Chapter VI: Part 6

Whether criticism in general, as critics in general write it, ought to be of one school or another, subject to personal impression or subject to rule, one thing is beyond dispute: the singular charm, one feels almost like saying the incomparable charm, of “La Vie Littéraire” lies in its intimate, individual quality. It is not a set of formulas, nor even a thesaurus of literary opinions and estimates. It is the voice of a man, speaking as a man. As you listen, you see his mind at work; you know what he thinks about, and how he thinks about it; what he enjoys best and oftenest, what trains his reveries naturally fall into; how the world looks to him, past, present, and future. He does not set himself to reveal himself; when men do that, they mostly fail; his mind _plays_ before you. Above all things, he is an ironist. There is nothing, least of all anything in himself or concerning himself, that he cannot smile at, though there may be tears in his eyes at the same moment. He admires, and can perfectly express his admiration; and when he despises, he is no more at a loss. The more he knows, the more he is ignorant,--and the more he wonders. He is full of modern knowledge, and he loves of all things a fairy tale. Shakespeare delights him, and he cannot say well enough nor times enough how greatly he enjoys the marionettes.

It can hardly have been an accident (and yet, for aught we know, it may have been, since accident often seems to be no more foolish than the rest of us) that his first “Times” essay was concerned with a representation of “Hamlet,” and the second with the latest story of M. Jules Lemaître. Both the Danish prince and the martyr Sérénus were men oppressed and finally overcome by a sense of the mystery of things, having ideas, almost in excess, and being so skillful in debate that they could never come to a conclusion. Like horses and politicians, they needed blinders, and for lack of them could not keep a straight course.

Both make a lively appeal to our critic’s sympathy. In his own way he is sufficiently like them. And so what ought, on one theory, to have been a dissertation upon Shakespeare’s conception of Hamlet’s character, runs of its own will into an address to the Dane himself. He is so real to the Frenchman that the two go home together, as it were, after the play, and the Frenchman, having sat silent so long, finds his heart full and his tongue suddenly unloosed.

First he must apologize to Hamlet for the audience, some part of which, as he may have noticed, seemed a trifle inattentive and light. Hamlet must not lay this to heart. “It was an audience of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen,” he should remember. “You were not in evening dress, you had no amorous intrigue in the world of high finance, and you wore no flower in your buttonhole. For that reason the ladies coughed a little in their boxes while eating candied fruits. Your adventures could not interest them. They were not worldly adventures; they were only human adventures. Besides, you force people to think, and that is an offense which will never be pardoned to you here.”

Still there were a few among the spectators who were profoundly moved, a few by whom the melancholy Dane is preferred before all other beings ever created by the breath of genius. The critic himself, by a happy chance, sat near one such, M. Auguste Dorchain. “He understands you, my prince, as he understands Racine, because he is himself a poet.”

And then, after a little, he concludes by confiding to Hamlet what a mystery and contradiction the world continues to find him, though he is the universal man, the man of all times and all countries, though he is exactly like the rest of us, “a man living in the midst of universal evil.” It is just because he is like the rest of us, indeed, that we find his character a thing so impossible to grasp. It is because we do not understand ourselves that we cannot understand him. His very inconsistencies and contradictions are the sign of his profound humanity. “You are prompt and slow, audacious and timid, benevolent and cruel; you believe and you doubt; you are wise, and above everything else you are insane. In a word, you live. Who of us does not resemble you in something? Who of us thinks without contradiction, and acts without inconsistency? Who of us is not insane? Who of us but says to you with a mixture of pity, of sympathy, of admiration, and of horror, ‘Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’”

This may not be great Shakespearean criticism; certainly it bears no very striking resemblance to the ordinary German article that walks abroad under that name; but at least it is good reading, and so far as may be possible in a few sentences, it may be thought to go somewhat near to the heart of the matter.

As for the Sérénus of M. Jules Lemaître, he, too, is a thinker and dreamer set to live in difficult conditions. He, too, is caught in contradictory currents, and finds it impossible to make the shore. For him, as for Hamlet, death is the only way out. His creator, of whom M. Anatole France loves to talk, is himself a born skeptic, always asking, under one ingenious form and another, the question of the old Roman functionary, “What is truth?” and never getting an answer. Like his friend and critic, “he loves believers and believes not.” It may have been he of whom it is remarked, somewhere, that he has “a mind full of ironic curiosity.” We have been turning the volumes over in search of the phrase. We did not find it, but we found ourselves repeating the word with which we began: “M. Anatole France is a writer who is continually saying something.” It seems to us truer than ever; and it seems a considerable merit.

In the course of our search we fell anew upon the essay dealing with that amazing book, the “Journal” of the Goncourt brothers. It is no very enlivening subject, one would say, but the essay is of the brightest, sparkling from end to end with those “good things” concerning which the scientific critic may say what he will, so long as the impressionistic critic will be kind enough to furnish them for our delectation. As plain untheoretical readers, we are thankful to be interested.

Of all books, as we know already, M. Anatole France believes in personal memoirs. In his opinion writers are seldom so likely to be well inspired as when they speak of themselves. La Fontaine’s pigeon had good reason to say:--

“Mon voyage dépeint
Vous sera d’un plaisir extrême.
Je dirai: ‘J’étais là; telle chose m’avint:’
Vous y croirez être vous-même.”

Even a cold writer like Marmontel gets a hold upon us “as soon as he begins to tell about a little Limousin who read the Georgics in a garden where the bees were murmuring,”--because he was the boy, and the bees were those whose honey he ate, the same which he saw his aunt warming in the hollow of her hand, and refreshing with a drop of wine, when the cold had benumbed them. As for St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” so called, our essayist has no very exalted opinion of them. The great doctor, he thinks, hardly confesses enough. Worse yet, he hates his sins; and, in the way of literature, “nothing spoils a confession like repentance.”

But Rousseau, “poor great Jean-Jacques,” “whose soul held so many miseries and grandeurs,”--he surely made no half-hearted confession. “He acknowledged his own faults and those of other people with marvelous facility. It cost him nothing to tell the truth. However vile and ignoble it might be, he knew that he could render it touching and beautiful. He had secrets for that, the secrets of genius, which, like fire, purifies everything.”

But we must be done with quotation, though the matter that offers itself is fairly without end. Especially one would be glad to cite some of the essayist’s reminiscences of the men he has known: some of them famous, like Flaubert, “a pessimist full of enthusiasm,” who “had the good part of the things of this world, in that he could admire;” Jules Sandeau, whom the critic, when a child, used to meet on the quays of Paris, which are “the adopted country of all men of thought and taste;” and dear old Barbey d’Aurévilly, so queerly dressed, so profane a believer, “so frightfully Satanic and so adorably childish;” and others,--and these among the best,--two or three priests, in particular,--never heard of except in our author’s pages.

One would like, also, to speak of his favorite heterodox theory touching the fallible nature of posterity as a judge of works of art; of the fun that he pokes so effectively at the new school of symbolists and decadents (small wonder they do not love him); of his ideas upon language, upon history, upon the grossness of Zola,--with which he as an artist has no patience,--upon the exalted rank of the critical essay, upon the educational value of the humanities. These and many other things have their place in the four volumes, and every one is touched with grace and something of originality. Everywhere the personal note makes itself heard. It is a voice, not the scratching of a pen, that we listen to, the voice of a man who never forgets that he was once a child. He has lived in Eden. We all begin, he tells himself, where Adam began. “In those blessed hours,” he says, “I have seen thistles springing up amid heaps of stones in little sunny streets where birds were singing; and I tell you the truth, it was Paradise.”

The two or three years during which he was contributing weekly articles to “Le Temps” were not quite of this heavenly quality, we may safely presume; in the inevitable course of things the gates of Eden must for some time have been already closed against him; but if one is to judge by his books of the period, meaning to include among them “La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,” “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard,” and “Le Jardin d’Épicure,”--three of the best and most characteristic, though the two first named are not for readers afflicted with what a French critic calls _pudeur livresque_,--they were still years of quietness and a reasonably full content. He was writing and studying more than formerly, to be sure, and of course, by his own showing, was learning so much the less; but, taking everything into account, he and the world, for all its badness, were pulling pretty well together.

Since then, somehow, we cannot profess to know exactly how or why, a change appears to have come over him; a change not altogether for the worse, nor altogether for the better. Life, in his eyes, is no longer so bright as it was. He is more serious, more satirical, less disposed to mind his rhyme and let the river run under the bridge; a little out of conceit with his old rôle of saunterer and looker-on. He seems to have heard a drum-beat, and if there is to be a fight, he will, after a rather independent fashion of his own, bear a hand in it. Perhaps this is the manlier part. At all events, there is no quarreling with it, and the evil days on which Anatole France has fallen (“_le perfide Anatole France_,” as we are told that his political enemies--a strange word for use in connection with the author of “Sylvestre Bonnard” and “Le Jardin d’Épicure”--are accustomed to call him) have borne their full share of fruit.

His second manner, to call it so, is like his first in this regard, that its most successful creation is an old scholar. M. Bergeret is Sylvestre Bonnard with a difference, as the present Anatole France, is the old Anatole France with a difference. It strikes us as almost a pleasantry of Fate that these two leading characters should stand thus as representatives of their creator’s two selves, or, if one prefers to express it so, of their creator’s one self in his two periods of calm and storm.

Sylvestre Bonnard’s life ran an even course. Its incidents were no more than the windings and falls of a quiet brook,--just enough to keep it wholesomely alive and give it a desirable diversity and picturesqueness. The world was good to him; and he thanked it. If he did not marry the girl with the pair of blue eyes,--the eyes _de pervenche_,--he was happier in his bachelorhood than the majority of men are in their married condition, and doubly happy toward the last, when time and chance (with more or less of human assistance) brought him his heart’s desire in the opportunity to care for his lost Clementine’s grandchild. His professional successes were according to his taste: he was a member of the Institute, an authority upon ancient texts, and in his old age the happy author of a book upon a new hobby.

Such was the life of a savant as M. Anatole France conceived it before the world was too much with him, before “Nationalists” and “Royalists” had begun to look askance upon him, and call him traitor.

M. Bergeret, like M. Bonnard, is a man of kindly nature, a scholar, and a lover of peace, but life to him, as to Shelley, has been “dealt in another measure;” a disloyal wife, uncongenial daughters, squalor in his house, disappointment in his calling, lack of favor with his colleagues and superiors, and, to fill his cup, the Dreyfus controversy, which makes him a target for stoning.

And in the midst of it all, notwithstanding it all, what a dear old soul, and what an interesting talker!--so amiably philosophical, so keen in his thrusts, so sly in his humor, so fond of good company, his own and his dog’s included, and, in spite of his weaknesses, so equal to the occasion! If he is irreligious, according to his neighbors’ standards, it is at least “with decency and good taste.”

The four volumes in which he figures (“Histoire Contemporaine,” they are jointly called), like all the works of their author, are crammed with clever sayings. There is no great story, of course, though some of the incidents are many shades too lively to be set in modest English type; but the characterization and the dialogue are of the best,--in the good Yankee sense of the word, “complete.”

For its full appreciation the book--it is really one, in spite of its four titles--demands a more familiar acquaintance with the ins and outs of current French politics than the average American reader is likely to bring to it. There are so many wheels within wheels, and the intrigues are made, of set purpose on the author’s part, to turn upon desires and considerations so almost incredibly sordid and petty! It is a comedy; we are bound to laugh; but it is also a horror, and is meant to be. Satire was never more biting. The game of provincial politics, bishop-making and all, is played with merciless particularity before the reader’s eyes; and if he fails to follow some of the moves with perfect intelligence, he sees only too well the smallness and baseness and cruelty of the whole; a game in which a matron’s honor is no more than a pawn upon the chessboard, to be given and taken without so much as an extra pulse-beat, even an extra pulse-beat of her own. If it be true, or within a thousand miles of true,--well, to repeat the saying of one of old, a critic accounted wise in his day, “man hath no preëminence above a beast!”

Poor M. Bergeret! He ought to have been so happy! Like his human creator, he was born for life in a cloister, some Abbaye de Thélème, where he should have had nothing to do but to read his books, say his prayers, mind a few cabbages, perhaps, and be quiet; and instead of that, here he is passing his days in such a turmoil that he experiences a kind of joy on finding himself in the street, the one place where he gets a taste of “that sweetest of good things, philosophical liberty.” And with all the rest of his tribulations there falls upon him that dreadful nightmare of the Dreyfus case. Neither he nor his neighbors can let it alone. It is like the bitterness of aloes in all their conversation.

One resource he still has; one neighbor, better still, one housemate, with whom he can discuss anything, even the “Affaire,” with no risk of being stoned or misunderstood. His dog Riquet, though he “does not understand irony” (a congenital deficiency, it must have been, with such opportunities), is to our _Maître de Conférences à la Faculté des Lettres_ a true friend in need. For that matter, indeed, M. Bergeret is probably not the only man who has found it one of the best points in a dog’s favor that you can say to him anything you please. If your human neighbor stands in perishing need of wholesome truth, or if you stand in sore need of expressing it to him, and if there happens to be some not unnatural unwillingness on his part, or some momentary lack of courage on yours, why, you have only to deliver your message to him vicariously, as it were, to the sensible relief of your own mind, if not to the edification of his.

“Riquet,” said M. Bergeret, after a vain endeavor to make one of his brother provincials submit himself to reason, “Riquet, your velvety ears hear not him who speaks best, but him who speaks loudest.” And Riquet, well used to his master’s conversational eccentricities, took the compliment in good part; in much better part, at all events, than any human interlocutor would have been likely to take it. For really, unless one actually lost one’s temper, one could not say just that to a neighbor and equal, especially if it happened to be true.

For a heretic living among the orthodox there is nothing like keeping a dog. So we were ready to say and leave it; but we bethink ourselves in season that there is a more excellent way. Keep a dog, if you will, but keep also the pen of a novelist. Then all your beliefs and half beliefs and unbeliefs, all your benevolently contemptuous opinions of men and of men’s institutions, all your treasures of irony and satire, dear as these ever are to the man who possesses them, instead of being wasted upon a pair of velvety ears, may be trumpeted to the world at large through the lips of a third party, a “character,” so called, some M. Bergeret, if you can invent him, or an Abbé Coignard.

It is one of the best reasons for reading fiction, by the way, provided it is written by a man of insight and force, that he is so much more likely to tell us what he thinks when he is not compelled to speak in his own person.

A happy lot is the novelist’s. Such a more than angelic liberty as he enjoys, so comfortably irresponsible and blameless as he is, whatever happens! One thinks again of Jérôme Coignard, concerning whom too little is finding its way into this paper. That grand old Christian and reprobate, as we know, could live pretty much as he listed, and hold pretty much such “opinions” as pleased him, at ease all the while in the assurance that somewhere in a deep inner closet, fast under lock and key, he preserved a faith in the Christian mysteries so perfect and unsoiled--never having been subjected to any earthly contact--that the good St. Peter, when the inevitable time should come, would be sure to pass its possessor into the good place without a question.

Yet it will never do for us to intimate that M. Anatole France has sought to save either comfort or reputation by talking through a mask. His theological, political, and socialistic heresies, if you call them such, this being matter of opinion, have been too openly expounded, and have brought him, as has already been told, too many enemies and reproaches. The most that we started to say under this head was that the storms into which the currents of the world have drifted him are reflected in his “Histoire Contemporaine,” especially in the difference between his M. Bergeret and his M. Bonnard.

Of the two, M. Bergeret has the greater philosophic interest for us, as well as the greater number of rememberable things to say to us. If the reader wishes to see him in two highly contrasted situations, let him turn to the wonderful chapter describing his sensations and behavior immediately after detecting his wife’s infidelity, and the beautiful one in which he and his more practical sister visit together the old Paris mansion in which they had passed some portion of their childhood. They were house-hunting at the time, and the Master, falling into one of his far-away, philosophical moods, remarked, apropos of something or nothing: “Time is a pure idea, and space is no more real than time.” “That may be so,” answered his matter-of-fact, executive-minded sister, “but it costs more in Paris.”

Doctor Johnson called himself “an old struggler,” and the words come unbidden into our minds as we review M. Bergeret’s story. To us, we must confess, the old Latin professor seems almost as real a personage as the Great Cham of literature himself. We hope he is happy in his new post of honor at the Sorbonne. It was time, surely, that some of the quails and the manna should be found in his basket.

And now it is pleasant to add, by way of ending, that the latest book of M. Anatole France seems to indicate that he also, as well as the man of his creation, has come out into a larger place. His mood is quieter and less satirical, though he is still many degrees more serious than in the old days of “Thaïs” and “Sylvestre Bonnard.” “Sur la Pierre Blanche” is a work of the rarest distinction; not a book for the casual reader to hurry over in pursuit of a story (in a loose way of speaking it may be characterized as a volume of imaginary conversations), but one to be cherished and dwelt upon by such as love the perfection of art and are not averse to knowing what kind of thoughts visit a free-thinking, humanity-loving man, of a philosophical, half-conservative, half-radical turn of mind, in these days of social and political unrest, as he looks back upon the origins of Christianity and forward into those new and presumably brighter eras which we who live now may dream of, but never see.

The motto of the book explains the significance of its title: “You seem to have slept upon the white stone amongst the people of dreams.” Toleration, the spread of peace, imperialism, the socialistic evolution (following hard upon the capitalistic evolution, now at its height, or passing), the yellow peril, so called, the white peril, the future of Africa,--these are some of the larger and timelier questions considered. In general, the thoughts of the book are those of a scholar whose face is turned toward practical issues. The author is not concerned with any Utopia,--absolute justice, by his theory, being not a thing to be so much as hoped for,--but with some quite possible amelioration of the existing order, and some gradual, natural, irresistible approaches (irresistible because they are the work of Nature herself) toward a state of society less unequal, not to say less unendurable, than the present.

Let those scoff who will; for ourselves we rejoice to see the man, like the boy, “dreaming on things to come.”

At the same time, we should not be sorry to believe that, in the heat of writing, and out of the love, natural to all of us, of making facts conform to theory, we may have laid a thought too much of emphasis upon the alterations through which his mind has passed. His days, we suspect, have, after all, been pretty closely bound each to each by natural piety. We recall his fine saying about Renan, brought up in the Roman Church and dying an unbeliever, that he changed little. “He was like his native land, where clouds float across the sky, but the soil is of granite, and oaks are deeply rooted.”

Changed or unchanged, in his first manner or his second, Republican or Nationalist, socialist, anti-imperialist, “intellectual,” or what not, who will refuse to read a writer who can express himself after such a fashion?

VERBAL MAGIC

VERBAL MAGIC

A music-lover and devoted concert-goer of my acquaintance--“uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in his own words--is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is exciting; under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and the Bach fugues! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full face value. He means that the music thus described--heavenly music, he sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s unfinished symphony)--has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect, as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should be, he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “I don’t undertake to explain it,” he says; “so far as I am concerned, it is all a matter of feeling.”

Analogous to this is my own experience--and, I suppose, that of readers in general--with certain fragments of poetry, which have for me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality--though here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual limitations--is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.

The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe, at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained, it would be something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius and our old friend--or enemy--“an infinite capacity for taking pains,” so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best we can do with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our taste purified by its “heavenly alchemy;” as the best that our musical friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than once express himself, up to “heaven’s gate.”

And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no thought of solving,--a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them, though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.

Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper:”--

“Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”

The final couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he says of it, “In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in themselves, but depend for their “high quality” upon their association with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am strangely deluded, my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are composed, and how artlessly they are put together! Nine every-day words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, following each other in the most unstudied manner--and the result perfection!

By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from Shakespeare:--

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose order, and not over-musical,--“such stuff” and “little life” being almost cacophonous,--have a magical force, if I may presume for once to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of literature. We hear them, if we _do_ hear them, and all things earthly seem to melt and vanish.

Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition, and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the words, “Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly affected, politics and government are gone, an “insubstantial pageant faded.” “All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself, and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the pamphlet, I care not to read further; like Emerson at the play, who had ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost:--

“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”

I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that exalted title,--among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date, having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen: “Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in the midst of “Hamlet,” as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s, who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read Milton’s description of Satan--

“Nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured”--

till he felt “a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur.”

One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality: it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is commonly estimated. It is musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,--so completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either present or absent.[11] The appeal is to the imagination, not to the ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There is no enchantment in a riddle.

Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any conceit or play upon words.

“I could not love thee, Dear! so much,
Loved I not Honor more,”--

nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness of it, its courtly gracefulness, its _manner_ (one seems to see the bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase), the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks not of itself. If you think of _it_, the charm has failed.

In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that future day when _all_ things will be past; a suggestion or picture that brings an instant soberness,--reverie, melancholy, what you will,--that is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the Wordsworth couplet first quoted,--

“For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”--

or as that of the still more familiar slow-running line from the sonnets of Shakespeare,--

“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”--

a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.

And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf that separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next lower order. Take such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the first that offers itself for the purpose:--

“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”

Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say that less is meant than meets the ear; but set it beside the Wordsworth couplet, so easy, so simple,--

“Without all ornament, itself and true,”--

so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials, but divine in its birth and in its effect; the other is made of rare and costly stuffs, but when all is done it _is_ made. Though it sound old-fashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration.

The supreme achievement of poetic genius is not the writing of beautiful passages, but the conception and evolution of great poems,--the whole, even in a work of the imagination, being greater than any of its parts; but poetic inspiration reaches its highest jet, if we may so speak, its ultimate bloom, in occasional lines of transcendent and, as human judgment goes, perfect loveliness. I should like to see a rigorously sifted collection of such fragments, an anthology of magical verse, nothing less than magic being admitted. It would be a small volume,--

“Infinite riches in a little room;”

but it would need an inspired reader to make it.

QUOTABILITY

QUOTABILITY

There is a kind of writing by which the reader is led along, perhaps hurried along, if it be a narrative, without pause from beginning to end. Everything follows directly from what has gone before; the mind is held upon the same level of interest; and the impression produced is, as it were, a single impression. There is another kind of writing, which brings the reader now and then to a halt. He looks up from the page, perhaps, fixing his eyes upon vacancy, and turning the thought, or the expression of it, over in his mind; or he betakes himself to a book of extracts and conveys a sentence or two into its keeping; or, possibly, if he is one of the rare ones who buy books and read with pencil in hand, he may indite a note on the margin of the leaf, or at least set a mark there,--as one blazes a tree at the foot of which treasure is buried. The author has said something,--something in particular, fresh, surprising, original; something that seems to have come from his own mind; a thing to be pondered over and returned upon. For the moment there is no going further; the reader has turned thinker, or is lost in a dream. It is as if a man had been walking down a pleasant road bordered with hedges and fields, one much like another, and now of a sudden has rounded a corner, and sees before him a lake or a waterfall, something new, different, unexpected, at the sight of which he stops as by instinct. Or you may say, it is as if a man had been traveling steadily forward, thinking only of his journey’s end, and all at once catches the shine of a gold piece in the path, or sees by the wayside a flower so novel and beautiful that it must be stepped aside for and looked at.

We have had in America three writers, living in the same country village at the same time, who exemplified in a really striking manner these two styles of writing: Hawthorne on the one hand, and Emerson and Thoreau on the other.

Hawthorne’s work you may read from end to end without the temptation to transfer so much as a line to the commonplace book. The road has taken you through many interesting scenes, and past many a beautiful landscape; you may have felt much and learned much; you might be glad to turn back straightway and travel the course over again; but you will have picked up no coin or jewel to put away in a cabinet. This characteristic of Hawthorne is the more noteworthy because of the moral quality of his work. A mere story-teller may naturally keep his narrative on the go, as we say,--that is one of the chief secrets of his art; but Hawthorne was not a mere story-teller. He was a moralist,--Emerson himself hardly more so; yet he has never a moral sentence. The fact is, he did not make sentences; he made books. The story, not the sentence, nor even the paragraph or the chapter, was the unit. The general truth--the moral--informed the work. Not only was it not affixed as a label; it was not given anywhere a direct and separable verbal expression. If the story does not convey it to you, you will never get it. Hawthorne, in short, was what, for lack of a better word, we may call a literary artist.

Emerson and Thoreau, on the other hand, were journalizers. Their life was not to create, but to think, to see, to read, and to set down the results of it all, day by day. When Emerson would make a piece of literature,--a lecture, or an essay, or even a book,--he sought out related paragraphs from his diary, dove-tailed them together, disguising the joints more or less successfully, as might happen,--it was no great matter,--added collateral ideas as they occurred to him, and the job was done. It was done the more easily because the journal was not a receptacle for impressions hastily noted. Sentence and paragraph had been assiduously finished to a word, turned this way and that and settled finally into shape, before they went into it; for a journal, with him, was not a collection of rough jewels, but a drawer full of pearls and precious stones, each carefully cut and polished, ready for the setting or the string.

And what was true of Emerson was true in good degree of Thoreau, who followed the same general method, but with a less pronounced and continuous effect of discontinuity: partly, it would appear, because of a difference in the turn of his mind (more given to reason, and less to intuition), and partly because of the narrative form into which his natural historical bent almost of necessity carried him,--a form by which pages and whole chapters of his work are held pretty closely together.

If with Hawthorne we put Irving,--who was like him so far as the point now under consideration is concerned, fluidity of style and an absence of “passages,”--we have four of our American classics in well-contrasted pairs. One pair, we may say, did work that was like tapestry, woven throughout; the other’s product was rather like patchwork,--composed of rare and valuable stuff, but still patchwork.

This comparison, be it understood, is not to be taken as an attempt to settle a question of comparative rank. A contrast is not of itself an appraisal, nor a figure of speech an end of the argument. And after all, if figures of speech are to be regarded, a floor of tiles may be as beautiful, and even as “artistic,” as the finest of woven carpets. Let comparisons go. We may study differences without exalting one or depreciating another. Of the four writers now named, we are not to say that any one was greater than all the rest. Each had his superiorities and his inferiorities, the second necessary concomitants of the first; for every virtue casts its shadow.

Emerson, for his part, seems to have been keenly aware of the disconnectedness of his work,--his “formidable tendency to the lapidary style,” he terms it,--and even to have accepted it as a defect. “I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature,” he writes to Carlyle; “but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” That was one face of the medal; but his “bricks” are now of more value than many another man’s streetful of buildings.

Thoreau, though he too had his humble moods, was in general more self-reliant--or at least more self-assertive--than his older friend and master. He _believed_ in the “lapidary style,” or in some wholesome approach to it; and what he believed in he would stand up for. “We hear it complained of some works of genius,” he says, “that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the mountain peaks on the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range.” He is defending Emerson,--though he does not name him,--and, indirectly, himself; and with the same end in view he goes on to praise Sir Walter Raleigh, whose style, he says, has a natural emphasis, like a man’s tread, “and a breathing space between the sentences.” And he declares, correctly enough, that what the ignorant applaud as a “flow” of style is much of it nothing but a “rapid trot.”

One thing is certain: a man must work according to his own method. For him that is the best method, and indeed the only one. Carlyle entreated Emerson to “become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way.” “I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; and give us a History of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in good _words_) of his Life and him. I do indeed.” Thoreau’s appeal to Emerson is for exactly the opposite: less art, if need be, and less concreteness, but more “far-off heats,” more “star-dust and undissolvable nebulæ.” To that end he turns Emerson’s own verse against him. “From _his_

‘lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle.’

And yet sometimes,--

We should not mind if on our ear there fell
Some less of cunning, more of oracle.”

Clever critics, both of them, the Scotchman and the Yankee; but meanwhile, between the two fires, Emerson kept on polishing pearls and cutting cameos, with hardly so much as an attempt at an “artistic bronze statue.” The author of the essay on “Self-Reliance” knew that a man must work with his own mind, as he must wear his own face; that no method is so good or so bad but that it may be damaged by an attempt to make it as good as another’s.

And admirable as artistic perfection and absolute unity are, there remains a place, and a high place, for works of another order. All the world, even the stickler for classical perfection, loves a good sentence. Blessed is the writer who now and then makes one. We forgive him for carelessness of construction, and, almost, for every other literary fault, if once in a while--not _too_ infrequently--he packs wit or wisdom into a score or so of memorable words.

In speaking of a quotable style, we are not thinking of works like the Wisdom of Solomon, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Thoughts of Pascal and Joubert, books that are nothing but collections of maxims and aphorisms; nor even of books like Bacon’s Essays or Amiel’s Journal, that come near to falling under the same head. To find a happy and pregnant sentence in such a place is like taking an apple out of a dish and eating it at the table; to run upon one in the reading of a _book_ is like plucking an apple from a wayside tree in the midst of a half-day ramble, and munching it on the road. The fruit may be as fair and well-flavored in the first case as in the second, but what a difference in the relish of it! It is one thing to receive a coin over the banker’s counter, and another to pick a nugget out of the gravel. In reading, as well as anywhere else, a man enjoys the thrill of discovery.

Here, in great part, lies the enduring charm of an author like Montaigne, who wrote without plan, rambling at his own sweet will, never sticking to his text, and never so much as dreaming of unity or anything else that could be called “artistic,” yet making a book to live forever. As Sainte-Beuve says, you may open it at what page you will, and be in what mood you may, and you are sure to find a wise thought expressed in lively and durable phrase, a beautiful meaning set in a single strong line. And the best of it all is that these fine sentences, so detachable and memorable, are written like all the rest of the essay, and are part and parcel of it. No attention is called to them; they call no attention to themselves. They drop on the page, and the pen runs on. Seemingly, it was as easy for the writer to set down a “durable” phrase--done once for all and past all bettering--as to mention the kind of fish he preferred or any other trivial every-day matter. His good things are never tainted with smartness, the besetting vice of sentence-makers in general, nor have they at all the appearance of things designed to nudge the reader, to keep him awake, as if the writer had said to himself, “Go to, let us brighten up the discussion a bit.”

A gift of this sort comes mostly by nature, but no one ever wrote much and well without arriving at some pretty definite notions as to the art of writing; and so it was with Montaigne. If his style was discursive, formless, highly sententious, and yet to an extraordinary degree familiar, he was not only aware of the fact, but gloried in it. He loved a natural and plain way of speaking, he tells us; the same on paper as in the mouth; juicy and sinewy (_succulent et nerveux_), irregular, incontinuous and bold, every piece a body by itself,--“a soldier-like style.” Fine words he had no place for. “May I never use any other language than what is used in the markets of Paris!” he exclaims. As for mere rhetoric, he held it cheap, as every good writer does. Word painting, no matter how well done, is “easily obscured by the lustre of a simple truth.” But a good sentence, a thing worth saying and well said, he believed to be always in order. “If it is not good for what went before nor for what comes after, it is good in itself.” He praises Tacitus for being “full of sentences.” And therein, perhaps, as in Thoreau’s eulogy of Sir Walter Raleigh, we may see the author defending his own practice. There is no neater way of speaking well of ourselves than by complimenting our own special virtues in the person of another. In truth, however, Montaigne had no need to apologize even with indirectness. His “good sentences” are not only good in themselves, but good for what precedes and follows. They are never stuck on nor thrust in. On the contrary, as has been already observed, they are sure to be part of the very substance of the essay itself. You will never find Montaigne writing or retaining a paragraph for the sake of its snapper, like those authors of whom he said that they would “go a mile out of their way to run after a fine word.”

There is a natural relation, it would seem, between a quotable style and a fondness for quoting. If a man’s own thought falls easily into well-minted, separable phrases, he will almost of course be appreciative of similar aphoristic turns of speech in the works of others. So we find Montaigne’s pages bespattered from top to bottom with extracts from the philosophers and poets of an older time. As years passed, and successive editions of the book were published, the quotations grew more and more numerous, till some of the essays seemed in danger of losing their identity and becoming hardly more than leaves out of a commonplace book.

And as it was with the Frenchman, so was it with our two Concord philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were almost as fond of others’ bright things as of their own. And the same may be said of their contemporary and critic, Lowell, who, like them, was also a master of the phrase, a putter forth of “stamped sentences,” like gold and silver coins, as one of his admirers has called them. He, too, is always offering us a nugget out of another man’s pack. All three of these men, be it added, borrowed not only with freedom, but with great advantage to their own work. They had a right to borrow, being in good measure original in their very quotations, because, as has been remarked of Montaigne, “they employed them only when they found in them an idea of their own, or had been struck by them in a new and singular manner.”

But what a change when we turn to Hawthorne! His work is all of a piece, woven in his own loom. As nobody quotes him, so he quotes nobody. Inverted commas are as scarce on his pages as November violets are in the Concord meadows. You will find them, but you will have to search for them. On Thoreau’s page they are thick as violets in May.