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FOUR AMERICANS
* * * * *
REPRINTS FROM THE YALE REVIEW
[Illustration: Separator]
_A Book of Yale Review Verse_
1917
_War Poems from The Yale Review_
1918
_War Poems from The Yale Review_
(_Second Edition_)
1919
_Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman_
1919
* * * * *
FOUR AMERICANS
ROOSEVELT
HAWTHORNE
EMERSON
WHITMAN
BY
HENRY A. BEERS
AUTHOR OF
STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
[Illustration: Shield, scroll: LUX ET VERITAS]
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
PUBLISHED FOR THE YALE REVIEW
BY THE
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published, 1919
Second printing, 1920
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Roosevelt as Man of Letters 7
II. Fifty Years of Hawthorne 33
III. A Pilgrim in Concord 59
IV. A Wordlet about Whitman 85
ROOSEVELT AS MAN OF LETTERS
In a club corner, just after Roosevelt's death, the question was asked
whether his memory would not fade away, when the living man, with his
vivid personality, had gone. But no: that personality had stamped itself
too deeply on the mind of his generation to be forgotten. Too many
observers have recorded their impressions; and already a dozen
biographies and memoirs have appeared. Besides, he is his own recorder.
He published twenty-six books, a catalogue of which any professional
author might be proud; and a really wonderful feat when it is remembered
that he wrote them in the intervals of an active public career as Civil
Service Commissioner, Police Commissioner, member of his state
legislature, Governor of New York, delegate to the National Republican
Convention, Colonel of Rough Riders, Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
Vice-President and President of the United States.
Perhaps in some distant future he may become a myth or symbol, like
other mighty hunters of the beast, Nimrod and Orion and Tristram of
Lyonesse. Yet not so long as "African Game Trails" and the "Hunting
Trips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noble
sports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity,
the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterprise
and opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the great
adventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chase
the antelope over the plain"; "Afar in the desert I love to ride"; and
then we go out and shoot at a woodchuck, with an old double-barrelled
shotgun--and miss! If Roosevelt ever becomes a poet, it is while he is
among the wild creatures and wild landscapes that he loved: in the
gigantic forests of Brazil, or the almost unnatural nature of the
Rockies and the huge cattle ranches of the plains, or on the limitless
South African veldt, which is said to give a greater feeling of infinity
than the ocean even.
Roosevelt was so active a person--not to say so noisy and conspicuous;
he so occupied the centre of every stage, that, when he died, it was as
though a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had
stopped playing. It was not so much the death of an individual as a
general lowering in the vitality of the nation. America was less
America, because he was no longer here. He should have lived twenty
years more had he been willing to go slow, to loaf and invite his soul,
to feed that mind of his in a wise passiveness. But there was no repose
about him, and his pleasures were as strenuous as his toils. John
Burroughs tells us that he did not care for fishing, the contemplative
man's recreation. No contemplation for him, but action; no angling in a
clear stream for a trout or grayling; but the glorious, dangerous
excitement of killing big game--grizzlies, lions, African buffaloes,
mountain sheep, rhinoceroses, elephants. He never spared himself: he
wore himself out. But doubtless he would have chosen the crowded hour of
glorious life--or strife, for life and strife were with him the same.
He was above all things a fighter, and the favorite objects of his
denunciation were professional pacifists, nice little men who had let
their muscles get soft, and nations that had lost their fighting edge.
Aggressive war, he tells us in "The Winning of the West," is not always
bad. "Americans need to keep in mind the fact that, as a nation, they
have erred far more often in not being willing enough to fight than in
being too willing." "Cowardice," he writes elsewhere, "in a race, as in
an individual, is the unpardonable sin." Is this true? Cowardice is a
weakness, perhaps a disgraceful weakness: a defect of character which
makes a man contemptible, just as foolishness does. But it is not a sin
at all, and surely not an unpardonable one. Cruelty, treachery, and
ingratitude are much worse traits, and selfishness is as bad. I have
known very good men who were cowards; men that I liked and trusted but
who, from weakness of nerves or other physical causes--perhaps from
prenatal influences--were easily frightened and always constitutionally
timid. The Colonel was a very pugnacious man: he professed himself to be
a lover of peace--and so did the Kaiser--but really he enjoyed the
_gaudium certaminis_, as all bold spirits do.
In the world-wide sense of loss which followed his death, some rather
exaggerated estimates made themselves heard. A preacher announced that
there had been only two great Americans, one of whom was Theodore
Roosevelt. An editor declared that the three greatest Americans were
Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. But not all great Americans have
been in public life; and, of those who have, very few have been
Presidents of the United States. What is greatness? Roosevelt himself
rightly insists on character as the root of the matter. Still character
alone does not make a man great. There are thousands of men in common
life, of sound and forceful character, who never become great, who are
not even potentially great. To make them such, great abilities are
needed, as well as favoring circumstances. In his absolute manner--a
manner caught perhaps partly from Macaulay, for whose qualities as a
writer he had a high and, I think, well-justified regard--he pronounces
Cromwell the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century. Was he so?
He was the greatest English soldier and magistrate of that century; but
how about Bacon and Newton, about Shakespeare and Milton?
Let us think of a few other Americans who, in their various fields,
might perhaps deserve to be entitled great. Shall we say Jonathan
Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Robert
Fulton, S. F. B. Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Horace
Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Admiral Farragut, General W. T. Sherman,
James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Robert E. Lee? None
of these people were Presidents of the United States. But to the man in
the street there is something imposing about the office and title of a
chief magistrate, be he emperor, king, or elected head of a republic. It
sets him apart. Look at the crowds that swarm to get a glimpse of the
President when he passes through, no matter whether it is George
Washington or Franklin Pierce.
It might be safer, on the whole, to say that the three names in
question are those of our greatest presidents, not of the greatest
Americans. And even this comparison might be questioned. Some, for
example, might assert the claims of Thomas Jefferson to rank with the
others. Jefferson was a man of ideas who made a strong impression on his
generation. He composed the Declaration of Independence and founded the
Democratic party and the University of Virginia. He had a more flexible
mind than Washington, though not such good judgment; and he had
something of Roosevelt's alert interest in a wide and diversified range
of subjects. But the latter had little patience with Jefferson. He may
have respected him as the best rider and pistol shot in Virginia; but in
politics he thought him a theorist and doctrinaire imbued with the
abstract notions of the French philosophical deists and democrats.
Jefferson, he thought, knew nothing and cared nothing about military
affairs. He let the army run down and preferred to buy Louisiana rather
than conquer it, while he dreamed of universal fraternity and was the
forerunner of the Dove of Peace and the League of Nations.
Roosevelt, in fact, had no use for philosophy or speculative thought
which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently
practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little
imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer
or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will
and abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning
metaphysical cobwebs, doubtless seemed to the author of "The Strenuous
Life" a career of mere self-indulgence. It is not without significance
that, with all his passion for out of doors, for wild life and the study
of bird and beast, he nowhere, so far as I can remember, mentions
Thoreau,[A] who is far and away our greatest nature writer. Doubtless he
may have esteemed him as a naturalist, but not as a transcendentalist or
as an impracticable faddist who refused to pay taxes because
Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law. We are told that his
fellow historian, Francis Parkman, had a contempt for philosophers like
Emerson and Thoreau and an admiration for writers such as Scott and
Cooper who depicted scenes of bold adventure. The author of "The Oregon
Trail" and the author of "African Game Trails" had a good deal in
common, especially great force of will--you see it in Parkman's jaw. He
was a physical wreck and did his work under almost impossible
conditions; while Roosevelt had built up an originally sickly
constitution into a physique of splendid vigor.
Towards the critical intellect, as towards the speculative, Roosevelt
felt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristic
utterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910,
"Citizenship in a Republic." Here, amidst a good deal of moral
commonplace--wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficiently
platitudinous--occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always at
his strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included the
intellectual _élite_ of France; and he warns it against the besetting
sin of university dons and the learned and lettered class in general, a
supercilious, patronizing attitude towards the men of action who are
doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his
fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a
readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to
perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with
life's realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain
think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who
counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or
where the doer of deeds could have done them better.... Shame on the man
of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a
fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday
world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small
field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from
contact with their fellows."
The speaker had seemingly himself been stung by criticism; or he was
reacting against Matthew Arnold, the celebrated "Harvard indifference,"
and the cynical talk of the clubs.
We do not expect our Presidents to be literary men and are
correspondingly gratified when any of them shows signs of almost human
intelligence in spheres outside of politics. Of them all, none touched
life at so many points, or was so versatile, picturesque, and generally
interesting a figure as the one who has just passed away. Washington was
not a man of books. A country gentleman, a Virginia planter and
slave-owner, member of a landed aristocracy, he had the limited
education of his class and period. Rumor said that he did not write his
own messages. And there is a story that John Quincy Adams, regarding a
portrait of the father of his country, exclaimed, "To think that that
old wooden head will go down in history as a great man!" But this was
the comment of a Boston Brahmin, and all the Adamses had bitter tongues.
Washington was, of course, a very great man, though not by virtue of any
intellectual brilliancy, but of his strong character, his immense
practical sagacity and common sense, his leadership of men.
As to Lincoln, we know through what cold obstruction he struggled up
into the light, educating himself to be one of the soundest statesmen
and most effective public speakers of his day--or any day. There was an
inborn fineness or sensitiveness in Lincoln, a touch of the artist (he
even wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustrious
contemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, of
commonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associates
and his entire indifference to "the things of the mind." He was almost
illiterate and only just a gentleman. Yet by reason of his dignified
modesty and simplicity, he contrived to write one of the best of
autobiographies.
Roosevelt had many advantages over his eminent predecessors. Of old
Knickerbocker stock, with a Harvard education, and the habit of good
society, he had means enough to indulge in his favorite pastimes. To
run a cattle ranch in Dakota, lead a hunting party in Africa and an
exploring expedition in Brazil, these were wide opportunities, but he
fully measured up to them. Mr. W. H. Hays, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, said of him, "He had more knowledge about more
things than any other man." Well, not quite that. We have all known
people who made a specialty of omniscience. If a man can speak two
languages besides his own and can read two more fairly well, he is at
once credited with knowing half a dozen foreign tongues as well as he
knows English. Let us agree, however, that Roosevelt knew a lot about a
lot of things. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, reading a book with
his finger tips, gutting it of its contents, as he did the birds that he
shot, stuffed, and mounted; yet not inappreciative of form, and
accustomed to recommend much good literature to his countrymen. He took
an eager interest in a large variety of subjects, from Celtic poetry and
the fauna and flora of many regions to simplified spelling and the split
infinitive.
A young friend of mine was bringing out, for the use of schools and
colleges, a volume of selections from the English poets, all learnedly
annotated, and sent me his manuscript to look over. On a passage about
the bittern bird he had made this note, "The bittern has a harsh,
throaty cry." Whereupon I addressed him thus: "Throaty nothing! You are
guessing, man. If Teddy Roosevelt reads your book--and he reads
everything--he will denounce you as a nature faker and put you down for
membership in the Ananias Club. Recall what he did to Ernest
Seton-Thompson and to that minister in Stamford, Connecticut. Remember
how he crossed swords with Mr. Scully touching the alleged dangerous
nature of the ostrich and the early domestication of the peacock. So far
as I know, the bittern thing has no voice at all. His real stunt is as
follows. He puts his beak down into the swamp, in search of insects and
snails or other marine life--_est-ce que je sais?_--and drawing in the
bog-water through holes in his beak, makes a booming sound which is most
impressive. Now do not think me an ornithologist or a bird sharp.
Personally I do not know a bittern from an olive-backed thrush. But I
have read some poetry, and I remember what Thomson says in 'The
Seasons':
The bittern knows his time with bill ingulf'd
To shake the sounding marsh.
See also 'The Lady of the Lake':
And the bittern sound his drum,
Booming from the sedgy shallow.
See even old Chaucer who knew a thing or two about birds, _teste_ his
'Parlament of Foules,' admirably but strangely edited by Lounsbury,
whose indifference to art was only surpassed by his hostility to nature.
Says Chaucer:
And as a bytoure bumblith in the myre."
My friend canceled his note. It is, of course, now established that the
bittern "booms"--not in the mud--but in the air.
Mr. Roosevelt was historian, biographer, essayist, and writer of
narrative papers on hunting, outdoor life, and natural history, and in
all these departments did solid, important work. His "Winning of the
West" is little, if at all, inferior in historical interest to the
similar writings of Parkman and John Fiske. His "History of the Naval
War of 1812" is an astonishing performance for a young man of
twenty-four, only two years out of college. For it required a careful
sifting of evidence and weighing of authorities. The job was done with
patient thoroughness, and the book is accepted, I believe, as
authoritative. It is to me a somewhat tedious tale. One sea fight is
much like another, a record of meaningless slaughter.
Of the three lives, those of Gouverneur Morris, T. H. Benton, and Oliver
Cromwell, I cannot speak with confidence, having read only the last. I
should guess that the life of Benton was written more _con amore_ than
the others, for the frontier was this historian's favorite scene. The
life of Cromwell is not so much a formal biography as a continuous essay
in interpretation of a character still partly enigmatic in spite of all
the light that so many acute psychologists have shed upon it. It is a
relief to read for once a book which is without preface, footnote, or
reference. It cannot be said that the biographer contributes anything
very new to our knowledge of his subject. The most novel features of his
work are the analogies that he draws between situations in English and
American political history. These are usually ingenious and
illuminating, sometimes a little misleading; as where he praises
Lincoln's readiness to acquiesce in the result of the election in 1864
and to retire peaceably in favor of McClellan; contrasting it with
Cromwell's dissolution of his Parliaments and usurpation of the supreme
power. There was a certain likeness in the exigencies, to be sure, but a
broad difference between the problems confronting the two rulers.
Lincoln was a constitutional President with strictly limited powers,
bound by usage and precedent. For him to have kept his seat by military
force, in defiance of a Democratic majority, would have been an act of
treason. But the Lord Protector held a new office, unknown to the old
constitution of England and with ill-defined powers. A revolution had
tossed him to the top and made him dictator. He was bound to keep the
peace in unsettled times, to keep out the Stuarts, to keep down the
unruly factions. If Parliament would not help, he must govern without
it. Carlyle thought that he had no choice.
Roosevelt's addresses, essays, editorials, and miscellaneous papers,
which fill many volumes, are seldom literary in subject, and certainly
not in manner. He was an effective speaker and writer, using plain,
direct, forcible English, without any graces of style. In these papers
he is always the moralist, earnest, high-minded, and the preacher of
many gospels: the gospel of the strenuous life; the gospel of what used
to be called "muscular Christianity"; the gospel of large families; of
hundred per cent Americanism; and, above all, of military preparedness.
I am not here concerned with the President's political principles, nor
with the specific measures that he advocated. I will only say, to guard
against suspicion of unfair prejudice, that, as a Democrat, a
freetrader, a state-rights man, individualist, and anti-imperialist, I
naturally disapproved of many acts of his administration, of the
administration of his predecessor, and of his party in general. I
disapproved, and still do, of the McKinley and Payne-Aldrich tariffs; of
the Spanish war--most avoidable of wars--with its sequel, the conquest
of the Philippines; above all, of the seizure of the Panama Canal zone.
But let all that pass: I am supposed to be dealing with my subject as
man of letters. As such the Colonel of the Rough Riders was the high
commander-in-chief of rough writers. He never persuaded his readers into
an opinion--he bullied them into it. When he gnashed his big teeth and
shook his big stick,
... The bold Ascalonite
Fled from his iron ramp; old warriors turned
Their plated backs under his heel;
mollycoddles, pussy-footers, professional pacifists, and nice little men
who had lost their fighting edge, all scuttled to cover. He called
names, he used great violence of language. For instance, a certain
president of a woman's college had "fatuously announced ... that it was
better to have one child brought up in the best way than several not
thus brought up." The woman making this statement, wrote the Colonel,
"is not only unfit to be at the head of a female college, but is not fit
to teach the lowest class in a kindergarten; for such teaching is not
merely folly, but a peculiarly repulsive type of mean and selfish
wickedness." And again: "The man or woman who deliberately avoids
marriage ... is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an
object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people."
Now, I am not myself an advocate of race suicide but I confess to a
feeling of sympathy with the lady thus denounced, whose point of view
is, at least, comprehensible. Old Malthus was not such an ass as some
folks think. It is impossible not to admire Roosevelt's courage,
honesty, and wonderful energy: impossible to keep from liking the man
for his boyish impulsiveness, camaraderie, sporting blood, and hatred of
a rascal. But it is equally impossible for a man of any spirit to keep
from resenting his bullying ways, his intolerance of quiet, peaceable
people and persons of an opposite temperament to his own. Even nice,
timid little men who have let their bodies get soft do not like to be
bullied. It puts their backs up. His ideal of character was manliness, a
sound ideal, but he insisted too much upon the physical side of it,
"red-bloodedness" and all that. Those poor old fat generals in
Washington who had been enjoying themselves at their clubs, playing
bridge and drinking Scotch highballs! He made them all turn out and ride
fifty miles a day.
Mr. Roosevelt produced much excellent literature, but no masterpieces
like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. Probably his
sketches of ranch life and of hunting trips in three continents will be
read longest and will keep their freshness after the public questions
which he discussed have lost interest and his historical works have been
in part rewritten. In these outdoor papers, besides the thrilling
adventures which they--very modestly--record, there are even passages of
descriptive beauty and chapters of graphic narrative, like the tale of
the pursuit and capture of the three robbers who stole the boats on the
Missouri River, which belonged to the Roosevelt ranch. This last would
be a capital addition to school readers and books of selected standard
prose.
Senator Lodge and other friends emphasize the President's sense of
humor. He had it, of course. He took pains to establish the true reading
of that famous retort, "All I want out of you is common civility and
damned little of that." He used to repeat with glee Lounsbury's
witticism about "the infinite capability of the human mind to resist the
introduction of knowledge." I wonder whether he knew of that other good
saying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his own
person, a proof of the necessity of the Norman Conquest. He had, at all
events, a just and high estimate of the merits of my brilliant
colleague. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui
meminisse!" But Roosevelt was not himself a humorist, and his writings
give little evidence of his possession of the faculty. Lincoln, now, was
one of the foremost American humorists. But Roosevelt was too strenuous
for the practice of humor, which implies a certain relaxation of mind: a
detachment from the object of immediate pursuit: a superiority to
practical interests which indulges itself in the play of thought; and,
in the peculiarly American form of it, a humility which inclines one to
laugh at himself. Impossible to fancy T. R. making the answer that
Lincoln made to an applicant for office: "I haven't much influence with
this administration." As for that variety of humor that is called irony,
it demands a duplicity which the straight-out-speaking Roosevelt could
not practise. He was like Epaminondas in the Latin prose composition
book, who was such a lover of truth that he never told a falsehood even
in jest--_ne joco quidem_.
The only instance of his irony that I recall--there may be others--is
the one recorded by Mr. Leupp in his reply to Senator Gorman, who had
charged that the examiners of the Civil Service Commission had turned
down "a bright young man" in the city of Baltimore, an applicant for the
position of letter-carrier, "because he could not tell the most direct
route from Baltimore to Japan." Hereupon the young Civil Service
Commissioner challenged the senator to verify his statement, but Mr.
Gorman preserved a dignified silence. Then the Commissioner overwhelmed
him in a public letter from which Mr. Leupp quotes the closing passage,
beginning thus: "High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman! Clinging, trustful
Mr. Gorman! Nothing could shake his belief in that 'bright young man.'
Apparently he did not even yet try to find out his name--if he had a
name," and so on for nearly a page. Excellent fooling, but a bit too
long and heavy-handed for the truest ironic effect.
Many of our Presidents, however little given to the use of the pen, have
been successful coiners of phrases--phrases that have stuck: "entangling
alliances," "era of good feeling," "innocuous desuetude," "a condition,
not a theory." Lincoln was happiest at this art, and there is no need to
mention any of the scores of pungent sayings which he added to the
language and which are in daily use. President Roosevelt was no whit
behind in this regard. All recognize and remember the many phrases to
which he gave birth or currency: "predatory wealth," "bull moose," "hit
the line hard," "weasel words," "my hat is in the ring," and so on. He
took a humorous delight in mystifying the public with recondite
allusions, sending everyone to the dictionary to look out "Byzantine
logothete," and to the Bible and cyclopedia to find Armageddon.
Roosevelt is alleged to have had a larger personal following than any
other man lately in public life. What a testimony to his popularity is
the "teddy bear"; and what a sign of the universal interest, hostile or
friendly, which he excited in his contemporaries, is the fact that Mr.
Albert Shaw was able to compile a caricature life of him presenting many
hundred pictures! There was something German about Roosevelt's
standards. In this last war he stood heart and soul for America and her
allies against Germany's misconduct. But he admired the Germans'
efficiency, their highly organized society, their subordination of the
individual to the state. He wanted to Prussianize this great peaceful
republic by introducing universal obligatory military service. He
insisted, like the Germans, upon the _Hausfrau's_ duty to bear and rear
many children. If he had been a German, it seems possible that, with his
views as to the right of strong races to expand, by force if necessary,
he might have justified the seizure of Silesia, the partition of
Poland, the _Drang nach Osten_, and maybe even the invasion of
Belgium--as a military measure.
And so of religion and the church, which Germans regard as a department
of government. Our American statesman, of course, was firmly in favor of
the separation of church and state and of universal toleration. But he
advises everyone to join the church, some church, any old church; not
because one shares its beliefs--creeds are increasingly unimportant--but
because the church is an instrument of social welfare, and a man can do
more good in combination with his fellows than when he stands alone.
There is much truth in this doctrine, though it has a certain naïveté,
when looked at from the standpoint of the private soul and its spiritual
needs.
As in the church, so in the state, he stood for the associative
principle as opposed to an extreme individualism. He was a practical
politician and therefore an honest partisan, feeling that he could work
more efficiently for good government within party lines than outside
them. He resigned from the Free Trade League because his party was
committed to the policy of protection. In 1884 he supported his party's
platform and candidate, instead of joining the Mugwumps and voting for
Cleveland, though at the National Republican Convention, to which he
went as a delegate, he had opposed the nomination of Blaine. I do not
believe that his motive in this decision was selfish, or that he quailed
under the snap of the party lash because he was threatened with
political death in case he disobeyed. Theodore Roosevelt was nobody's
man. He thought, as he frankly explained, that one who leaves his
faction for every slight occasion, loses his influence and his power for
good. Better to compromise, to swallow some differences and to stick to
the crowd which, upon the whole and in the long run, embodies one's
convictions. This is a comprehensible attitude, and possibly it is the
correct one for the man in public life who is frequently a candidate for
office. Yet I wish he could have broken with his party and voted for
Cleveland. For, ironically enough, it was Roosevelt himself who
afterward split his party and brought in Wilson and the Democrats.
Disregarding his political side and considering him simply as man of
letters, one seeks for comparisons with other men of letters who were at
once big sportsmen and big writers; Christopher North, for example:
"Christopher in his Aviary" and "Christopher in his Shooting Jacket."
The likeness here is only a very partial one, to be sure. The American
was like the Scotchman in his athleticism, high spirits, breezy
optimism, love of the open air, intense enjoyment of life. But he had
not North's roystering conviviality and uproarious Toryism; and the
kinds of literature that they cultivated were quite unlike.
Charles Kingsley offers a closer resemblance, though the differences
here are as numerous as the analogies. Roosevelt was not a clergyman,
and not a creative writer, a novelist, or poet. His temperament was not
very similar to Kingsley's. Yet the two shared a love for bold
adventure, a passion for sport, and an eager interest in the life of
animals and plants. Sport with Kingsley took the shape of trout fishing
and of riding to hounds, not of killing lions with the rifle. He was
fond of horses and dogs; associated democratically with gamekeepers,
grooms, whippers-in, poachers even; as Roosevelt did with cowboys,
tarpon fishers, wilderness guides, beaters, trappers, and all whom Walt
Whitman calls "powerful uneducated persons," loving them for their
pluck, coolness, strength, and skill. Kingsley's "At Last, a Christmas
in the West Indies," exhibits the same curiosity as to tropical botany
and zoology that Roosevelt shows in his African and Brazilian journeys.
Not only tastes, but many ideals and opinions the two men had in
common. "Parson Lot," the Chartist and Christian Socialist, had the same
sympathy with the poor and the same desire to improve the condition of
agricultural laborers and London artisans which led Roosevelt to promote
employers' liability laws and other legislation to protect the
workingman from exploitation by conscienceless wealth. Kingsley, like
Roosevelt, was essentially Protestant. Neither he nor Mr. Roosevelt
liked asceticism or celibacy. As a historian, Kingsley did not rank at
all with the author of "The Winning of the West" and the "Naval War of
1812." On the other hand, if Roosevelt had written novels and poetry, I
think he would have rejoiced greatly to write "Westward Ho," "The Last
Buccaneer," and "Ode to the North-East Wind."
In fine, whatever lasting fortune may be in store for Roosevelt's
writings, the disappearance of his vivid figure leaves a blank in the
contemporary scene. And those who were against him can join with those
who were for him in slightly paraphrasing Carlyle's words of dismissal
to Walter Scott, "Theodore Roosevelt, pride of all Americans, take our
proud and sad farewell."
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Mr. Edwin Carty Ranck, of the Roosevelt Memorial Committee,
calls attention to the following sentence, which I had overlooked: "As a
woodland writer, Thoreau comes second only to Burroughs."--"The
Wilderness Hunter," p. 261.
FIFTY YEARS OF HAWTHORNE
Hawthorne was an excellent critic of his own writings. He recognizes
repeatedly the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R.
H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who love
his exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporeal
substance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of his
chill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with which
they too have associations.
I heard Colonel Higginson say, in a lecture at Concord, that if a few
drops of redder blood could have been added to Hawthorne's style, he
would have been the foremost imaginative writer of his century. The
ghosts in "The Æneid" were unable to speak aloud until they had drunk
blood. Instinctively, then, one seeks to infuse more red corpuscles into
the somewhat anæmic veins of these tales and romances. For Hawthorne's
fiction is almost wholly ideal. He does not copy life like Thackeray,
whose procedure is inductive: does not start with observed characters,
but with an imagined problem or situation of the soul, inventing
characters to fit. There is always a dreamy quality about the action:
no violent quarrels, no passionate love scenes. Thus it has been often
pointed out that in "The Scarlet Letter" we do not get the history of
Dimmesdale's and Hester's sin: not the passion itself, but only its
sequels in the conscience. So in "The House of the Seven Gables," and
"The Marble Faun," a crime has preceded the opening of the story, which
deals with the working out of the retribution.
When Hawthorne handled real persons, it was in the form of the character
sketch--often the satirical character sketch,--as in the introduction to
"The Scarlet Letter" which scandalized the people of Salem. If he could
have made a novel out of his custom-house acquaintances, he might have
given us something less immaterial. He felt the lack of solidity in his
own creations: the folly of constructing "the semblance of a world out
of airy matter"; the "value hidden in petty incidents and ordinary
characters." "A better book than I shall ever write was there," he
confesses, but "my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to
transcribe it."
Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his own
experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia
is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The
American Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his
neighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the
Concord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. There
is a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with which
Hollingsworth is groping the river bottom.
And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interesting
reading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. They
have puzzled Mr. James, who asks what the author would be at in them,
and suggests that he is writing letters to himself, or practising his
hand at description. They are not exactly a _journal in-time_; nor are
they records of thought, like Emerson's ten volumes of journals. They
are carefully composed, and are full of hints for plots, scenes,
situations, characters, to be later worked up. In the three collections,
"Twice-Told Tales," "Mosses from an Old Manse," and "The Snow Image,"
there are, in round numbers, a hundred tales and sketches; and Mr.
Conway has declared that, in the number of his original plots, no modern
author, save Browning, has equalled Hawthorne. Now, the germ of many, if
not most, of these inventions may be found in some brief jotting--a
paragraph, or a line or two--in "The American Note Books."
Yet it is not as literary material that these notes engage me most--by
far the greater portion were never used,--but as records of observation
and studies of life. I will even acknowledge a certain excitement when
the diarist's wanderings lead him into my own neighborhood, however
insignificant the result. Thus, in a letter from New Haven in 1830, he
writes, "I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that
I was an Englishman." Mr. Lathrop thinks that it was on this trip
through Connecticut that he hit upon his story, "The Seven Vagabonds,"
the scene of which is near Stamford, in the van of a travelling showman,
where the seven wanderers take shelter during a thunderstorm. How
quaintly true to the old provincial life of back-country New England are
these figures--a life that survives to-day in out-of-the-way places.
Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables,"
a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer
trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a
salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a
country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the
Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of Cologne water and other essences." The Note Books tell us
that, at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with a
surgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: and
that, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took up
an essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar,
wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine that
the essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagon
to-day on lonely roads between the hill-villages of Massachusetts and
Connecticut.
It was while living that strange life of seclusion at Old Salem,
compared with which Thoreau's hermitage at Walden was like the central
roar of Broadway, that Hawthorne broke away now and then from his
solitude, and went rambling off in search of contacts with real life.
Here is another item that he fetched back from Connecticut under date of
September, 1838: "In Connecticut and also sometimes in Berkshire, the
villages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, so
that they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkable
instance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from the
winds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from a
mountain-top. The streets are very wide--two or three hundred feet at
least--with wide green margins, and sometimes there is a wide green
space between two road tracks.... The graveyard is on the slope, and at
the foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of red
freestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble and one of
cast iron with an inscription of raised letters." Do I not know that
wind-swept hilltop, those grassy avenues? Do I not know that ancient
graveyard, and what names are on its headstones? Yes, even as the heart
knoweth its own bitterness.
As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. The
turn of the year--the annual return of the day--birthdays or death-days
or set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring reminders
of loss and change. This is true of domestic anniversaries; while public
literary celebrations, designed to recall to a forgetful generation the
centenary or other dates in the lives of great writers, appear too often
but milestones on the road to oblivion. Fifty years is too short a time
to establish a literary immortality; and yet, if any American writer has
already won the position of a classic, Hawthorne is that writer.
Speaking in this country in 1883, Matthew Arnold said: "Hawthorne's
literary talent is of the first order. His subjects are generally not to
me subjects of the highest interest; but his literary talent is ... the
finest, I think, which America has yet produced--finer, by much, than
Emerson's." But how does the case stand to-day? I believe that
Hawthorne's fame is secure as a whole, in spite of the fact that much of
his work has begun to feel the disintegrating force of hostile
criticism, and "the unimaginable touch of time."
For one thing, American fiction, for the past fifty years, has been
taking a direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that
will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask
yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not
inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales
of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of
flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone
theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the
accepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection is
the recent essay by Mr. W. C. Brownell, one of the most acute and
unsparingly analytic of American critics. It is full of cruelly clever
things: for example, "Zenobia and Miriam linger in one's memory rather
as brunettes than as women." And again, _à propos_ of Roger
Chillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter,"--"His characters are not
creations, but expedients." I admire these sayings; but they seem to me,
like most epigrams, brilliant statements of half-truths. In general, Mr.
Brownell's thesis is that Hawthorne was spoiled by allegory: that he
abused his naturally rare gift of imagination by declining to grapple
with reality, which is the proper material for the imagination, but
allowing his fancy--an inferior faculty--to play with dreams and
symbols; and that consequently he has left but one masterpiece.
This is an old complaint. Long ago, Edgar Poe, who did not live to read
"The Scarlet Letter," but who wrote a favorable review of "The
Twice-Told Tales," advised the author to give up allegory. In 1880, Mr.
Henry James wrote a life of Hawthorne for the English Men of Letters
series. This was addressed chiefly to the English public and was thought
in this country to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its
patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social
environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The
"American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of
small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could
reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of
peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke
entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who
writes about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography,
it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, in
effect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point,
of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit.
"Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist--he was
not, to my mind, enough of one." The biographer allows him a liberal
share of imagination, but adds that most of his short tales are more
fanciful than imaginative. "Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is
nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of
the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know,
have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and
correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very
different story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me a
first-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things--a story
and a moral."
Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad," an ironical
application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne
seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite
symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists
in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and
incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way
in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the
moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every
human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The
Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can
eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful,"
for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his
thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house
flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or
the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It
is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this
symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or
what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would
have added the botanical name.
"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those
"insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always
of much moment." The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation from
Sir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story there
passeth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fed
with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to
destroy him." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of
psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to
fascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and gradually
evolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim of
a scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, the
narrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral is
quite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which might
have been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quite
representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral
to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and
applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain
from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of
Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by
their daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can be
cured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite and
belladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, _similia similibus
curantur_. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner," of the girl
impregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when the
serpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story,
is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A very
obvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing its
best loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole tale
into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural
rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting
the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?