Chapter VI: Part 6

Hence back of all, the one thing that has told most in keeping White’s book alive is undoubtedly its sound style--sentences actually filled with the living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to face with something genuine and real; objects, ideas, stand out on the page; the articulation is easy and distinct. White had no literary ambitions. His style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to natural knowledge. There was evidently something winsome and charming about the man personally, and these qualities reappear in his pages.

He was probably a parson who made as many calls afield as in the village, if not more. An old nurse in his family said of him, fifty years after his death, “He was a still, quiet body, and that there was not a bit of harm in him.”

White was a type of the true observer, the man with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his own thoughts and theories into Nature, but submitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and delighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the birds and the wild life around him. To see the thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his ambition. He could resist the tendency of his own mind to believe without sufficient evidence. Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion current during the last century, that swallows hibernated in the mud in the bottoms of streams and ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It was not enough that a few belated specimens were seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or again hovering over them early in spring; or that some old grandfather had seen a man who had taken live swallows out of the mud. Produce the man and let us cross-question him,--that was White’s attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that swallows did thus pass the winter in the mud “conglobulated into a ball,” but Johnson had that literary cast of mind that prefers a picturesque statement to the exact fact. White was led astray by no literary ambition. His interest in the life of nature was truly a scientific one; he must know the fact first, and then give it to the humanities. How true it is in science, in literature, in life, that any secondary motive vitiates the result! Seek ye the kingdom of truth first, and all things shall be added.

But White seems finally to have persuaded himself that at least a few swallows passed the winter in England in a torpid state--if not in the bottom of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks. He reasoned from analogy, though he had expressed his distrust of that mode of reasoning. If bats, insects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can thus pass the winter, why not swallows? On many different occasions, during mild days late in the fall and early in the spring, he saw house-martins flying about; the weather suddenly changing to colder, they quickly disappeared. Bats and turtles came forth, then vanished in the same way. White finally concluded that the mystery was the same in both cases,--that the creatures were brought from their winter retreats by the warmth, only to retire to them again when it changed to cold. If he had adhered to his usual caution he would have waited for actual proof of this fact,--the finding of a torpid swallow. He made frequent search for such, but never found any.

This notion so long current about the swallows probably had its origin in two things: first, their partiality for mud as nesting material; and secondly, the habit of these birds, after they have begun to collect into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to their migrations, of passing the night in vast numbers along the margins of streams and ponds. White knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to see in the fact presumptive evidence of the truth of the notion that, though they may not retire into the water itself, yet that they “may conceal themselves in the banks of pools and rivers during the uncomfortable months of the year.” One midsummer twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds of swallows--barn and cliff--settled for the night upon some low alders that grew upon the margin of a deep, still pool in the river. The bushes bent down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This attraction for the water on the part of the swallow family is certainly a curious one, and is not easily explained.

Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the nesting habits of birds afford a clue to their roosting habits,--that they usually pass the night in or near those places where they build their nests. Thus, the tree-builders roost in trees; the ground-builders upon the ground. I have seen our chickadee and woodpecker enter, late in the day, the cavities in decaying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dispose of herself for the night on the end of a maple branch where her “pendent bed and procreant cradle” was begun a few days later. In walking through the summer fields in the twilight, the vesper sparrow or the song sparrow will often start up from almost beneath one’s feet. It is said that the snow-bunting will plunge beneath the snow and pass the night there. The ruffled grouse often does this, but the swallows seem to be an exception to this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of swifts take up their lodging for the night in a tall, unused chimney; but the barn swallows and the cliff and the white-bellied swallows, at least after the young have flown, appear to pass the night in the vicinity of streams. White noticed also--and here the true observer again crops out--that the fieldfare, a kind of thrush, though a tree-builder, always appears, to pass the night on the ground. “The larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat stubbles.” He learned, as every observer sooner or later learns, to be careful of sweeping statements,--that the truth of nature is not always caught by the biggest generalizations. After speaking of the birds that dust themselves, earth their plumage--_pulveratrices_, as he calls them--he says, “As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken,” and he instances the house sparrow as doing both. White seems to have been about the first writer upon natural history who observed things minutely; he saw through all those sort of sleight-o’-hand movements and ways of the birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the point. He saw the swallows feed their young on the wing; he saw the fern-owl, while hawking about a large oak, “put out its short leg while on the wing, and by a bend of the head deliver something into its mouth.” This explained to him the use of its middle toe, “which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.” He timed the white owls feeding their young under the eaves of his church, with watch in hand. He saw them transfer the mouse they brought, from the foot to the beak, that they might have the free use of the former in ascending to the nest.

In his walks and drives about the country he was all attention to the life about him, simply from his delight in any fresh bit of natural knowledge. His curiosity never flagged. He had naturally an alert mind. His style reflects this alertness and sensitiveness. In his earlier days he was an enthusiastic sportsman, and he carried the sportsman’s trained sense and love of the chase into his natural history studies. He complained that faunists were too apt to content themselves with general terms and bare descriptions; the reason, he says, is plain,--“because all that may be done at home in a man’s study; but the investigation of the life and conversation of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country.” He himself had the true inquisitiveness and activity, and the loving, discriminating eye. He saw the specific marks and differences at a glance. Then, his love of these things was so well known in the neighborhood, that this kind of knowledge flowed to him from all sides. He was a magnet that attracted all the fresh natural lore about him. People brought him birds and eggs and nests, and animals or any natural curiosity, and reported to him any unusual occurrence. They loaned him the use of their eyes and ears. One day a countryman told him he had found a young fern-owl in the nest of a small bird on the ground, and that it was fed by the little bird. “I went to see this extraordinary phenomenon, and found that it was a young cuckoo hatched in the nest of a titlark; it was become vastly too big for its nest, appearing to have its large wings extended beyond the nest,

‘in tenui re
Majores pennas nido extendisse,’

and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I teased it, for many feet from the nest, and sparring, and buffeting with its wings like a gamecock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a distance, hovering about with meat in its mouth, and expressing the greatest solicitude.”

He observed that the train of the peacock was really not its tail, but an entirely separate appendage. He remarked how extremely fond cats are of fish, and yet of all quadrupeds “are the least disposed towards the water.” This is a curious fact to him. A neighbor of his, in ploughing late in the fall, turned a water-rat out of his hibernaculum in a field far removed from any water. The rat had laid up more than a gallon of potatoes for its winter food. This was another curious fact that set the writer speculating. His correspondent tells him of a heronry near some manor-house that excites his curiosity much. “Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many miles to get a sight of.” Such a lively curiosity had the parson. His thirst for exact knowledge was so great that on one occasion he took measurements of the carcass of a moose when he was probably compelled to hold his nose to finish the task. At one place he heard of a woman who professed to cure cancers by the use of toads; some of his brother clergymen believed the story, but when he came to sift the evidence he made up his mind that the woman was a fraud.

He said truly, “There is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.”

The observations of hardly one man in five hundred are of any value for scientific purposes.

White had the true scientific caution, and was, as a rule, very careful to verify his statements.

Of course the science of White’s time was far behind our own. The phenomenon of the weather, for instance, was not understood then as it is now. The great atmospheric waves that sweep across the continents, and the regular alternations of heat and cold, were unsuspected. White observed that cold descended from above, but he thought that thaws often originated underground, “from warm vapours which arise.” He was greatly puzzled, too, when, during the severe cold of December, 1784, the thermometer fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than on the hills. He had not observed that the very cold air on such occasions settles down into the valleys and fills them like water, marking the height to which it rises by a level line upon the trees or foliage. It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect the true source of honey dew, but it did not. He thought it proceeded from the effluvia of flowers, which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth of the sun by day, descended again as dew by night.

When a French anatomist announced that he had discovered why the cuckoo did not hatch its own eggs,--namely, because the crop or craw of the bird was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a protuberance on the belly,--White dissected a cuckoo for himself, and, finding the fact as stated, proceeded to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate, as the fern-owl and a hawk, and finding the craw situated the same as in the cuckoo, justly charged the Frenchman with having reached an unscientific conclusion.

In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly anticipates Darwin as to the beneficial functions of earthworms in the soil, and tells farmers and gardeners that the little creatures which they look upon as their enemies are really their best friends.

White has had imitators, but no successful rivals. A work much in the spirit and manner of his famous book, called “Jesse’s Gleanings in Natural History,” was published fifty years later. It had some reputation in its own day, but seems to be quite forgotten in our time. A good reader quickly sees that its pages have not the same fresh, distinctive quality as White’s, not the same atmosphere of unconscious curiosity and alert interest. They are stamped with a die far less clear and individual. The field covered is the same, the facts and incidents are the same, but the medium through which we see them all is not the same.

The following extract gives a fair sample of the style:--

“The enjoyments and delights of a country life have been sung by poets in all ages, and it is our own fault if we find the country irksome, or less agreeable than a crowded metropolis. It affords many resources of a most agreeable nature, to those who seek for rational and tranquil enjoyments. A beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in fine weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or cool valley, have great charms for those who are fond of the country. We may then exclaim with Virgil,--

‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”

But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White’s pages.

X

LUCID LITERATURE

Nothing can make up in a writer for the want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our ideas are obscure; if one’s mental activity is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There is a large blind spot in his mind, so that at times an almost total eclipse passes over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid intervals--strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his subject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at times he caught at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted meanings, as when be says of the skylark, “He _drinks_ his hurried flight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird drinking its own flight?

Or take this puzzle:--

“Vermilion wings, by distance held
To pause aflight while fleeting swift,
And high aloft the pearl inshelled
Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”

Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head in a whirl?

The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the presence of everyday things and events.

There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality,” or Tennyson’s “Tiresias” or “Ancient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whitman’s “Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast difference between the impression or want of impression made by a commonplace thought veiled and hidden by ambiguity of phrase, and that made by “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a sense of depth and height, of the far and the rare. Meredith does at times, but oftener he gives us only a sense of the dense and the foggy.

There are two reasons why we may not understand a man. In one case the fault is in him,--in his clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such as I have already spoken of. In the other case the fault, or rather the difficulty, is in us. The man may live and move upon a different spiritual plane, he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid men of Boston did not understand Emerson, but said their daughters did. The daughters were habitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values than the fathers were. Thus Scott said he did not understand Wordsworth, could not follow his “abstruse ideas;” Campbell suited him better. Scott belonged to another type of mind than that of Wordsworth’s, lived in another world. There was no sense of mystery in his mind,--of that haunting, elusive something which Wordsworth felt in all outward nature. There was no religion in Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably that baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born countrymen and equal lovers of common, rural things, but Wordsworth associated them with his spiritual and ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found in them an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and his love of sensuous beauty. Wordsworth would understand Scott much better than Scott would understand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably would not understand the moderns nearly as well as the moderns understand the ancients. We are further along on the road of human experience.

Then, we may understand a work and not appreciate it, not respond to its appeal. Appreciation is based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy with some types of mind than with others of equal parts. The most impersonal and judicious of critics cannot escape the law of elective affinities. Some books _find_ us more than others of similar merit. See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about Whitman, and it is because his aim is not merely to give the reader poetic truth disassociated from all personal qualities and traits, but to give him himself. We cannot separate the poet from the man, and if we do not respond to the man, to his type, to his quality, to his wholesale and radical democracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we all read authors only through our taste in _belles lettres_, through our love of literary truth, we should agree in our estimate of them according as our tastes agreed. But the feeling we bring to them is very complex. Character, predisposition, natural affinities, race traits, all play a part. We are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton, because the personal element plays so small a part in his poetry. If we do not get poetic truth in him we do not get anything. His style is the main thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other words, there is nothing in Milton that makes a personal appeal. One cannot conceive of any reader taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and finding his life colored and changed by him, as by some later poets. Wordsworth was a revelation to Mill; Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the same way been revelations to many readers, and for the same reason,--their intense individual point of view. Their appeal is a personal and a religious one as well as a poetic. No one who has not something of the modern pantheistic feeling toward nature will be deeply touched by Wordsworth. No one who has not felt the burden of modern problems, the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s poetry. His “sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our age. No one who has not broken away from the old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and possessed himself emotionally of the point of view afforded by modern science, will make much of Whitman. Without a certain mental and spiritual experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson will not be much to you. In Poe one’s sense of artistic forms and verbal melody are alone appealed to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an American. If you are ahungered for the bread of life do not go to Poe, do not go to Landor or to Milton, do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to Whitman,--the great personal poets, the men who have spiritual and religious values as well as poetic. All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.

XI

“MERE LITERATURE”

Is there any justification for the phrase “mere literature” which one often hears nowadays? There is no doubt a serious sneer in it, as Professor Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay, avers; but I think the sneer is not aimed so much at literature in itself as at certain phases of literature. Lowell has been quoted as saying that “mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage stamps;” yet at vital scholarship--scholarship that is wielded as a weapon, and that results in power--Lowell would be the last man to sneer. In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a great deal is produced that may well be called mere literature,--the result of assiduous training and stimulation of the literary faculties,--just as a great deal of art is produced that may be called mere art. Literature that is the result of the friction upon the mind of other literatures, might, with some justice, be called mere literature. That which is the result of the contact of the mind with reality is, or ought to be, of another order.

Or we may say “mere literature” as we say “mere gentleman.” Now gentlemanly qualities--refinement, good breeding, etc.--are not to be sneered at, unless they stand alone, with no man behind them; and literary qualities--style, learning, fancy, etc.--are not to be sneered at unless _they_ stand alone, which is not infrequently the case. We should not apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washington, or Lincoln, or Wellington, though these men may have been the most thorough of gentlemen; neither should we apply the phrase “mere literature” to the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato. The Bible is literature, but it is not mere literature. We apply the latter term to writings that have little to recommend them save their technical and artistic excellence, like the mass of current poetry and fiction. The men who have nothing to say and say it extremely well produce mere literature.

Both England and France have at the present time many excellent writers, men who possess every grace of style and charm of expression, who still give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not move us, they do not lay strong hands upon us, their works do not take hold of any great reality; they produce mere literature. Literary seriousness, literary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly seriousness and moral earnestness. A sensitive artistic conscience cannot make us content with a dull or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker is to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does the man of science, if he hopes to produce anything that rises above mere literature. The picnickers, the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of literature do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of Hawthorne was much more than a literary seriousness; the emotion of Whittier at his best is fundamental and human.

There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well expresses the distinction I am aiming at. “I have been thinking a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez,” he says, under date of December 4, 1876. “Perhaps his novels make up the most disputable part of his work,--they are so much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subtlety,--how much thought everywhere, and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him. Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of resources; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say of him, ‘He has never risen from the order of thought to the order of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an Augustine, but still he is a Lucian.... The positive element in Victor Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral or religious life.”

The positive element in the enduring works is always something more than the beautiful; it is the true, the vital, the real, as well. The beautiful is there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world is held together, life is nourished and made strong, and power begotten, by the neutral or negatively beautiful. Works are everywhere produced that are artistically serious, but morally trifling and insincere; faultless in form, but tame and barren in spirit. We could not say this of the works of Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he had a higher purpose than to produce mere literary effects; but we can say it of most of the productions of the younger British essayists and poets. In some of them there is a mere lust of verbal forms and rhythmic lilt. In reading their poems, I soon find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be trying to breathe in a vacuum,--an effect which one does not experience at all in reading Tennyson, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pater, the lust of mere style so pervades his work. Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet the best qualities of style--freshness, naturalness, simplicity--are not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far towards atoning for all his sins against art, against sanity and proportion, are his terrible moral earnestness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think of his work, we are not likely to call it “mere literature.” That masterly ubiquitous sporting and toying with the elements of life which we find in Shakespeare we shall probably never again see in letters. The stress and burden of later times do not favor it. The great soul is now too earnest, too self-conscious; life is too serious. Only light men now essay it. With so much criticism, so much knowledge, so much science, another Shakespeare is impossible. Renan says: “In order to establish those literary authorities called classic, something especially healthy and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value here than pastry.” There can be little doubt that our best literary workers are intent upon producing something analogous to pastry, or even confectionery,--something fine, complex, highly seasoned, that tickles the taste. It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and sustaining qualities of natural products,--grain, fruits, nuts, air, water.

XII

ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON

In one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as a wife feels toward her husband; we like to find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us to have others do the same. He was a friend of our youth.

Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we cherish him in our heart of hearts.

The process of maturing, with the spirit as with the body, with man as with the various organic growths, is more or less a hardening and toughening process,--a hardening for strength and endurance. Emerson belongs to the earlier period, before the hardening has progressed far, while the grain of our thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals to us most strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are not too critical and while we are yet full of brave and generous impulses. A little callow we may be, but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older something seems to evaporate from him, and one returns to his pages in middle or later life as to the scene of some youthful festival, half religious, half social, in which he took part, and the memory of which still stirs his emotions.

Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never ceased to be a clergyman. He was like a flower escaped from the garden, and finding a lodgment in an adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a garden flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness always clung to him,--a certain remoteness from the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of everyday humanity. If he had been a better worldling he would have been a better poet,--that is, if he had had more of the feelings, passions, sympathies and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would have given him more flexibility and brought him closer to human life. Rarely, as poet or prose writer, could he speak in the tone of the people. There was always, more or less concealed, the tone of the pulpit. Mr. James expressed this idea well when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side relating him to ordinary people.”

This prosaic side is very important to the poet, or to any man who would touch and move his fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson was always a preacher, and his theme, by whatever name he called it, was always religion, or what he called religion, namely, the universality of the moral law.

No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had him other than what he was; I certainly would not. At the same time it is a pleasure to explore his limitations and see just what he was, and what he was not. He was a rare soul, probably the most astral genius in English or any other literature. His books are for young men and for those of a religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a writer, as a contributor to the world’s literature, arises from this same want of sympathy with the world,--from the select, abridged, circumscribed character of his genius. He did not and could not deal with human life as Montaigne, or Bacon, or Plutarch, or Cicero did.

He was conscious of his defect in this direction, and would fain have had it otherwise. Thus he writes in his journal in 1839: “We would all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private; such is the poverty of my constitution. ‘Heaven betrayed me to a book and wrapped me in a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a steady appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities.” He even quotes approvingly the remark of some one that he “always seemed to be on stilts.” “It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He cared nothing for persons as such, but only for the genius of humanity which they embodied, and this genius of humanity he did not find in any sufficiency in ordinary mortals.

He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not men!” He liked ideas, but not things. He dwelt in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the highest friendship,” he says, “we form a league with the Idea of the man who stands to us in that relation--not with the actual person.” And his letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not read like a message from one person to another person, but from one Idea to another Idea.

Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently American; I mean his hospitality toward the new,--the eagerness with which he sought and welcomed the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might call it his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made such rash, such extreme statements, in the hope that some new truth might be compassed. Anything new and daring instantly challenged his attention. His face was wholly set toward the future,--the new. The past was discredited the moment it became the past. “The coming only is sacred,” he said; “no truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.”

As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts appear trivial in the light of his audacious affirmations. He stood ready at all times to strike his colors to the man who could bring a larger generalization than his own. All his knowledge, all his opinions, were at the mercy of the new idea. He did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in the logical way; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of the mind. He called himself an “experimenter,” and said he did not pretend to settle anything as true or false. “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane: I simply experiment; an endless seeker with no Past at my back.” In his random, prophetic way he hits on many sublime truths--hits on them by sheer force of affirmation, like the truth of evolution, and of the correlation of forces. Indeed, there are few great thoughts current in our time that were not indicated by the bold guessing of Emerson. The fragmentary and projectile-like character of his thinking is often very effective. He spent no force upon logic, upon fortifying his position, but sent his single bullet as far and as deep as he could. Emerson’s hope and confidence in the new is shown in his serious prophecy and expectancy of the coming man.

He was apparently always on the lookout for a new and greater man than had yet appeared. He was always sweeping the horizon for this strange sail. “A new person,” he says, “is to me a great event, and keeps me from sleep.” He met every stranger with a curious, expectant glance. He looked at you and waited for you to speak, as if the thought that perhaps here is the man I am waiting for, was never absent from his mind. “If the companions of our childhood,” he says, “should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” But the experience of most persons, I fancy, points just the other way: we are always incredulous when told that our playmates have turned out to be heroes; just as the whole world, except the Emersons in it, are skeptical of the worth of the new idea, or of the new invention.

Emerson does not so much expound a philosophy as he celebrates a sentiment or a law. He does not inculcate a virtue, but quickens our moral sense. He does not teach a religion, but shows all nature as religious. His method is not that of the analyst; he celebrates and presents whole what others give in detail. His mind is deficient in continuity, but strong in affirmation, strong in its separate sallies and flights. He has not a definite, practical bent like Carlyle; he seldom lays his hand on any current evil or want, but rather glorifies the world as it is. He is abstract in his aim, and concrete in his methods. He fixes his eye on the star, but would make it draw his wagon.

Carlyle was like an engine tied to its iron rails,--he turned aside for nothing; Emerson was more like a sailing yacht that hovers about all shores and takes advantage of every breeze.

XIII

THOREAU’S WILDNESS.

Doubtless the wildest man New England has turned out since the red aborigines vacated her territory was Henry Thoreau,--a man in whom the Indian reappeared on the plane of taste and morals. One is tempted to apply to him his own lines on “Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain they fit himself much more closely than they ever did his neighbor:--

“O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares.
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.”

His whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature but in literature, in life, in morals. The shyest and most elusive thoughts and impressions were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in his own mind, but in the minds of others. His startling paradoxes are only one form his wildness took. He cared little for science, except as it escaped the rules and technicalities, and put him on the trail of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau was of French extraction; and every drop of his blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal, as the French blood has so often done in other ways in this country. He, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he coveted his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He accredited him with a more “practical and vital science” than was contained in the books. “The Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.” And again, “The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as Heaven is.” In his “Week” he complains that our poetry is only white man’s poetry. “If we could listen for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” Speaking of himself, he says, “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.” Again and again he returns to the Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.” “We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.” The only relics that interest him are Indian relics. One of his regular spring recreations or occupations is the hunting of arrow-heads. He goes looking for arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botanizing. In his published journal he makes a long entry under date of March 28, 1859, about his pursuit of arrow-heads. “I spend many hours every spring,” he says, “gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil.” He probably picked up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for them. The Indian in him recognized its own.

His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the wild weapon he so loved,--hard, flinty, fine-grained, penetrating, winged, a flying shaft, bringing down its game with marvelous sureness. His literary art was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration; and though his arrows sometimes go wide, yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emersonian or transcendental red man, going about with a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead of with a bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as stoical and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veritable Indian; and how he hunted without trap or gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere the wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because it was a kind of æolian harp; the wind blowing upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the railroad through his native town, because it was the wildest road he knew of: it only made deep cuts into and through the hills. “On it are no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me. The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are not like other laborers.” One day he passed a little boy in the street who had on a home-made cap of woodchuck’s skin, and it completely filled his eye. He makes a delightful note about it in his journal. That was the kind of cap to have,--“a perfect little idyl, as they say.” Any wild trait unexpectedly cropping out in any of the domestic animals pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his favorite apple, because of its beauty and perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a wild horse, but such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.

Thoreau hesitated to call himself a naturalist. That was too tame; he would perhaps have been content to have been an Indian naturalist. He says in this journal, and with much truth and force, “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.” When he was applied to by the secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science, at Washington, for information as to the particular branch of science he was most interested in, he confesses he was ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridicule. But he says, “If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.” “The fact is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” Indeed, what Thoreau was finally after in nature was something ulterior to science, something ulterior to poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it was that vague something which he calls “the higher law,” and which eludes all direct statement. He went to Nature as to an oracle; and though he sometimes, indeed very often, questioned her as a naturalist and a poet, yet there was always another question in his mind. He ransacked the country about Concord in all seasons and weathers, and at all times of the day and night he delved into the ground, he probed the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes, into muskrats’ dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels; he saw every bird, heard every sound, found every wild-flower, and brought home many a fresh bit of natural history; but he was always searching for something he did not find. This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful parable in “Walden:”--

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”

XIV

NATURE IN LITERATURE

Several different kinds or phases of this thing we call Nature have at different times appeared in literature. For instance, there is the personified or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish ignorance, and the tyranny of personality; the Greek was so alive himself that he made everything else alive, and so manly and human that he could see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in a measure of Virgil’s Nature. In a later class of writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian Church; it is a kind of theological Nature.

In English literature there is the artificial Nature of Pope and his class,--a kind of classic liturgy repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and affected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic muse; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualized Nature of Wordsworth, which has given the prevailing tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus, from a goddess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, besides other characters not so definite, till she has at last become a priestess of the soul. What will be the next phase is perhaps already indicated in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is regarded mainly in the light of science, through the immense vistas opened up by astronomy and geology. This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions.

I was much struck with a passage in Whitman’s last volume, “Two Rivulets,” in which he says that he has not been afraid of the charge of obscurity in his poems, “because human thought, poetry or melody, must have dim escapes and outlets,--must possess a certain fluid, aërial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.” I know no ampler justification of a certain elusive quality there is in the highest poetry--something that refuses to be tabulated or explained, and that is a stumbling-block to many readers--than is contained in these sentences.

XV

SUGGESTIVENESS

There is a quality that adheres to one man’s writing or speaking, and not to another’s, that we call suggestiveness,--something that warms and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the amount of truth or information directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he elaborates the least and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of poetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do,--he abounded in hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style,--nothing that stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers’ minds than his earlier and more direct one, or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind; at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a rolling field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight one. In literature perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer, sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun vague generalities,--with these go the power of suggestiveness.