MY LITERARY PASSIONS

By William Dean Howells

1895

 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL. 

 I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME II. GOLDSMITH III. CERVANTES IV. IRVING V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT" VII. SCOTT VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES IX. POPE X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES XI. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN XII. OSSIAN XIII. SHAKESPEARE XIV. IK MARVEL XV. DICKENS XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER XVII. MACAULAY. XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS. XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE XX. THACKERAY XXI. "LAZARILLO DE TORMES" XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL XXIII. TENNYSON XXIV. HEINE XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW. XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE XXVII. CHARLES READE XXVIII. DANTE. XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO XXX. "PASTOR FIDO, " "AMINTA, " "ROMOLA, " "YEAST, " "PAUL FERROLL" XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY XXXV. TOLSTOY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The papers collected here under the name of 'My Literary Passions' wereprinted serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they mightwell have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that couldbe reasonably hoped for them. Nevertheless, they were reissued in avolume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had apleasing share of such favor as their author's books have enjoyed. Butit is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as heliked writing them--say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a NewYork flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles anda half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever hechose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscencesperhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader'sfollowing. The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popularpublication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration asthey might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editorand author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun. 

The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that littleremains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historicaldetail here given. Their short and simple annals could be eked out byconfidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of theliterary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to theimagination of such posterity as they may reach. They are ratherhelplessly frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helplessfrankness, offensively frank. They are at least not part of the polemicwhich their author sustained in the essays following them in this volume, and which might have been called, in conformity with 'My LiteraryPassions', by the title of 'My Literary Opinions' better than by thevague name which they actually wear. 

They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism and the art ofFiction, and so far their present name is not a misnomer. It followsthem from an earlier date and could not easily be changed, and it mayserve to recall to an elder generation than this the time when theirauthor was breaking so many lances in the great, forgotten war betweenRealism and Romanticism that the floor of the "Editor's Study" inHarper's Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters. The "Editor'sStudy" is now quite another place, but he who originally imagined it in1886, and abode in it until 1892, made it at once the scene of suchconstant offence that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence. The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the prime mover in theattack upon the masters of the Romanticistic school; but he lived to ownthat he had fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that he wasright. The Realists, who were undoubtedly the masters of fiction intheir passing generation, and who prevailed not only in France, but inRussia, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in allAnglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of Romanticism, who tothis day possess the land; though still, whenever a young novelist doeswork instantly recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is seenand felt to have wrought in the spirit of Realism. Not even yet, however, does the average critic recognize this, and such lesson as the"Editor's Study" assumed to teach remains here in all its essentials forhis improvement. 

Month after month for the six years in which the "Editor's Study"continued in the keeping of its first occupant, its lesson was more orless stormily delivered, to the exclusion, for the greater part, of otherprophecy, but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous manneralong with the fulminant matter in this volume. When the author came torevise the material, he found sins against taste which his zeal forrighteousness could not suffice to atone for. He did not hesitate toomit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a precept, but an example in criticism. He hopes that in other and slighter thingshe has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact thebook is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from which ithas here been a second time evolved. 

The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product ofthose unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of'My Literary Passions. ' They could not have been written in quite somany places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on theshores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo, in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions toBoston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of New England, until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and hevoluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and enemiesalike. 

The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not asstill appears to him with greater reason. At moments his deliverancesseemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, sofar as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas;and some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as itis his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacksupon their theories of criticism and fiction. His opinions were alwaysimpersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has beenslightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that itwas the belief of one English critic that their author had "placedhimself beyond the pale of decency" by them. It ought to be lesssurprising that, since these dreadful words were written of him, morethan one magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the authorthe feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazardedconvictions. The penitence of his countrymen is still waitingexpression, but it may come to that when they have recurred to theevidences of his offence in their present shape. 

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909. 

 MY LITERARY PASSIONS

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME

To give an account of one's reading is in some sort to give an account ofone's life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me inthese papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of theauthors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught methis or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that Icould not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable oflearning. I do not know whether I have been what people call a greatreader; I cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I havealways been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and morediscreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from thevantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be foundwriting here rather than from the facts of the case. 

But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always keptthe lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right touse authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shalltry not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here ofall my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of thosebooks, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for. Ihave known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly ofthe loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the morefrankly because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than thatof any other person. 

I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literaturein a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes. From aletter of my great-grandmother's written to a stubborn daughter upon someunfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that shewas fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilfulchild that she has "planted a dagger in her mother's heart, " and I shouldnot be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that mygrandfather derived his taste for poetry rather than from his father, whowas of a worldly wiser mind. To be sure, he became a Friend byConvincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he wasaltogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded theindustry of making flannels in the little Welsh town where he lived, andhe seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us havesince grown for ours. My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly ingetting away from the world and its wickedness. He came to this countryearly in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin inthe Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences ofthe village where he was managing some woollen-mills. But he kept hisaffection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, andhe must have suffered his children to read them, pending that greatquestion of their souls' salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him. 

My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in the direction ofliterature, that he was not content in any of his several economicalexperiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then thesole means of satisfying a literary passion. His paper, at the date whenI began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but withoutthe least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much bettercondition. I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancementwhich most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of hisfinest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was notexempt from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed byneed but he could give himself at will not only to the things of thespirit, but the things of the mind too. After a season of scepticism hehad become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his ownfashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend whohad married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist. Myfather, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetingswhere my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, andhad at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings ofEmanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with acontent that has lasted him all the days of his many years. Ever since Ican remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library;he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a"Memorable Relation" from them to us children. But he did not force themupon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was verywell. I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so. But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and whenI began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice. 

His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was notgiven to theology, was given to poetry. I call it the library now, butthen we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was, because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection ofbooks, it was a larger private collection than any other in the townwhere we lived. Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in acase of very few shelves. It was not considerably enlarged during mychildhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulgedhimself in buying them even more rarely. My grandfather's book store(it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock ofliterature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers' agentcame to replenish it, he gave my father several volumes for review. Oneof these was a copy of Thomson's Seasons, a finely illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them themost beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of thebook aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter ofthat he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything butgood, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got noharm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, andhe used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressibleweariness. I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feelthe charm of the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos. Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read "Lalla Rookh" to my motherI sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story ofthe "Fire Worshippers. " I drew the line at the "Veiled Prophet ofKhorassan, " though I had some sense of the humor of the poet's conceptionof the critic in "Fadladeen. " But I liked Scott's poems far better, andgot from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy. I followedthe "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and when I first began to contriveverses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre. 

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which Iused to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, werePope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy inPhiladelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehowseemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said tome in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of suchpictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try. At any rate, I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume ofShakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me inlike manner with its wood-cuts. I cannot say just why I conceived thatthere was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps thiswas a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man fromwhom my father had it. If he were not profligate I ask his pardon. Ihave not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had ofhim, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. There may never have beensuch a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pureinvention of my own, like many things with children, who do not verydistinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in theworld where both project the same quality of shadow. 

There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which myconsciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember. Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe's 'Tales ofthe Grotesque and the Arabesque' (I long afflicted myself as to whatthose words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) andBulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding. Historyis known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of theUnited States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and bya 'Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada', by the ever dear and preciousFray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and thesame as Washington Irving. 

In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and Icannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not reallyvery much in school, and so I got small harm from it. The printing-office was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughlybelieved in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustratedas soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We couldgo to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must dosomething, for our souls' sake, though he was willing enough we shouldplay, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy thepleasures that manhood can share with childhood. I suppose that as theworld goes now we were poor. His income was never above twelve hundred ayear, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; welived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not knowthat we were poor. As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamedof (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) inthe little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happyboyhood was passed. 

II. GOLDSMITH

When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certainbooks above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith, Cervantes, and Irving. In the sharply foreshortened perspective of thepast I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order oftime in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first. He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read him, butit must have been before I was ten years old. I read other books aboutthat time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which Iperused with such a passion for those pagan gods and goddesses that, ifit had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana, I do not really knowwhether I should have been able to refuse. I adored indiscriminately allthe tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and heroes, as well as the highones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopledand ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers at night, and fellasleep in sorrow for my sins. I do not know in the least how Goldsmith'sGreece came into my hands, though I fancy it must have been procured forme because of a taste which I showed for that kind of reading, and I canimagine no greater luck for a small boy in a small town of SouthwesternOhio well-nigh fifty years ago. I have the books yet; two little, stoutvolumes in fine print, with the marks of wear on them, but without thosedishonorable blots, or those other injuries which boys inflict upon booksin resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wantonness. I was alwayssensitive to the maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a bookfaced down or dogs-eared or broken-backed. It was like a hurt or aninsult to a thing that could feel. 

Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much later, but quite asimmemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek Republics, which I dare say was not mistaken. Of course I liked Athens best, andyet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans in battle, which won a heart formed for hero-worship. I mastered the notion oftheir communism, and approved of their iron money, with the poverty itobliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the Helots failedto shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I had toforgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs. Therewas hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in those daysto the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as despatched adespot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I could onlygrieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things. 

I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made themall live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist usingfor my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to seethe loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my ownpoor account. I tried to make verses like those I listened to when myfather read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no suchhappiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then ofattempting to write like Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work asignorantly as I did my other blessings. I was concerned in getting atthe Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and bywhat lovely ways I was led to them. Some retrospective perception ofthis came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all ofhis poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but forthe present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in theworld of art. What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got atthem was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse, and in dramatic verse at that. The Romans were less civilized than theGreeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy's purpose. I didnot make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of theRomans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the"Lady of the Lake. " I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I amnot sure that I ever made it known to them. Still, they were notignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certainboy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outrankedme in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the name of the Romanemperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, thathe had lost a day. The boy was going to use the story, in a composition, as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor's name; Icould not tell him now without turning to the book. 

My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it torank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I havesince found that literature gives one no more certain station in theworld of men's activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk tryto believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period oflife, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, andwant to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted. I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome, or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have norecollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing theallegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems tohave been in my hands about the same time or a little later. I had adelight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannotaccount for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusionit made of my ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at all theancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's histories. 

I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have beenodd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginningto be troubled with work. As I have said, I was to and fro between theschoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I tired of the oneI must have been very promptly given my choice of the other. Thereading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no doubt my lovefor it won me a chance for it. There were some famous cherry-trees inour yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to have been in flower orfruit the year round; and in one of them there was a level branch where aboy could sit with a book till his dangling legs went to sleep, or tillsome idler or busier boy came to the gate and called him down to playmarbles or go swimming. When this happened the ancient world was rolledup like a scroll, and put away until the next day, with all its oratorsand conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; thoughsometimes they escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams. 

I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the 'ArabianNights' or 'Robinson Crusoe, ' but when it came to the 'IngeniousGentleman of La Mancha, ' I was not only first, I was sole. 

Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had myboyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt tothat not unequal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long after Ihad read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilersas they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came toknow his poetry. My father must have read the "Deserted Village" to us, and told us something of the author's pathetic life, for I cannotremember when I first knew of "sweet Auburn, " or had the light of thepoet's own troubled day upon the "loveliest village of the plain. "The 'Vicar of Wakefield' must have come into my life after that poem andbefore 'The Traveler'. It was when I would have said that I knew allGoldsmith; we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this waywithout having any tangible assets; and my reading has always been verydesultory. I should like to say here that the reading of any one whoreads to much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I hadbetter not say so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that Inever read any one author quite through without wandering from him toothers. When I first read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' (for I have sinceread it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found itspersons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard itread. It is still for me one of the most modern novels: that is to say, one of the best. It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and thenunmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be foreverimperishable. Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it isthese in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth thewhile of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take alittle thought of them. They are the source of all refinement, and I donot believe that the best art in any kind exists without them. The styleis the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that weshall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speechbetrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtlyyet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart. As toGoldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, ofworldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do notthink that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, hisspiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in theliterary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in hiswork. 

I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to closecriticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author Iloved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader. I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I wasfourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the'Citizen of the World' and other unsuccessful ventures of his. Itcontained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to writesketches and studies of life in their manner. But this attempt atGoldsmith's manner followed a long time after I tried to write in thestyle of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his 'Tales of the Grotesqueerred Arabesque. ' I suppose the very poorest of these was the "Devil inthe Belfry, " but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could inthe "Devil in the Smoke-Pipes"; I meant tobacco-pipes. The resemblancewas noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it orwould not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be foundto have produced an imitation. 

It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I hadimitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself. I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him. I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I shouldnot say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as likemyself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of someothers. I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn somethingfrom the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the youngwriter this seems impossible. He must form himself from time to timeupon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done thishe must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too. The loveralways desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adorationwhich a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing thelove of women. I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was oneof my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of hismastery than I had of Goldsmith's. 

III. CERVANTES

I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of 'DonQuixote, ' while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly withanybody's authorship. I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion ofliterature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually comeout rightly rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close of asummer's day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlesslylate, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about herwork, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brotherand me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of abook that he had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but thestory, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever ourfingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land ofadventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight trulywithout fear and without reproach burned itself out. I dare say that myfather tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book. I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant toridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do atonce was to get that book and plunge into its story. He told us atrandom of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of thenight in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of theinn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of theisland that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at theduke's and duchess's, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of thecapture of Mambrino's helmet, and of Sancho's invention of the enchantedDulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in themost wonderful and delightful book in the world. I do not know when orwhere my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time thatpassed between my hearing of it and my having it. The event must havebeen most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment whenthe precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of thatthere is nothing more capricious than a child's memory, what it will holdand what it will lose. 

It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not muchbigger each than my Goldsmith's 'Greece', bound in a sort of law-calf, well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo. Thetranslation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which, whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth-century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of theoriginal. If it had any literary influence with me the influence musthave been good. But I cannot make out that I was sensible of theliterature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed. I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of thatimmense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the naturalsequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough forthe events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streamsand hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons andpalaces, which were the setting of that matchless history. I took it assimply as I took everything else in the world about me. It was full ofmeaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kindthat literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon myinnocence. I did not know whether it was well written or not; I neverthought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, itsinexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams ofavarice. 

My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as abouthis 'Don Quixote', for I seem to have known from the beginning that hewas once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and Iloved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still livingand he could somehow return my love. His name and nature endeared theSpanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, andto this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in somethingof the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child. While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school, one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system ofeducation; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died toplease for Cervantes' and Don Quixote's sake, because I knew he spoketheir tongue. But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance todistinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before theblessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassionedreveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty, and because I would have been Spanish if I could. 

I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fonddreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there;in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heardof Don Quixote. But I believe that I carried the book about with me mostof the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it. Even inthe blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to mystore, I must still have been reading it. This was after we had removedfrom the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and Ihad barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of myuncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in theplace, forty miles away, where he practised medicine. We made the longjourney, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of thosedays, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home, and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left. I do not knowhow it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopelessblackness around me, I should have got my 'Don Quixote' out of my bag;I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for mynew career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion ofbeguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown mysorrows in it. But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweetyoung aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stoodtogether on the lawn in the summer evening light. My aunt held my DonQuixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child shecarried on her arm. She looked at the book, and then from time to timeshe looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, sothat as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had thesense that in her eyes I was a queer boy. She returned the book withoutcomment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where theconfidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep. 

In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I wasgoing home. Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down tothe stage-office with me and took my passage back. 

The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage-office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead. But my uncle ledme to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made metaste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehowgot home together alive. 

The reading of 'Don Quixote' went on throughout my boyhood, so that Icannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less, reading that book. In a boy's way I knew it well when I was ten, and afew years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable newversion of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my ownirrevocable past that I did not find it very gay. But I made a greatmany discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and mustalways have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a neweffect upon me. I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given itmy whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness ofthe book it seemed to me greater than ever. I believe that its free andsimple design, where event follows event without the fettering control ofintrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions, is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if weever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such largeand noble lines. As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in hisdignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotionto them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in mylatest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first, and had felt the sublimity of his nature. I did not want to laugh at himso much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things doneto him. Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, sothat it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as bothflowing from the same mind. But in my mature experience, which threw abroader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an authorwho had been almost personally, dear to me. 

IV

IRVING

I have told how Cervantes made his race precious to me, and I am surethat it must have been he who fitted me to understand and enjoy theAmerican author who now stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy inSpanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in time and circumstancebetween Irving and Cervantes. The most I can make sure of is that I readthe 'Conquest of Granada' after I read Don Quixote, and that I loved thehistorian so much because I had loved the novelist much more. Of courseI did not perceive then that Irving's charm came largely from Cervantesand the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, and that he had formedhimself upon them almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say thatthis fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. Afterwards Icame to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own inIrving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and hisoriginal, if somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was nocritical question with me. I gave my heart simply and passionately tothe author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in mysympathy, and companioned me with the stately and gracious actors inthem. 

I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more. I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, andyet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the pooryoung King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time afollower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved theLast Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, itwas as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast. I put boththese princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote. I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to aconclusion it does not greatly matter. I had never yet read anhistorical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt musthave been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving's history. I amcertain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at allvarying them. 

In reading his 'Chronicle' I suffered for a time from its attribution toFray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it, just as in reading 'Don Quixote' I suffered from Cervantes masqueradingas the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. My father explained theliterary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and Imade a practice of skipping those passages where either author insistedupon his invention. I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thingseems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and frankermethods of modern fiction will forbid its revival. Thackeray was fond ofsuch open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask ofYellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was inhis least modern moments. 

My 'Conquest of Granada' was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards, and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges. I do not know when the books happened in my hands. I have no remembrancethat they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort ofway they were as authentically mine as if I had made them. I saw them athome, not many months ago, in my father's library (it has long outgrownthe old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole Irather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, thoughI could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding theghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf, somewhere between the familiar pages. 

When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, ofwriting the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-oddyears to do it in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, whenI knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of thebook. My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himselfwritten a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let meplunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, andall the rest, when as yet I could not confidently call them by name, withthe serene belief that if I did not swim I would still somehow get ashorewithout sinking. The end, perhaps, justified him, and I suppose I didnot do all that work without getting some strength from it; but I wish Ihad back the time that it cost me; I should like to waste it in someother way. However, time seemed interminable then, and I thought therewould be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish literature; or, at least, I did not propose to do anything less. 

I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and withother authors at the same time. I did my poor best to be amused by his'Knickerbocker History of New York', because my father liked it so much, but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefullythrough it again. I could not laugh. Even as a boy I found some otherthings of his uphill work. There was the beautiful manner, but thethought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by'Bracebridge Hall', though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense thatit would be very 'comme il faut' to like it. But I did like the 'Life ofGoldsmith'; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative'Life by Forster', and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense ofGoldsmith in it. Better than all, except the 'Conquest of Granada', I liked the 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and the story of Rip Van Winkle, with their humorous and affectionate caricatures of life that was once ofour own soil and air; and the 'Tales of the Alhambra', which transportedme again, to the scenes of my youth beside the Xenil. It was long aftermy acquaintance with his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as anartist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of it only now, whenI perceive that he worked willingly only when he worked inventively. At last I can do justice to the exquisite conception of his 'Conquest ofGranada', a study of history which, in unique measure, conveys not onlythe pathos, but the humor of one of the most splendid and impressivesituations in the experience of the race. Very possibly something of theseverer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect of the pleasingand touching tale, but I do not under stand that this was really done. Upon the whole I am very well content with my first three loves inliterature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do not see how Icould choose better than Goldsmith and Cervantes and Irving, kindredspirits, and each not a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whosekindness could not fail to profit him. 

V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA

In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certainBoeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward inthe paths I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of theover-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should beashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact. My father hadsold his paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another atDayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it. My dailytasks began so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if Ihad the spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what was really release, came to us that I got back again to mybooks. Then we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress oftoil, with the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like thehorror of an evil dream. The only new book which I remember to have readin those two or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to haveread any old ones, was the novel of 'Jane Eyre, ' which I took in veryimperfectly, and which I associate with the first rumor of the RochesterKnockings, then just beginning to reverberate through a world that theyhave not since left wholly at peace. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoonwhen the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the storywas an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nailsand come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures hadbeen doing in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spiritswere beginning to make themselves felt. The thing did not really happenin my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily havehappened. 

If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand myacquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself. There was a haplesscompany of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us fortheir printing. I believe they never paid for it, or at least neverwholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I canmake out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, everynight. They gave two or three plays at every performance to housesungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper thatwould not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the billeach day. In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I readhim, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, andI saw "Macbeth" and "Hamlet, " and above all "Richard III. , " again andagain. I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send meto the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase athome, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them Iam not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than "Rollo, " "The Wife, " "The Stranger, " "Barbarossa, " "The Miser ofMarseilles, " and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which Isaw at that time. I have a notion that there were some clever people inone of these companies, and that the lighter pieces at least were wellplayed, but I may be altogether wrong. The gentleman who took the partof villain, with an unfailing love of evil, in the different dramas, usedto come about the printing-office a good deal, and I was puzzled to findhim a very mild and gentle person. To be sure he had a mustache, whichin those days devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blondmustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark and deadly thingit was behind the footlights at night. I could scarcely gasp in hispresence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid avisit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills. Thecompany he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them. 

Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming. Wehad to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when theworst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before. There was nomore waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking atdawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier forthe doom hanging over us. My father and his brothers had long dreamed ofa sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle whowas most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far fromDayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the otherscould shape their business to follow him. The scheme came to nothingfinally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and itssorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin, while a house was building for us. 

VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"

This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft werestored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase. I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendshipwith them. The light could not have been good, though if I brought mybooks to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning andwhistling gristmill I could see well enough. But perhaps I liked theloft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could bealone. At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow's "SpanishStudent, " which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of thebarrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all thingsSpanish inspired in me. As I read I not only renewed my acquaintancewith literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I hadbeen happy before those heavy years in Dayton. At the same time I felt alittle jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them aswell as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hatedthe poet for trespassing on my ground. But I could not hold out longagainst the witchery of his verse. The "Spanish Student" became one ofmy passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like 'Don Quixote' and the'Conquest of Granada', but still a passion, and I should dread a littleto read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty. The hero's rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards, so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my firstpseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed mylegislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it. I was in lovewith the heroine, the lovely dancer whose 'cachucha' turned my head, along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten, and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if shehad been a real person. 

VII. SCOTT

All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of play which I had notenjoyed in the toil-years at Dayton, and was trying to make my Spanishreading serve in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river. We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we were British andAmericans, or settlers and Indians. I suspect that the large, mild boy, the son of a neighboring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but adim notion of what I meant by my strange people, but I did my best toenlighten him, and he helped me make a dream out of my life, and did hisbest to dwell in the region of unrealities where I preferably had mybeing; he was from time to time a Moor when I think he would rather havebeen a Mingo. 

I got hold of Scott's poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most ofthe tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of myfather's. I could not say why "Harold the Dauntless" most took my fancy;the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do withit, I believe. I liked these things, all of them, and in after years Iliked the "Lady of the Lake" more and more, and from mere love of it gotgreat lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then orever a great passion with me. It was a sobered affection at best, whichcame from my sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly andhumane keeping of his genius. Many years later, during the month when Iwas waiting for my passport as Consul for Venice, and had the time on myhands, I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after another, without the interruption of other reading. 'Ivanhoe' I had known before, and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' and 'Woodstock', but the rest had remainedin that sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people expectto read as a matter of course, and come very near not reading at all, orread only very late. Taking them in this swift sequence, little ornothing of them remained with me, and my experience with them is againstthat sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so often heardadvised for young people by their elders. I always suspect their eldersof not having done that kind of reading themselves. 

For my own part I believe I have never got any good from a book that Idid not read lawlessly and wilfully, out of all leading and following, and merely because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to praisethat way of doing. The book which you read from a sense of duty, orbecause for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this willbe in its own unentreated way and in spite of your good intentions. Little of the book read for a purpose stays with the reader, and this isone reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofitable. I havedone a vast deal of this, but I have usually been aware that the book wassubtly withholding from me the best a book can give, since I was notreading it for its own sake and because I loved it, but for selfish endsof my own, and because I wished to possess myself of it for businesspurposes, as it were. The reading that does one good, and lasting good, is the reading that one does for pleasure, and simply and unselfishly, as children do. Art will still withhold herself from thrift, and shedoes well, for nothing but love has any right to her. 

Little remains of the events of any period, however vivid they were inpassing. The memory may hold record of everything, as it is believed, but it will not be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I findmyself striving in vein to recall the things that I must have read thatyear in the country. Probably I read the old things over; certainly Ikept on with Cervantes, and very likely with Goldsmith. There was adelightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the pioneer times, which was a good deal in the hands of us boys; and there was a book ofWestern Adventure, full of Indian fights and captivities, which we woreto pieces. Still, I think that it was now that I began to have aliterary sense of what I was reading. I wrote a diary, and I tried togive its record form and style, but mostly failed. The versifying whichI was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand. I shouldbe very glad to, know at present what it dealt with. 

VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES

When my uncles changed their minds in regard to colonizing their familiesat the mills, as they did in about a year, it became necessary for myfather to look about for some new employment, and he naturally looked inthe old direction. There were several schemes for getting hold of thispaper and that, and there were offers that came to nothing. In that daythere were few salaried editors in the country outside of New York, andthe only hope we could have was of some place as printers in an officewhich we might finally buy. The affair ended in our going to the Statecapital, where my father found work as a reporter of legislativeproceedings for one of the daily journals, and I was taken into theoffice as a compositor. In this way I came into living contact withliterature again, and the daydreams began once more over the familiarcases of type. A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in thelong reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case, I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity. I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in thosepreposterous deliriums. What I actually did was to write a good manycopies of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and Goldsmith, andsome minor poets, whose work caught my fancy, as I read it in thenewspapers or put it into type. 

One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances asto treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing Iever had in print. My father offered it to the editor of the paper Iworked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he haddone when I saw it in the journal. In the tumult of my emotions Ipromised myself that if I got through this experience safely I wouldnever suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not longbefore I offered the editor a poem myself. I am now glad to think itdealt with so humble a fact as a farmer's family leaving their old homefor the West. The only fame of my poem which reached me was when anotherboy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision. This covered mewith such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth. At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it wasattempted in a way which was not false or wrong. I had tried to sketchan aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very wellindeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poorlittle affair. 

My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where Iworked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that lighttrade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat. I readthem after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passionthat I bestowed upon my favorite authors. I believe I had no criticalreserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy. Still, we had great fun with Japhet in 'Search of a Father', and with'Midshipman Easy', and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darklingmoods of 'Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend. ' I do not remember even the names ofthe other novels, except 'Jacob Faithful, ' which I chanced upon a fewyears ago and found very, hard reading. 

We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields werehomesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate withthis longing the 'Farmer's Boy of Bloomfield, ' which my father got forme. It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mildwoodcuts in it. I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vagueresentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of itsparts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have feltthis. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfieldbetter; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabicswhich I preferred to any other verse. 

IX. POPE

I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun toread Pope, and that I must have read the "Deserted Village" of Goldsmith. I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the"Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took meso much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroicepic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, withthe wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods andgoddesses. It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best tobalance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line, and a neat antithesis at the end. 

The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments ofbeing intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase, and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with asense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing moreliterary, and less human. I fell in love with Pope, whose life I readwith an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited. I was ofhis side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I didnot understand them I was of his side anyway. When I found that he was aCatholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for hissake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to knowthat most of his friends were Protestants. If the truth must be told, I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chieflyattached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating, with a whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks, enamelled meads, rolling years, and the like. 

After my day's work at the case I wore the evening away in my boyishliterary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that unnatural kind, andrubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes takeon an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine. With all my pains I do not think I ever managed to bring any of mypastorals to a satisfactory close. They all stopped somewhere abouthalfway. My swains could not think of anything more to say, and themerits of my shepherdesses remained undecided. To this day I do not knowwhether in any given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of Sylviathat carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare say it does not muchmatter. I am sure that I produced a rhetoric as artificial and treatedof things as unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad that Iacquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood of literature which, whateverwe may say against it, seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood ofcivilization. 

The severe schooling I gave myself was not without its immediate use. I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness, and though I often employed them decoratively and with no vital sense oftheir qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be chosenintelligently, and after some thought about their structure and meaning. I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his methodwas to the last degree intelligent. He certainly knew what he was doing, and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish toknow, and ashamed of not knowing. There are several truer poets whomight not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, heseems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one ofthe great poets. The poor man's life was as weak and crooked as hisfrail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought hisway against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature. I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from timeto time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would haveliked always to respect himself if he could. He violently revolted, now and again, from the abasement to which he forced himself, and healways bit the heel that trod on him, especially if it was a very high, narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it. I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I amnot sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite. I humbly, own a vast debt to him, not the least part of which is the perceptionthat he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned than to be followedin literature. 

He was the first of the writers of great Anna's time whom I knew, and hemade me ready to understand, if he did not make me understand at once, the order of mind and life which he belonged to. Thanks to hispastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisitefor full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities atTasso's "Aminta" and Guarini's "Pastor Fido"; things which you willthoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how peopleonce seriously liked them as high examples of poetry. 

Of course I read other things of Pope's besides his pastorals, even atthe time I read these so much. I read, or not very easily or willinglyread at, his 'Essay on Man, ' which my father admired, and which heprobably put Pope's works into my hands to have me read; and I read the'Dunciad, ' with quite a furious ardor in the tiresome quarrels itcelebrates, and an interest in its machinery, which it fatigues me tothink of. But it was only a few years ago that I read the 'Rape of theLock, ' a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we may choose to think ofthe kind. Upon the whole I think much better of the kind than I oncedid, though still not so much as I should have thought if I had read thepoem when the fever of my love for Pope was at the highest. 

It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt by one'sidealizations of historical or imaginary characters, and I shall not tryto answer it fully. I suppose that if I once cherished such a passionfor Pope personally that I would willingly have done the things that hedid, and told the lies, and vented the malice, and inflicted thecruelties that the poor soul was full of, it was for the reason, partly, that I did not see these things as they were, and that in the glamour ofhis talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his defects, which hecertainly had, and partly that in my love of him I could not take sidesagainst him, even when I knew him to be wrong. After all, I fancy notmuch harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthusiasms for thisimperfect hero or that. In my own case I am sure that I distinguished asto certain sins in my idols. I could not cast them down or cease toworship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secretshame for them. I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believethat they were less evil for them than they would have been for lesspeople. This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good andevil. While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not evenunderstand the wrong. When I realized what lives some of my poets hadled, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue, I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and tothis day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxesitself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he shouldsuffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before anethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the racecompelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthyimages and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that theboy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from thesethrough his ignorance. Still I wish they were not there, and I hope thetime will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in usthat the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that whatis lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editionsas are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which nowperpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer haveits way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that isthe truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped fromliterature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some tothink of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation togeneration, and carefully passed down from age to age as somethingprecious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which theyare. 

During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father readthings aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with therest. I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson's 'Castle ofIndolence' in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient ofhaving things read to me. The trouble was that I caught some thought orimage from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that whilethe reading went on, and I lost the rest. But I think the reading wasless in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting andhis leisure less. My own hours in the printing-office began at seven andended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used forputting down such verses as had come to me during the morning. As soonas supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept ingreat disorder, and written in several different hands on severaldifferent kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at myblessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to riseagain at five. Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off onSaturdays, and though the days were long the work was not alwaysconstant, and was never very severe. I suspect now the office was not soprosperous as might have been wished. I was shifted from place to placein it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over thedistribution of my case. I was very fond of my work, though, and proudof my swiftness and skill in it. Once when the perplexed foreman couldnot think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would nottake it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my artof poetry than in my trade of printing. What went on in the officeinterested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of Englishletters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapelessdiary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of adistinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write. There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wetsponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them backand forth at each other. This amiable fray, carried on during theforeman's absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy whohas come to be a name well-known in literature. I admired his vigor as acombatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamedthat he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely asmyself. Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both becomejournalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for theAtlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship whicheventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse. 'The Poems ofTwo Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the Westwaited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the Eastsaid nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred cameback upon the publisher's hands. I imagine these copies were "ground up"in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the bookquoted the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, and Iinfer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity. It wasa very pretty little book, printed on tinted paper then called "blush, "in the trade, and it was manufactured in the same office where we hadonce been boys together, unknown to each other. Another boy of that timehad by this time become foreman in the office, and he was very severewith us about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin. Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs, and perhaps wemight have taken on airs if the fate of our book had been different. As it was I really think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and afterthirty four or five years for reflection I am still of a very modest mindabout my share of the book, in spite of the price it bears in the book-seller's catalogue. But I have steadily grown in liking for my friend'sshare in it, and I think that there is at present no American of twenty-three writing verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and high, and from an impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt's were then. Healready knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of theregion where we were both native, and in him the Middle West has its truepoet, who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and tenderimagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely andfully his own. I was reading over his poems in that poor little book afew days ago, and wondering with shame and contrition that I had not atonce known their incomparable superiority to mine. But I used then andfor long afterwards to tax him with obscurity, not knowing that my ownwant of simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect. My reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, ofdefiniteness; anything left in the vague was intolerable to me; but mylong subjection to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me sostrictly literary in my point of view that sometimes I could not see whatwas, if more naturally approached and without any technicalpreoccupation, perfectly transparent. It remained for another greatpassion, perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in which Iwas trying so hard to dance, and free me forever from the bonds which Ihad spent so much time and trouble to involve myself in. But I was notto know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the mean time Ikept on as I had been going, and worked out my deliverance in thepredestined way. What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness. I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, andunfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness. 

X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES

My father was very fond of Byron, and I must before this have known thathis poems were in our bookcase. While we were still in Columbus I beganto read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped meto a truer and freer ideal. I read "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, "and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm. These would, perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism formethodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic anddecasyllabic couplets was painful to me. The Spencerian stanza, with itsrich variety of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut "ChildeHarold" from me, and whenever I found a poem in any book which did notrhyme its second line with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all. 

This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay inColumbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned, and my father's employment ceased. He tried to find some editorial workon the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, andit was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it. We hadnothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money wouldavail us. This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in thenortheastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves onemoonlight night of early summer. The Lake Shore Railroad then ended atAshtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up fromthe station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled theomnibus, rode. We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to beanywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even sonear to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again. We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at theMills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially avillage peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it. I mustown that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in SouthernOhio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look backit still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have everknown, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elmsand maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass-bordered, sandy streets between them. The hotel, where we rejoined ourfamily, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the townpump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it. 

The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetlyromantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of itscharm. It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of theplain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village withoutbeing deserted. 

XI. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, wasthen beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has movedit. I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era, and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, as every one else did. YetI cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the otherbooks that I had loved intensely. I felt its greatness when I read itfirst, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and moreclearly that it was a very great novel. With certain obvious lapses inits art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhapsprimitive, the book is still a work of art. I knew this, in a measurethen, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I wasbeginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerfulappeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it. I couldnot say why this was so. Why does the young man's fancy, when it lightlyturns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that? There seems nomore reason for one than for the other. 

Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong interest of whatis still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed my tribute of tears, and wenton my way. I did not try to write a story of slaver, as I might verywell have done; I did not imitate either the make or the manner of Mrs. Stowe's romance; I kept on at my imitation of Pope's pastorals, which Idare say I thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such a poet asI meant to be. I did this, as I must have felt then, at some personalrisk of a supernatural kind, for my studies were apt to be prolonged intothe night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and a certainghost, which I had every reason to fear, might very well have visited thesmall room given me to write in. There was a story, which I shrank fromverifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung himself in it, butI do not know to this day whether it was true or not. The doubt did notprevent him from dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and manya time I shunned the sight of this problematical suicide by keeping myeyes fastened on the book before me. It was a very simple device, butperfectly effective, as I think any one will find who employs it in likecircumstances; and I would really like to commend it to growing boystroubled as I was then. 

I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he took himself out of theworld, if he really did so, or if he ever was in it; but I am sure thatmy passion for Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have beenpowerful indeed to carry me through dangers of that kind. I suspect thatthe strongest proof of their existence was the gloomy and ruinous look ofthe house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and the only onethat was for rent there. We went into it because we must, and we were toleave it as soon as we could find a better. But before this happened weleft Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few possibilities I haveenjoyed of seeing a ghost on his own ground, as it were. 

I was not sorry, for I believe I never went in or came out of the place, by day or by night, without a shudder, more or less secret; and at least, now, we should be able to get another house. 

XII. OSSIAN

Very likely the reading of Ossian had something to do with my morbidanxieties. I had read Byron's imitation of him before that, and admiredit prodigiously, and when my father got me the book--as usual I did notknow where or how he got it--not all the tall forms that moved before theeyes of haunted bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me fromit. There were certain outline illustrations in it, which were very goodin the cold Flaxman manner, and helped largely to heighten thefascination of the poems for me. They did not supplant the pastorals ofPope in my affections, and they were never the grand passion with me thatPope's poems had been. 

I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, and I dare say they werenot windier and mistier than the original. At the same time I read theliterature of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpherson anunquestioning faith. I should have made very short work of any one whohad impugned the authenticity of the poems, but happily there was no onewho held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I knew, or whocared for Ossian, or had even heard of him. This saved me a great dealof heated controversy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in manyangry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, who had dared to say in theirtime that the poems of Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard, handed down from father to son, and taken from the lips of old women inHighland huts, as Macpherson claimed. 

In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of the eighteenth centuryin which these curious frauds found polite acceptance all over Europe, and I think yet that they were really worthier of acceptance than most ofthe artificialities that then passed for poetry. There was a light ofnature in them, and this must have been what pleased me, so long-shut upto the studio-work of Pope. But strangely enough I did not falter in myallegiance to him, or realize that here in this free form was adeliverance, if I liked, from the fetters and manacles which I had beenat so much pains to fit myself with. Probably nothing would then havepersuaded me to put them off permanently, or to do more than lay themaside for the moment while I tried that new stop and that new step. 

I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessnesswas really better than formality. Something, it seems to me, may becontained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everythingspills and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect of ourAmerican Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies. He had great moments, beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations, and a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but he had nobounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the casing air, but he was oftenas vague and intangible. I cannot say how long my passion for Ossianlasted, but not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in thetime following our removal from Ashtabula to the county seat atJefferson. I kept on with Pope, I kept on with Cervantes, I kept on withIrving, but I suppose there was really not substance enough in Ossian tofeed my passion, and it died of inanition. 

XIII. SHAKESPEARE

The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been nonebefore, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events sofilling that they left little room for any other excitement but that ofgetting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going toparties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, anddances, and all the other pleasures in which that community seemed toindulge beyond any other we had known. The village was smaller than theone we had just left, but it was by no means less lively, and I thinkthat for its size and time and place it had an uncommon share of what hassince been called culture. The intellectual experience of the people wasmainly theological and political, as it was everywhere in that day, butthere were several among them who had a real love for books, and whenthey met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to dispute of theinspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens andThackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron. There were lawstudents who read "Noctes Ambrosianae, " the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's"Festus, " as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a publiclibrary in that village of six hundred people, small but very wellselected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free toall. It seems to me now that the people met there oftener than they doin most country places, and rubbed their wits together more, but this maybe one of those pleasing illusions of memory which men in later life aresubject to. 

I insist upon nothing, but certainly the air was friendlier to the tastesI had formed than any I had yet known, and I found a wider if not deepersympathy with them. There was one of our printers who liked books, andwe went through 'Don Quixote' together again, and through the 'Conquestof Granada', and we began to read other things of Irving's. There was avery good little stock of books at the village drugstore, and among thosethat began to come into my hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, strayvolumes of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of Thackeray. I believe I had no money to buy them, but there was an open account, or a comity, between the printer and the bookseller, and I must have beenallowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books. 

Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave myheart to any of them. Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, withoutnotice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too, and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together. Printers inthe old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and Isuppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature ofthings. I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began toread him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition ofours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of"Hamlet, " out of "The Tempest, " out of "Macbeth, " out of "Richard III. , "out of "Midsummer-Night's Dream, " out of the "Comedy of Errors, " out of"Julius Caesar, " out of "Measure for Measure, " out of "Romeo and Juliet, "out of "Two Gentlemen of Verona. "

These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or atleast at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were theHistories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaffappeared. This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy. I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym. I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was apersonal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him: blackguardfor blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard. Perhaps Iflatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, and entered into the author'swonderfully humorous conception of him. There is no such perfectconception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception isall the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice ofFalstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry companion. I am not sure but I should put him besideHamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artisticcompleteness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least hishumor. 

As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, andwould not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little. I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be ashappy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again inthe "Merry Wives of Windsor, " though at the bottom of my heart I felt thedifference. I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, inthat Ercles vein which is so easily caught. This was after a year or twoof the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which hasbeen my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved. My worshipof Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with noearlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myselfsaying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of aplanet. 

There ought certainly to be some bound beyond which the cult of favoriteauthors should not be suffered to go. I should keep well within thelimit of that early excess now, and should not liken the creation ofShakespeare to the creation of any heavenly body bigger, say, than one ofthe nameless asteroids that revolve between Mars and Jupiter. Even thisI do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I think that in thecase of all great men we like to let our wonder mount and mount, till itleaves the truth behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast. A wise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare because he is alreadygreat than it will magnify any less man. But we are loaded down with theresponsibility of finding him all we have been told he is, and we must dothis or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of sensibility. Atthe same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us toexpect this or that of him, and more truly his friends. I wish the timemight come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, assincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of ourcontemporaries. The course of criticism is towards this, but when Ibegan to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he wasnot at every moment great. I should no more have thought of questioningthe poetry of any passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holywrit. All the same, I knew very well that much which I read was reallypoor stuff, and the persons and positions were often preposterous. It isa great pity that the ardent youth should not be permitted and evenencouraged to say this to himself, instead of falling slavishly before agreat author and accepting him at all points as infallible. Shakespeareis fine enough and great enough when all the possible detractions aremade, and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer and greaterfor the loss of half his work, though if I had heard any one say such athing then I should have held him as little better than one of thewicked. 

Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my way to Shakespeareearlier, though it is rather strange that I had not. I knew him on thestage in most of the plays that used to be given. I had shared theconscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; manytimes, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked and sufferedwith Richard III. 

Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever broughtmore to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to thatof seeing the curtain rise on "Hamlet, " and hearing the guards begin totalk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself withoutany material embodiment! It is the same in the whole range of his plays:they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. Theyare neither worse nor better because of the theatre. They are so greatthat it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it totheir own proportions and endue it with something of their own livingforce. They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so whollythat you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one whotalks importantly to you. I have heard people say that they would rathernot see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agreewith them. He can better afford to be played ill than any other man thatever wrote. Whoever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who isspeaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I cantrace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them. 

The effect is so equal from either experience that I am not sure as tosome plays whether I read them or saw them first, though as to most ofthem I am aware that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth mustbe told there is still one of his plays that I have not read, and Ibelieve it is esteemed one of his greatest. There are several, with allmy reading of others, that I had not read till within a few years; and Ido not think I should have lost much if I, had never read "Pericles" and"Winter's Tale. "

In those early days I had no philosophized preference for reality inliterature, and I dare say if I had been asked, I should have said thatthe plays of Shakespeare where reality is least felt were the mostimaginative; that is the belief of the puerile critics still; but Isuppose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made the greatHistories so delightful to me, and that rendered "Macbeth" and "Hamlet"vital in their very ghosts and witches. There I found a worldappreciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander thanthe poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of, and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home andcitizen in it as where I actually lived. There I found joy and sorrowmixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing foritself, and not for some other thing. Then, I suppose it was theinterfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious andfriendly. I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered inme by my father's way of looking at life, and had certainly beenflattered by my intimacy with Cervantes; but whether this was so or not, I know that I liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages inShakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the comic was closest. Perhaps in a time when self-consciousness is so widespread, it is theonly thing that saves us from ourselves. I am sure that without it Ishould not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare'sHistories, where I used to spend so much of my leisure, with such a senseof his own intimate companionship there as I had nowhere else. I feltthat he must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and that in hisgreat heart he had room for a boy willing absolutely to lose himself inhim, and be as one of his creations. 

It was the time of life with me when a boy begins to be in love with thepretty faces that then peopled this world so thickly, and I did not failto fall in love with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I livedequally. I cannot tell whether it was because I found them like myideals here, or whether my ideals acquired merit because of theirlikeness to the realities there; they appeared to be all of one degree ofenchanting loveliness; but upon the whole I must have preferred them inthe plays, because it was so much easier to get on with them there; I wasalways much better dressed there; I was vastly handsomer; I was notbashful or afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to contendwith here. 

That friend of mine, the printer whom I have mentioned, was one with mein a sense of the Shakespearean humor, and he dwelt with me in the sortof double being I had in those two worlds. We took the book into thewoods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that remained to us whenwe had finished our work, and on the shining Sundays of the warm, latespring, the early, warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes orheaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is mixed for me with arapturous sense of the out-door beauty of this lovely natural world. We read turn about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as weread the drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air withsuch orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling streamafforded. It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on usfrom the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolongeditself with unbroken sweetness from one world to the other. 

But I think it takes two to read in the open air. The pressure of wallsis wanted to keep the mind within itself when one reads alone; otherwiseit wanders and disperses itself through nature. When my friend left usfor want of work in the office, or from the vagarious impulse which is sostrong in our craft, I took my Shakespeare no longer to the woods andfields, but pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little spacewhich I had for my study, under the stairs at home. There was a deskpushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling eloped down tomeet behind it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good light onthe writing-leaf of my desk. This was my workshop for six or sevenyears, and it was not at all a bad one; I have had many since that werenot so much to the purpose; and though I would not live my life over, Iwould willingly enough have that little study mine again. But it is gonean utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that Iwas fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest mein the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with verylittle hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave wayunder no burden, before no obstacle. Long ago changes were made in thelow, rambling house which threw my little closet into a larger room; butthis was not until after I had left it many years; and as long as Iremained a part of that dear and simple home it was my place to read, towrite, to muse, to dream. 

I sometimes wish in these later years that I had spent less time in it, or that world of books which it opened into; that I had seen more of theactual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it better. I mightso have amassed more material for after use in literature, but I had tofit myself to use it, and I suppose that this was what I was doing, in myown way, and by such light as I had. I often toiled wrongly andfoolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted. Somestrength, I hope, was coming to me, even from my mistakes, and though Iwent over ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been leftso much to find the way alone, yet I was not standing still, and some ofthe things that I then wished to do I have done. I do not mind owningthat in others I have failed. For instance, I have never surpassedShakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to do so; but then, itis to be remembered that very few other people have surpassed him, andthat it would not have been easy. 

XIV. IK MARVEL

My ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its height when I was betweensixteen and seventeen years old, for I fancy when I began to formulate myadmiration, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I was lesssimply impassioned than at some earlier time. At any rate, I am surethat I did not proclaim his planetary importance in creation until I wasat least nineteen. But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped ata single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of my idolatry, and Ibowed the knee to them all in a devotion which, if it was not of onequality, was certainly impartial. While I was reading, and thinking, andliving Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not see how therecould have been room in my consciousness for anything else, there seem tohave been half a dozen other divinities there, great and small, whom Ihave some present difficulty in distinguishing. I kept Irving, andGoldsmith, and Cervantes on their old altars, but I added new ones, andthese I translated from the contemporary: literary world quite as oftenas from the past. I am rather glad that among them was the gentle andkindly Ik Marvel, whose 'Reveries of a Bachelor' and whose 'Dream Life'the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture whichwould not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people ofthis. The books have survived the span of immortality fixed by ouramusing copyright laws, and seem now, when any pirate publisher mayplunder their author, to have a new life before them. Perhaps this isordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit bythem, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so oftenshows. 

I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I supposeit was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning toread, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and Icould not say why I thought it would be very 'comme il faut' to likethem. Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbingshoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of itspowder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be ofit, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do itnow. But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends, and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow ofpurpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from theirsentiment. I dare say I should find their pose now a littleold-fashioned. I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs andstarts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I amsure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of alltimes and always the latest wear. Whatever it was, it sufficed to win myheart, and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and mostpathetic in it. I read 'Dream Life' first--though the 'Reveries of aBachelor' was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book--and 'Dream Life' remains first in my affections. I have now littlenotion what it was about, but I love its memory. The book is associatedespecially in my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when Icarried it into the woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter ofemotion over its page. I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember howthe light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of thefoliage. My friend was away by this time on one of his several absencesin the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevantmelancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book. Ibegan to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airsand graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvelin the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with hisShakespearean prayer:

 "To Milan let me hear from thee by letters, Of thy success in love, and what news else Betideth here in absence of thy friend; And I likewise will visit thee with mine. "

Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our littlevillage; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the realplaces would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else inthe situation was really this or that. Heaven knows what gaudysentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travestyhad kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough. My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story, in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, forthat was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marveleither, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helpedmyself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was allvery well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the futuresufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as Iwent on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it. Mymaterial gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered andthreatened to perish on my hands. To crown my misery there grew up animpatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to meone day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say thathe did not think that story amounted to much. I did not think so either, but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortaleffect of the stroke I do not know. Somehow I managed to bring thewretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past. Slowlyit seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is alwaysthis consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that theworld's memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it willnot keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will itlong dwell upon your defeats. But that experience was really terrible. It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one's self in battlewithout the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action, or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appearin. I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame andanguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badlyconceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken. If it were notfor what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story onthe same lines in the future. 

XV. DICKENS

What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at thesame time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing aboutthe reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detachthemselves one from another. This may be so because my reading was muchmore multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was readingalways two or three authors at a time. I think Macaulay a littleantedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of thatmasterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as tothe times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail tofall under his spell. 

This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in brokenhealth the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends. It seemedfor a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of theafternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down tomy books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until thefamily were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that Ishould like to do it. The most that can be said in defence of such athing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it wasinevitable. If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it inthat way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than Iwanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing. I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I wastrying to do, except as a means to other things. As far as my pleasurewent, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have beenwandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under atree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort. But there wasmuch more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aimto achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped andaimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know verydistinctly what either was. As I look back at the endeavor of those daysmuch of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering. I can seethat doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sortof helpless force. 

I studied Latin because I believed that I should read the Latin authors, and I suppose I got as much of the language as most school-boys of myage, but I never read any Latin author but Cornelius Nepos. I studiedGreek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter of the Testament, and an ode of Anacreon. Then I left it, not because I did not mean to gofarther, or indeed stop short of reading all Greek literature, butbecause that friend of mine and I talked it over and decided that I couldgo on with Greek any time, but I had better for the present study German, with the help of a German who had come to the village. Apparently I wascarrying forward an attack on French at the same time, for I distinctlyrecall my failure to enlist with me an old gentleman who had once lived along time in France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent from. Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhapsbecause he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keepany of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he soabounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I wasleft to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eightyears later. At the same time I was reading Spanish, more or less, but neither wisely nor too well. Having had so little help in mystudies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even such as I might haveavailed myself of, without shame, in books, and I would not read anySpanish author with English notes. I would have him in an edition whollySpanish from beginning to end, and I would fight my way through himsingle-handed, with only such aid as I must borrow from a lexicon. 

I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boywho was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going todo that. In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; hehad no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever hasthat. Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle, undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as hehad was toughened by the prolonged stress. It could be said, of course, that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could havebeen well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of Englishliterature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; butthen, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless. I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from themthan it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making knownto me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek haveenabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I shouldhave had otherwise. 

But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture. What is certain isthat for the present my studies, without method and without stint, beganto tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner ofhypochondriacal fears. These finally resolved themselves into one, incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue, or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogetherand filled my morbid mind with the images of another's creation. 

In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the readingI had listened to. But now I devoured his books one after another asfast as I could read them. I plunged from the heart of one to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me. Some ofthem remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so thatwhen I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow. But I havesince read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinkingDickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived inthe days of the mighty magician. I fancy the readers who have come tohim since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have littlenotion how great it was. In that time he colored the parlance of theEnglish-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talentattempting fiction. While his glamour lasted it was no more possible fora young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poetto escape writing Tennyson. I admired other authors more; I loved themmore, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fictionI was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially inhis way. 

All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was awarethat it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert mysense of this against him in matters of character and structure. Tothese I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of theirdivine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius inthese kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted withoutsacrilege. But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, Isuffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind abouthis style, which I thought bad. 

I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from, and who might almost have come out of his books. He lived in Dickens ina measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely musthave brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief. He forgave it, no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on allother points. He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had cometo America early in life, and had lived in our village many years, without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of acontrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social. He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church wheneverit was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while hedisputed the authority of the Bible with all comers. He had become acitizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency onlyby voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to theinstitution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the Americanname. From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage andcynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him. I knownothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, orwhat his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from ahouse-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music. He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them withhis own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate thechurches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could makethem. He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he satbefore it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, hisnoble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture ofhis music. He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in everyfibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he wasa delightful companion. 

After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we tooklong, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore ofliterature. He must have been nearly three times my age, but that didnot matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there isneither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor. He had reada great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and wasalways coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed. He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and whenI praised Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he couldonly accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference. Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upperten thousand. His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure thatit was altogether mistaken. 

There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters thereader into the belief that he is better than other people. I do notmean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens, but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked himbetter; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finerporcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particulardifference in the various liquors poured into them. In Dickens thevirtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principlewhich sniffs, in his reader. The base of his work is the whole breadthand depth of humanity itself. It is helplessly elemental, but it is notthe less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations ofcharacter, character affected by the interests and passions rather thanthe tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moodsthrough them. I do not know that in the whole range of his work he oncesuffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through anysocial accident, or except for some moral cause. This makes him very fitreading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good fromhim. His view of the world and of society, though it was very littlephilosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it wasmost impossible. 

We are just beginning to discern that certain conceptions of ourrelations to our fellow-men, once formulated in generalities which metwith a dramatic acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by itas mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, and that if theyhave ever seemed false it was because of the false conditions in which westill live. Equality and fraternity, these are the ideals which oncemoved the world, and then fell into despite and mockery, as unrealities;but now they assert themselves in our hearts once more. 

Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often urged them, these idealsmark the whole tendency of his fiction, and they are what endear him tothe heart, and will keep him dear to it long after many a cunningerartificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness. I do not pretendthat I perceived the full scope of his books, but I was aware of it inthe finer sense which is not consciousness. While I read him, I was in aworld where the right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in thisworld, and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe willyet attend it in our daily life, untrammelled by social convention oreconomic circumstance. In that world of his, in the ideal world, towhich the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the showsof things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right. Of course it was in a way all crude enough, and was already contradictedby experience in the small sphere of my own being; but nevertheless itwas true with that truth which is at the bottom of things, and I washappy in it. I could not fail to love the mind which conceived it, andmy worship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet given anywriter. I did not establish with him that one-sided understanding whichI had with Cervantes and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was notpossible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the things he had saidagainst us, and the more hurt because I felt that they were often sojust. But I was for the time entirely his, and I could not have wishedto write like any one else. 

I do not pretend that the spell I was under was wholly of a moral orsocial texture. For the most part I was charmed with him because he wasa delightful story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me hotand cold; because he could make me laugh and cry, and stop my pulse andbreath at will. There seemed an inexhaustible source of humor and pathosin his work, which I now find choked and dry; I cannot laugh any more atPickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Nell or Paul Dombey; theirjokes, their griefs, seemed to me to be turned on, and to have amechanical action. But beneath all is still the strong drift of agenuine emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly, the unfortunate. In all that vast range of fiction, there is nothingthat tells for the strong, because they are strong, against the weak, nothing that tells for the haughty against the humble, nothing that tellsfor wealth against poverty. The effect of Dickens is purely democratic, and however contemptible he found our pseudo-equality, he was more trulydemocratic than any American who had yet written fiction. I suppose itwas our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctiveexpression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded our silly vanity sokeenly through our love when he told us the truth about our horrible shamof a slave-based freedom. But at any rate the democracy is there in hiswork more than he knew perhaps, or would ever have known, or everrecognized by his own life. In fact, when one comes to read the story ofhis life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of havingonce put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his motherfor suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was theslave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highestfunction of his fiction to help destroy. 

I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens were not verydiscriminating. I liked 'David Copperfield, ' and 'Barnaby Rudge, ' and'Bleak House, ' and I still like them; but I do not think I liked themmore than 'Dombey & Son, ' and 'Nicholas Nickleby, ' and the 'PickwickPapers, ' which I cannot read now with any sort of patience, not to speakof pleasure. I liked 'Martin Chuzzlewit, ' too, and the other day I reada great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the passages thatreferred to America, though it was surcharged in the serious moods, andcaricatured in the comic. The English are always inadequate observers;they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alienpeople; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look ofour life in certain aspects. His report of it was clumsy and farcical;but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught thenote of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality, and this was not altogether lost in his mocking horse-play. 

I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of Dickens because of it. I believe I was rather more willing to accept it as a faithfulportraiture then than I should be now; and I certainly never made anyquestion of it with my friend the organ-builder. 'Martin Chuzzlewit' wasa favorite book with him, and so was the 'Old Curiosity Shop. ' No doubta fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music madehim like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he wouldhave disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it wasa purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and hergrandfather. He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from bothbooks, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered intremulous emotion on the periods he loved. He would catch the volume upanywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness-shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of acountry village, in those days before the war, when people had all thetime there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose toread. One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the'Christmas Carol' in the Court-house, and people came from all about tohear him. 

He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering inthe saddest way. Several years before his death money fell to hisfamily, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vainto make himself at home. He never ceased to pine for the village he hadleft, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces;and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed, and he could come back no more. He was never reconciled to the change, and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened anhereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him. Off. My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of thisquaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before Iknew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of theother. 

XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER

Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom theorgan-builder and I were both fond. This was the young poet who lookedafter the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrotepoetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with suchstrength as he found in the disease preying upon him. He must have beenfar gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollectionof a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan, and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away, "Like wax in the fire, Like snow in the sun. "

People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragileand pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping orseeking to escape it. As the end drew near he left his employment andwent home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to seehim once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last. My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit passcheerfully with our wonted talk about books. Only at parting, when hetook my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, "I suppose my disease isprogressing, " with the patience he always showed. 

I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was verydistinct or very great. It was slight and graceful rather, I fancy, and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known, but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature, and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I cameinto appreciation of several authors whom I had not known, or had notcared for before. There could not have been many shelves of books inthat store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all beforeI began to buy them. For the most part, I do not think it occurred to methat they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent tothe commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them. 

I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found inhis charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond ofDr. Holmes's poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each representedin his slender stock by some distinctive work. There were several strayvolumes of Thackeray's minor writings, and I still have the 'YellowplushPapers' in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton'sPopular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in thefamous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant ofexcellence in the literature it covered. Besides these there werestandard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, fromwornout plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth inthis shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the "Excursion" init, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it isvery right and fit to have read the "Excursion. " To be honest, it wasvery hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I haveever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, Ido not suppose that any one ever did. I tried hard enough to likeeverything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I oughtto like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual andmoral inferiority in me. My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbledinto the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately beengiven in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in suchnewspaper report as I had of them. So, my preoccupations were all infavor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience tolike Wordsworth. If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the faultremains very much what it first was. 

I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not thinkthat I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I amsure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him. After sufferingonce through the "Excursion" I did not afflict myself with it again, but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancyit is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fondof. Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine;on the other hand, neither was Byron. Him, too, I liked in passages andin certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read himthroughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try toimitate Wordsworth. 

Those lectures of Lowell's had a great influence with me, and I tried tolike whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young peoplewhen they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched;they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the criticadmires. From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking;but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can onlyavail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective. When I readLowell's praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and asoften as I have tried I have found it impossible. It was not so withChaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted inthose lectures, and in Chambers's 'Encyclopaedia of English Literature, 'which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder. 

In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read himwith that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembledhim in a certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not allege this asthe reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like eitherof them. Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannotquite account for one's passions in either; what is certain is, I likedChaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinitybetween reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to nameit, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earthin human life. By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could findin the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made aclerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me thepoet's works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with aglossary. It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and liftedmy heart with a sense of noble companionship. 

I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet'stime, which I found often enough in the poet's verse, as well as thegoodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certainmisgiving about it. He repeated to me the librarian's question as towhether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the handsof a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me. It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and Isuppose he had not given me the book without due reflection. Probably hereasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad wouldbecome known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better knowthat he knew it. 

The streams of filth flow down through the ages in literature, whichsometimes seems little better than an open sewer, and, as I have said, I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious and noisomechannels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial, and sofar the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say. The worst oflewd literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in thelife, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is thedanger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked. Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucerwas probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am notgoing to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy wouldbe the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall betaken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praisehim. The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of ameans of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, andeven falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects justwhat it is, and not to feign it otherwise. I am not ready to say thatthe harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and thefilthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it doesnot corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader'stongue and pen to sin in kind. 

I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the bestin him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to lookfor the best, and to know it when I had found it. Of course I began tocopy him. That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind;they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but Istudied his verse, and imitated a stanza which I found in some of histhings and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness andsweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure wasobsolete, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier thanthe imported analogues that had taken the place of the phrases he used. 

I began to employ in my own work the archaic words that I fancied most, which was futile and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for thesimpler Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad. Of course, being left so much as I was to my own whim in such things, I could notkeep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives which wasnothing short of a craze. Some half-bred critic whom I had read made mebelieve that English could be written without them, and had better bewritten so, and I did not escape from this lamentable error until I hadproduced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prosewholly composed of monosyllables. I suspect now that I did not alwaysstop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as anyof the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short. 

The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this exercise happilycould not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless fromthe beginning. Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know, as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and inthe revolt from the slavish bondage I took upon myself I did not go sofar as to plunge into any very wild polysyllabic excesses. I still likethe little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the bigone, but I honor above all the word that says the thing. At the sametime I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that Icannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, andrather than use one of those detested vocables, even when I perceive thatit would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other. I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it. 

An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly inpoint was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity ofdiction in phrases of as "learned length and thundering sound, " as any hewould have had me shun, and who deplored the Latinistic English ofJohnson in terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity andronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoidedhis medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavoras vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived. It was nonethe less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificedmyself to it with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long afterI read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens orChaucer. 

XVII. MACAULAY

One of the many characters of the village was the machinist who had hisshop under our printing-office when we first brought our newspaper to theplace, and who was just then a machinist because he was tired of beingmany other things, and had not yet made up his mind what he should benext. He could have been whatever he turned his agile intellect and hiscunning hand to; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, and Ibelieve an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer; he talked and wrotebrilliantly, and he was one of the group that nightly disposed of everymanner of theoretical and practical question at the drug-store; it wasquite indifferent to him which side he took; what he enjoyed was themental exercise. He was in consumption, as so many were in that region, and he carbonized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in theliquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had finally prevailedover the consumption, but it had itself become a seated vice; that wasmany years since, and it is many years since he died. 

He must have been known to me earlier, but I remember him first as heswam vividly into my ken, with a volume of Macaulay's essays in his hand, one day. Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing-officeto expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism of an editor in aneighboring city, who had adapted with the change of names and a word ortwo here and there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to thedenunciation of a brother editor. It was a very simple-hearted fraud, and it was all done with an innocent trust in the popular ignorance whichnow seems to me a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced, and merited the public punishment which the discoverer inflicted by meansof what journalists call the deadly parallel column. The effect oughtlogically to have been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was reallynothing of the kind. He simply ignored the exposure, and the comments ofthe other city papers, and in the process of time he easily lived downthe memory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his profession. 

But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listenedas the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill whichlost itself in the interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author. Those facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the finestthings I had yet known in literature, and I borrowed the book and read itthrough. Then I borrowed another volume of Macaulay's essays, andanother and another, till I had read them every one. It was like a longdebauch, from which I emerged with regret that it should ever end. 

I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the machinist had in hislibrary, but it was useless; neither Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlylecould console me; I sighed for more Macaulay and evermore Macaulay. Iread his History of England, and I could measurably console myself withthat, but only measurably; and I could not go back to the essays and readthem again, for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly that Ihad left nothing unenjoyed in them. I used to talk with the machinistabout them, and with the organ-builder, and with my friend the printer, but no one seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I did, andthat I should now be quite unable to account for. 

Once more I had an author for whom I could feel a personal devotion, whomI could dream of and dote upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy inmany an impassioned revery. I do not think T. B. Macaulay would reallyhave liked it; I dare say he would not have valued the friendship of thesort of a youth I was, but in the conditions he was helpless, and Ipoured out my love upon him without a rebuff. Of course I reformed myprose style, which had been carefully modelled upon that of Goldsmith andIrving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quicksentences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words, whichhe prescribed, but did not practise. As for his notions of literature, Isimply accepted them with the feeling that any question of them wouldhave been little better than blasphemy. 

For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other criticism; he made itseem pale, and poor, and weak; and he blunted my sense to subtlerexcellences than I found in him. I think this was a pity, but it was athing not to be helped, like a great many things that happen to our hurtin life; it was simply inevitable. How or when my frenzy for him beganto abate I cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have wanedrapidly, for after no great while I found myself feeling the charm ofquite different minds, as fully as if his had never enslaved me. Icannot regret that I enjoyed him so keenly as I did; it was in a way agenerous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly whatever way hethought, I do not think yet that he swayed me in any very wrong way. Hewas a bright and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, itis to be said of him that his worst fault was only to have stopped shortof the finest truth in art, in morals, in politics. 

XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS

What remained to me from my love of Macaulay was a love of criticism, and I read almost as much in criticism as I read in poetry and historyand fiction. It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the villagecharacters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe; I do not know just how, but it must have been in some exchange of books; he preferredmetaphysics. At any rate I fell greedily upon them, and I read with noless zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-mindedcriticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes. As usual, I acceptedthem implicitly, and it was not till long afterwards that I understoodhow worthless they were. 

I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of literature, andits celebration of the monkey and the goat in us, is the spectacle suchcriticism affords of the tigerish play of satire. It is monstrous thatfor no offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and themistake of his powers in that direction, a writer should become the preyof some ferocious wit, and that his tormentor should achieve credit byhis lightness and ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think howalluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader emulous of suchcredit, and eager to achieve it. Because I admired these barbarities ofPoe's, I wished to irritate them, to spit some hapless victim on my ownspear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh. This is as faras possible from the criticism that enlightens and ennobles, but it isstill the ideal of most critics, deny it as they will; and because it isthe ideal of most critics criticism still remains behind all the otherliterary arts. 

I am glad to remember that at the same time I exulted in these ferocitiesI had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer andfiner work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and LeighHunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix. I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarifyand formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done;Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and on every hand I wasreaching out for light that should enable me to place in literary historythe authors I knew and loved. 

I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got at the four greatEnglish reviews, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the London Quarterly, and the North British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood'sMagazine. We got them in the American editions in payment for printingthe publisher's prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy, and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without havingto accuse myself of exaggeration. The love of literature, and the hopeof doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of allother interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all otherthings were as shadows. I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which wasthen filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of ourFugitive Slave Law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where thegreat struggle between the two great principles in our nationality wasbeginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these thingswere more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interestin literature. If I was not to live by it, I was somehow to live for it. 

If I thought of taking up some other calling it was as a means only;literature was always the end I had in view, immediately or finally. I did not see how it was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost allthe literary men in the country had other professions; they were editors, lawyers, or had public or private employments; or they were men ofwealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen infiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day whenpeople wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now. But I kept blindly at my studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for, as I have said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, and Iwas beginning to see authors in their proportion to one another, and tothe body of literature. 

The English reviews were of great use to me in this; I made a rule ofreading each one of them quite through. To be sure I often broke thisrule, as people are apt to do with rules of the kind; it was not possiblefor a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to English politics andeconomics, but I do not think I left any paper upon a literary topicunread, and I did read enough politics, especially in Blackwood's, to beof Tory opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and they did notexact of me any change in regard to the slavery question. 

XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE

I suppose I might almost class my devotion to English reviews among myliterary passions, but it was of very short lease, not beyond a year ortwo at the most. In the midst of it I made my first and only essay asidefrom the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart from it. After sometalk with my father it was decided, mainly by myself, I suspect, that Ishould leave the printing-office and study law; and it was arranged withthe United States Senator who lived in our village, and who was at homefrom Washington for the summer, that I was to come into his office. TheSenator was by no means to undertake my instruction himself; his nephew, who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow-student, and we wereto keep each other up to the work, and to recite to each other, until wethought we had enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test ourfitness for admission to the bar. 

This was the custom in that day and place, as I suppose it is still inmost parts of the country. We were to be fitted for practice in thecourts, not only by our reading, but by a season of pettifogging beforejustices of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small shrinkingof my shy spirit; but what really troubled me most, and was always thegrain of sand between my teeth, was Blackstone's confession of his ownoriginal preference for literature, and his perception that the law was"a jealous mistress, " who would suffer no rival in his affections. I agreed with him that I could not go through life with a dividedinterest; I must give up literature or I must give up law. I not onlyconsented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt to carry onthe reading I had loved, and to keep at the efforts I was always makingto write something in verse or prose, at night, after studying law allday. The strain was great enough when I had merely the work in theprinting-office; but now I came home from my Blackstone mentally fagged, and I could not take up the authors whom at the bottom of my heart Iloved so much better. I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal daywhen I found that confession of Blackstone's, my whole being turned fromthe "jealous mistress" to the high minded muses: I had not only to goback to literature, but I had also to go back to the printing-office. I did not regret it, but I had made my change of front in the public eye, and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage with my fellow-citizens; as for the Senator, whose office I had forsaken, I met him nowand then in the street, without trying to detain him, and once when hecame to the printing-office for his paper we encountered at a point wherewe could not help speaking. He looked me over in my general effect ofbase mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only toanswer him I had, and our conference ended. It was a terrible moment forme, because I knew that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, whichif it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no way to the WhiteHouse. I suppose now that he thought I had merely gone back to my trade, and so for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose that he judgedmy case narrow-mindedly, and I ought to have had the courage to have theaffair out with him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we hadsometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read them as well as I, and it ought not to have been impossible for me to be frank with him;but as yet I could not trust any one with my secret hope of some dayliving for literature, although I had already lived for nothing else. I preferred the disadvantage which I must be at in his eyes, and in theeyes of most of my fellow-citizens; I believe I had the applause of theorgan-builder, who thought the law no calling for me. 

In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, wasas nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I couldhave suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a professionand going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I hadthrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some peoplethought I was a fool to do that. No one, indeed, could have imagined therapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when Idropped the law from them. Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could haveconceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reachedI was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and Imyself felt the difference. My reading had given me criterions differentfrom those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flattermyself that my calling would have been thought one of great socialdignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living. My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was asnob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt itan honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is theframe of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands. I do notknow how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think itwas through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to aknowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine. 

XX. THACKERAY

It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray's books first. He knewtheir literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but Ibelieve he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them. He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect inme; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste. In a certainmeasure he was right. 

What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates himwith Thackeray. With his air of looking down on the highest, andconfidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of thescorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too, is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors heaffects to despise. His sentimentality is also dear to the heart ofyouth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easypathos. Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is takenwith that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there ishardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a greatliterary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque liferight and left from the literature always at his command. At the sametime he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his ownsimple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues. It is so pleasing to one's 'vanity, and so safe, to be of the master'sside when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in thesystem of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long asone does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from. 

I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, and expose theirwicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose todo away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it hasbeen, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all. He appeared tome one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided the shamsof society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, wasnecessarily a sham; when he made a mock of snobbishness I did not knowbut snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured byridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shallhave snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snuband crawl. I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them fortrying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be fromthe selfish motives which underlie our economic life. But I did not knowthese things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart toThackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refugefrom the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it. He had the effectof taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendidindifference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could not see thatsham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all. 

I think it was 'Pendennis' I began with, and I lived in the book to thevery last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to thesmallest detail. I am still not sure but it is the author's greatestbook, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he haswritten, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to readquite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twentytimes. 

After reading 'Pendennis' I went to 'Vanity Fair, ' which I now think thepoorest of Thackeray's novels--crude, heavy-handed, caricatured. Aboutthe same time I revelled in the romanticism of 'Henry Esmond, ' with itspseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwroughtideal of gentlemanhood and honor. It was long before I was duly revoltedby Esmond's transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whomhe is successively enamoured of. I believe this unpleasant andpreposterous affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I donot mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and ifI could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood tobe in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune. The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the'Spectator' then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, andSteele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will's, who arepresented evanescently in the romance. The intensely literary keeping, as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highestfascination for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts tothe reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it, was what helped turn my head. 

This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writing. He is himselfforever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tellsyou it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while. Itis not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; hismeek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glintof mundane splendor, in his lowliest. He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness, and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most ofthose who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable. He has a good word forthe virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit onthe head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence andpride of birth, and purse-pride. But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in theworld and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends. 

I should be far from blaming him for all this. He was of his time; butsince his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a visionwhich makes his seem rather purblind. He must have been immensely inadvance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people thenused to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which wecould hardly find in it now. It was the age of intense individualism, when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as agentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon yourcharacter, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thingbecause it was wrong, but because it was mean. It was romanticismcarried into the region of morals. But I had very little concern then asto that sort of error. 

I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have convenientlystooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray'snovels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least withmyself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much. Itmust be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of thefeeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able toenjoy such a fine sort. No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of somekind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuringThackeray for his effect upon me in this way. No doubt the effect wasalready in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it. 

In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety ofhis minor works--his 'Yellowplush, ' and 'Letters of Mr. Brown, ' and'Adventures of Major Gahagan, ' and the 'Paris Sketch Book, ' and the'Irish Sketch Book, ' and the 'Great Hoggarty Diamond, ' and the 'Book ofSnobs, ' and the 'English Humorists, ' and the 'Four Georges, ' and all themultitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures--as in the spaciousdesigns of his huge novels, the 'Newcomes, ' and 'Pendennis, ' and 'VanityFair, ' and 'Henry Esmond, ' and 'Barry Lyndon. '

There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, andstill seems, the farthest reach of the author's great talent. It iscouched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which nextto the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself withsuch flexibility to the purpose of the author. In 'Barry Lyndon' thereis imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he neversupposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day. Of course, thepicture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray'stime, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that ageneration apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should notpossibly miss the artist's meaning. But I do not think it is so muchsurcharged as 'Esmond;' 'Barry Lyndon' is by no manner of means soconscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifoldself-reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to thinkhe is the most perfect creation of Thackeray's mind. 

I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray's books all at once, or evenin rapid succession, and he at no time possessed the whole empire of mycatholic, not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I wascompassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burningincense at his shrine. But there was a moment when he so outshone andovertopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively hisalone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee ofthree or four others of the very great. From his art there flowed intome a literary quality which tinged my whole mental substance, and made itimpossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it theliterary color. That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I hadbeen so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I musthave tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint that wouldremind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men. 

It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do notknow that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, ofall the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly and profoundlyimbued with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words andblood, but with words and ink. You may read the greatest part ofDickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, andnot once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult, but you canhardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray's without beingreminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion. 

I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have beenany other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talentis not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of thestreet, the field, the open sky, the simple earth. I began to imitatethis master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be, and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probablyhave known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, Ishould have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, nomodel; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and Ihad but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of artaltogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been. I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master'sspectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, withhis self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire. I need notsay I was perfectly satisfied with the result, or that to be able toimitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been ableto imitate nature. In fact, I could have valued any picture of the lifeand character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character asthese had shown themselves to me in his books. 

XXI. "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"

At the same time, I was not only reading many books besides Thackeray's, but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as Icould, with or without help. I could now manage Spanish fairly well, andI was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue. I do notremember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum;but it must have been given me out of the sums we were all working sohard to make up for the debt, and the interest on the debt (that isalways the wicked pinch for the debtor!), we had incurred in the purchaseof the newspaper which we lived by, and the house which we lived in. I spent no money on any other sort of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it wasafforded me the more readily; but I cannot really recall the history ofthose acquisitions on its financial side. In any case, if the sums Ilaid out in literature could not have been comparatively great, theexcitement attending the outlay was prodigious. 

I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York, for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficientlypedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanishliterature. Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thoughtanything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village;but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers, I am sure. I haunted the post-office about the time the books were due, and when I found one of them in our deep box among a heap of exchangenewspapers and business letters, my emotion was so great that it almosttook my breath. I hurried home with the precious volume, and shut myselfinto my little den, where I gave myself up to a sort of transport in it. These books were always from the collection of Spanish authors publishedby Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper cover, printedfull of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue of other Spanish books which Imeant to read, every one, some time. The paper and the ink had a certainodor which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby. The look of thetype took me more than the glance of a girl, and I had a fever of longingto know the heart of the book, which was like a lover's passion. Sometimes I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did. Moratin's 'Originsof the Spanish Theatre, ' and a large volume of Spanish dramatic authors, were the first Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I sentfor them, unless it was because I saw that there were some plays ofCervantes among the rest. I read these and I read several comedies ofLope de Vega, and numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin's history, and Ireally got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, which has nowalmost wholly faded from my mind. It is more intelligible to me why Ishould have read Conde's 'Dominion of the Arabs in Spain;' for that wasin the line of my reading in Irving, which would account for my pleasurein the 'History of the Civil Wars of Granada;' it was some time before Irealized that the chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and notveritable records; and my whole study in these things was whollyundirected and unenlightened. But I meant to be thorough in it, and Icould not rest satisfied with the Spanish-English grammars I had; I wasnot willing to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish Academy. I sent to New York for it, and my booksellers there reported that theywould have to send to Spain for it. I lived till it came to hand throughthem from Madrid; and I do not understand why I did not perish then fromthe pride and joy I had in it. 

But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak norwrite the language. I never got more than a good reading use of it, perhaps because I never really tried for more. But I am very glad ofthat, because it has been a great pleasure to me, and even some profit, and it has lighted up many meanings in literature, which must always haveremained dark to me. Not to speak now of the modern Spanish writers whomit has enabled me to know in their own houses as it were, I had even inthat remote day a rapturous delight in a certain Spanish book, which waswell worth all the pains I had undergone to get at it. This was thefamous picaresque novel, 'Lazarillo de Tormes, ' by Hurtado de Mendoza, whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I writeit I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had knownin the flesh. I believe it would not have been always comfortable toknow Mendoza outside of his books; he was rather a terrible person; hewas one of the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian historyas the Tyrant of Sierra. But at my distance of time and place I couldsafely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him amost charming companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, whobegan life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and thenadventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought backthe atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder-world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with allthe old delight. 

I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, or that the generalreader would find his account in it, but I am sure that the intendingauthor of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresquenovels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the bestforms for an American story. The intrigue of close texture will neversuit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man'slife among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it is the life of aman who has risen, as we nearly all have, with many ups and downs. Thestory of 'Latzarillo' is gross in its facts, and is mostly "unmeet forladies, " like most of the fiction in all languages before our times; butthere is an honest simplicity in the narration, a pervading humor, and arich feeling for character that gives it value. 

I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost upon me, but Icertainly understood that it would not do to present it to an Americanpublic just as it was, in the translation which I presently planned tomake. I went about telling the story to people, and trying to make themfind it as amusing as I did, but whether I ever succeeded I cannot say, though the notion of a version with modifications constantly grew withme, till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my father. Therewas a branch house of an Eastern firm of publishers in that place, and Imust have had the hope that I might have the courage to propose atranslation of Lazarillo to them. My father urged me to try my fortune, but my heart failed me. I was half blind with one of the headaches thattormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign, "J. P. Jewett & Co. , Publishers, " which held me fascinated, and went homewithout at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused. 

XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL

I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that inthose days. It had necessarily passed beyond my father's suggestion, andI think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I readone book rather than another. He made some sort of newspaper arrangementwith a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our homelibrary with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse forthat, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover ofthem. Among these I found a treasure in Curtis's two books, the 'NileNotes of a Howadji, ' and the 'Howadji in Syria. ' I already knew him byhis 'Potiphar Papers, ' and the ever-delightful reveries which have sincegone under the name of 'Prue and I;' but those books of Eastern travelopened a new world of thinking and feeling. They had at once a greatinfluence upon me. The smooth richness of their diction; the amiablesweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy of theirsatire (which was so kind that it should have some other name), theirabundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlyingtheir airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was differentfrom any I had yet known. 

As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancywhen I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor. I tried towrite like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I shouldprobably have done so from the love I bore him. He was a favorite notonly of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were readingcurrent literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundantsympathy. The present generation can have little notion of the deepimpression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nationby the 'Potiphar Papers, ' or how its fancy was rapt with the 'Prue and I'sketches, These are among the most veritable literary successes we havehad, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautifulthings turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle forfreedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too greatif we could have dreamed it would be life-long. But, as it was, we couldonly honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which heshared with Longfellow. 

This divine poet I have never ceased to read. His Hiawatha was a newbook during one of those terrible Lake Shore winters, but all the otherpoems were old friends with me by that time. With a sister who is nolonger living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty and touching andlightly humorous tale of 'Kavanagh, ' which was of a village life enoughlike our own, in some things, to make us know the truth of its delicaterealism. We used to read it and talk it fondly over together, and Ibelieve some stories of like make and manner grew out of our pleasure init. They were never finished, but it was enough to begin them, and therewere few writers, if any, among those I delighted in who escaped thetribute of an imitation. One has to begin that way, or at least one hadin my day; perhaps it is now possible for a young writer to begin bybeing himself; but for my part, that was not half so important as to belike some one else. Literature, not life, was my aim, and to reproduceit was my joy and my pride. 

I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I wasalways chancing upon some book that served this end among the greatnumber of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any realresult of the sort. Schlegel's 'Lectures on Dramatic Literature' cameinto my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history ofthe Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous. I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by thelight it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but whichI now followed in the full day. 

Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said. I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italiantheatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic dramawhich had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, andwhich was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whomI seemed to own, they owned me so completely. It vexes me now to findthat I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could havesuggested it to me. It is possible that it may have been that artist whocame and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother's portrait. She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors andartists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen myadored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him. Her talkabout these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven ofhope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and conversewith them face to face. My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was notsuch a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy nohappier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least. 

XXIII. TENNYSON

I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the thingsI had in hand more or less. It is perfectly clear to me that I did noneof them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other thanexcellently. I was attempting the study of no less than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to these. I was reading right and left inevery direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction. From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a 'coupde main, ' or sat down before it for a prolonged siege. There wasoccasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietlygave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors werefew. I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, andthe relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knewpretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committedmyself to the task of reading it. Always I read for pleasure, for thedelight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very differentthing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as Ido still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts. There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read;I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at theperiod I speak of I do not think I wasted much time. 

My day began about seven o'clock, in the printing-office, where it tookme till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five. Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work withtheir hands for their dinners. In the afternoon I went back andcorrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case forthe next day. At two or three o'clock I was free, and then I went homeand began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book. We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till Iwent to bed at ten or eleven. I cannot think of any time when I did notgo gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as wellas a high privilege. 

But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which wasnot yet known as nervous prostration. When I could not sleep after mystudies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks ofhypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was notthe day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that Ishould leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion thatthe case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure. I passeddays in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myselfin heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesomeand very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write. No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause, and to be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, rather than bysome ignoble ague or the devastating consumption of that region. If Ilay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and listening to thedeath-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was notwithout the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature. At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could havecomposed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for myuntimely fate. But there was really not impairment of my constitution, and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the healthwhich has never since failed me under any reasonable stress of workestablished itself. 

I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I first becameacquainted with the poet who at once possessed himself of what was bestworth having in me. Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and fromthe English reviews, but I believe it was from reading one of Curtis's"Easy Chair" papers that I was prompted to get the new poem of "Maud, "which I understood from the "Easy Chair" was then moving polite youth inthe East. It did not seem to me that I could very well live without thatpoem, and when I went to Cleveland with the hope that I might havecourage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to a publisher it was withthe fixed purpose of getting "Maud" if it was to be found in anybookstore there. 

I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can onlyaccount for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlierthan the later English poetry. To be sure I had passed through what Imay call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply unknown to thepresent generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, andput with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time totime in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him. I readthis now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved ofhim by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his"Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passagesfrom it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the solecritic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun inGraham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphianspecies. I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither couldany of the critics who led me into it, I dare say. The reading world isvery susceptible of such-lunacies, and all that can be said is that at agiven time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who wasneither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosizedbefore and since. What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of thepoets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that Ibathed myself in his second-hand effulgence. I already knew pretty wellthe origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, andKeats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a suddenconvert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive. Like every other great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day, and I suppose that at the time he wrote "Maud" he said more fully whatthe whole English-speaking race were then dimly longing to utter than anyEnglish poet who has lived. 

One need not question the greatness of Browning in owning the fact thatthe two poets of his day who preeminently voiced their generation wereTennyson and Longfellow; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly nowmore modern than either. However, I had then nothing to do withTennyson's comparative claim on my adoration; there was for the time noparallel for him in the whole range of literary divinities that I hadbowed the knee to. For that while, the temple was not only emptied ofall the other idols, but I had a richly flattering illusion of being hisonly worshipper. When I came to the sense of this error, it was with thebelief that at least no one else had ever appreciated him so fully, stoodso close to him in that holy of holies where he wrought his miracles. 

I say tawdily and ineffectively and falsely what was a very precious andsacred experience with me. This great poet opened to me a whole world ofthinking and feeling, where I had my being with him in that mysticintimacy, which cannot be put into words. I at once identified myselfnot only with the hero of the poem, but in some so with the poet himself, when I read "Maud"; but that was only the first step towards the lastingstate in which his poetry has upon the whole been more to me than that ofany other poet. I have never read any other so closely and continuously, or read myself so much into and out of his verse. There have been timesand moods when I have had my questions, and made my cavils, and when itseemed to me that the poet was less than I had thought him; and certainlyI do not revere equally and unreservedly all that he has written; thatwould be impossible. But when I think over all the other poets I haveread, he is supreme above them in his response to some need in me that hehas satisfied so perfectly. 

Of course, "Maud" seemed to me the finest poem I had read, up to thattime, but I am not sure that this conclusion was wholly my own; I thinkit was partially formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I feltto be everywhere in the critical atmosphere, and which had alreadypenetrated to me. I did not like all parts of it equally well, and someparts of it seemed thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to sayso then), and they still seem so. But there were whole passages andspaces of it whose divine and perfect beauty lifted me above life. I didnot fully understand the poem then; I do not fully understand it now, butthat did not and does not matter; for there something in poetry thatreaches the soul by other enues than the intelligence. Both in this poemand others of Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there aremelodies and harmonies enfolding significance that appeared long after Ihad first read them, and had even learned them by heart; that lay weedyin my outer ear and were enough in their Mere beauty of phrasing, tillthe time came for them to reveal their whole meaning. In fact they coulddo this only to later and greater knowledge of myself and others, asevery one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book that he readwhen young; then he finds it twice as full of meaning as it was at first. 

I could not rest satisfied with "Maud"; I sent the same summer toCleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet's work, andabandoned myself so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other versethat I can remember. The volume was the first of that pretty blue-and-gold series which Ticknor & Fields began to publish in 1856, and whichtheir imprint, so rarely affixed to an unworthy book, at once carried farand wide. Their modest old brown cloth binding had long been a quietwarrant of quality in the literature it covered, and now this splendidblossom of the bookmaking art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to conveythe sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I thought theworld had yet known. After an old fashion of mine, I read itcontinuously, with frequent recurrences from each new poem to some thathad already pleased me, and with a most capricious range among thepieces. "In Memoriam" was in that book, and the "Princess"; I read the"Princess" through and through, and over and over, but I did not thenread "In Memoriam" through, and I have never read it in course; I am notsure that I have even yet read every part of it. I did not come to the"Princess, " either, until I had saturated my fancy and my memory withsome of the shorter poems, with the "Dream of Fair Women, " with the"Lotus-Eaters, " with the "Miller's Daughter, " with the "Morte d'Arthur, "with "Edwin Morris, or The Lake, " with "Love and Duty, " and a score ofother minor and briefer poems. I read the book night and day, in-doorsand out, to myself and to whomever I could make listen. I have no wordsto tell the rapture it was to me; but I hope that in some more articulatebeing, if it should ever be my unmerited fortune to meet that 'sommopoeta' face to face, it shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and hewill understand how completely he became the life of the boy I was then. I think it might please, or at least amuse, that lofty ghost, and that hewould not resent it, as he would probably have done on earth. I can wellunderstand why the homage of his worshippers should have afflicted himhere, and I could never have been one to burn incense in his earthlypresence; but perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence. I eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I could find abouthim, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed intimacy with him through hisverse, in which I could not presume nor he repel, and which I had enjoyedin turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub from them. 

I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the rapture of the newconvert could not last. That must pass like the flush of any otherpassion. I think I have now a better sense of his comparative greatness, but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not have than I hadat the beginning; and I believe this is the essential knowledge of apoet. It is very well to say one is greater than Keats, or not so greatas Wordsworth; that one is or is not of the highest order of poets likeShakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything ofvalue, and I never find my account in it. I know it is not possible forany less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one's life. Somedazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears hiswelcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-home if he knocks again. But it was only this morning that I read one ofthe new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which hefirst woke in me well-nigh forty years ago. There has been no year ofthose many when I have not read him and loved him with something of theearly fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poemof his has been for me a fresh joy. 

He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make myfirst venture away from home. My father had got one of those legislativeclerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors whentheir party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out ascheme for corresponding with some city newspapers. We were to furnish adaily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which Iwas mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together. Theletters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, andmy father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them whowas doing it. We were afraid they might not care for the reports of aboy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and Idid not boast of my youth among the lawmakers. I looked three or fouryears older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when afatherly Senator asked me my age. I got away somehow without saying, butit was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter, and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year. 

I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts ofbooks from it. Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all thenovels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 'TheCaxtons' and 'My Novel. ' I was dazzled by them, and I thought him agreat writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself. Little ornothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poetand his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and roguesof all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remainedwith me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say. If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say thatit was but a fitful fever. I also read many volumes of Zschokke'sadmirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and Ithink I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors Irecall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelesslyas they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandicpoems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studyingIcelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, anddecided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must havebegun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author atleast, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson;but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry. I suspect that Icarried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraidthat I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I wasready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation. This is theworst of the ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every one elseshare his rapture, will he, nill he. Many good fellows suffered from myadmiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids. I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I amafraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in thecase of the poems I did worse, I repeated them. This seems ratherincredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at leastattests my sincerity. It was long before I cured myself of so pestilenta habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safelytrusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener. I dare say Icould not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was notso nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me;I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish tomake them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as hewas to mine. My head was full of him; his words were always behind mylips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some oneelse, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could. It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for thefuture in which I must make my own place in the world. Work, and hardwork, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by nomeans the whole story. You may get on without much of it, or you may doa great deal, and not get on. I was willing to do as much of it as Icould get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had manyforebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to thesubstance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget. I wasalready imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthymodel for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did. None of theauthors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could nothave believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me. In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has been. 

XXIV. HEINE

That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of thelegislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction ofone of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it. I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was tohave charge of the local reporting. It was a great temptation, and for awhile I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune. I went down toCincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fitmyself for it by beginning as reporter myself. One night's round of thepolice stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was notmeant for that work, and I attempted it no farther. I have often beensorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life thatI have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life wassupremely interesting and important. I fancied that literature, thatpoetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to thinkof myself torn from my high ideals by labors like those of the reporter. I would not consent even to do the office work of the department, and theproprietor and editor who was more especially my friend tried to makesome other place for me. All the departments were full but the one Iwould have nothing to do with, and after a few weeks of sufferance andsuffering I turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for thesecond time returned to the printing-office. 

I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time tormented by my oldmalady of homesickness. But otherwise the situation was not cheerful forme, and I now began trying to write something for publication that Icould sell. I sent off poems and they came back; I offered littletranslations from the Spanish that nobody wanted. At the same time Itook up the study of German, which I must have already played with, atsuch odd times as I could find. My father knew something of it, and thatfriend of mine among the printers was already reading it and trying tospeak it. I had their help with the first steps so far as therecitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but I was impatient to readGerman, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy fromthe first line of his I had seen. 

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one authorthat I have known. Where or when I first acquainted myself with his mostfascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some articleof the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given inEnglish and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessedmy soul. I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great goodluck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books. He was abookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848sent to us in great numbers. He was a Hanoverian, and his accent wasthen, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the acceptedpronunciation. But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get atHeine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate thefriendship of that bookbinder in every way. I dare say he was glad ofmine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had nocompanionship outside of his own family. I clothed him in all theromantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which newtook the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections. He was avery quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of ourauthor's humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember verywell the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant, and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came tosome passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew hadunpacked all the insult of his soul. 

We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almostword by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English wasrather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, Iwas getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from othersources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or aconjugation. As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home tothe books, and worked away at them until supper. Then my bookbinder andI met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on thetable between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we readtill we were both tired out. 

The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flatcandlesticks heavily loaded with lead, which compositors once used. It seems to have been summer when our readings began, and they areassociated in my memory with the smell of the neighboring gardens, whichcame in at the open doors and windows, and with the fluttering of moths, and the bumbling of the dorbugs, that stole in along with the odors. I can see the perspiration on the shining forehead of the bookbinder ashe looks up from some brilliant passage, to exchange a smile of triumphwith me at having made out the meaning with the meagre facilities we hadfor the purpose; he had beautiful red pouting lips, and a stiff littlebranching mustache above them, that went to the making of his smile. Sometimes, in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story ofhis life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our reading, or quoted apassage from some other author. It seemed to me the make of a highintellectual banquet, and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything asmuch now. 

We walked home as far as his house, or rather his apartment over one ofthe village stores; and as he mounted to it by an outside staircase, weexchanged a joyous "Gute Nacht, " and I kept on homeward through the darkand silent village street, which was really not that street, but someother, where Heine had been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of hisknowledge, or of his dream. When I reached home it was useless to go tobed. I shut myself into my little study, and went over what we had read, till my brain was so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last, it was to lie down to slumbers which were often a mere phantasmagory ofthose witching Pictures of Travel. 

I was awake at my father's call in the morning, and before my mother hadbreakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him. To tellthe truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love ofliterature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me gothrough them. Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languagesI was worrying at, and though I could once write a passable literaryGerman, it has all gone from me now, except for the purposes of reading. It cost me so much trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the grammarand lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was impatient to read, thatI remember the words very well in all their forms and inflections, and Ihave still what I think I may call a fair German vocabulary. 

The German of Heine, when once you are in the joke of his capriciousgenius, is very simple, and in his poetry it is simple from the first, so that he was, perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with if Iwanted to go fast rather than far. I found this out later, when Iattempted other German authors without the glitter of his wit or thelambent glow of his fancy to light me on my hard way. I should find ithard to say just why his peculiar genius had such an absolute fascinationfor me from the very first, and perhaps I had better content myself withsaying simply that my literary liberation began with almost the earliestword from him; for if he chained me to himself he freed me from all otherbondage. I had been at infinite pains from time to time, now upon onemodel and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may make a wordwhich does not quite say the thing for me. What I mean is that I hadsupposed, with the sense at times that I was all wrong, that theexpression of literature must be different from the expression of life;that it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state or at leastof formality in it; that it must be this style, and not that; that itmust be like that sort of acting which you know is acting when you see itand never mistake for reality. There are a great many children, apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical authorities, whoare still of this youthful opinion of mine. But Heine at once showed methat this ideal of literature was false; that the life of literature wasfrom the springs of the best common speech and that the nearer it couldbe made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was. 

He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks withthem, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in hismanner, that is to say instantly. His tricks he had mostly atsecond-hand, and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well enough thento know their origin. But in all essentials he was himself, and my finallesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was tofind myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was. 

I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for several years, though, and for a much longer time than I should have done if I hadever become equally impassioned of any other author. 

Some traces of his method lingered so long in my work that nearly tenyears afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine thathe had been reading: "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones asmen do mercury, " and his kindness for me would not be content with lessthan the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time savedmy life. I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bonesafter it had done its office, but it did do its office. 

It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found theHeine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier workin verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for theAtlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was nota translation of Heine. Then he printed it, and I am bound to say thatthe poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see whyHeine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted. Hispotent spirit became immediately so wholly my "control, " as the mediumssay, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so faras any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like otherinspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of thespirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to usea medium. But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lastingharm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was onethat can only end with me. He undid my hands, which had taken so muchpains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though itmay be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither prettynor useful. 

XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW

Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was DeQuincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another, until I had read them all. We who were young people of that day thoughthis style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in thosepassages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life withan intimacy which was always-more rather than less. His rhetoric there, and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminousrichness, without losing its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed thissubtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lightedup so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksyglimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods andexperiences so like my own, as I was pleased to fancy. I have not lookedat his Twelve Caesars for twice as many years, but I should be greatlysurprised to find it other than one of the greatest historical monographsever written. His literary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitelyhumorous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me to have himpersonally present, with the warmth of his own temperament in regions ofcold abstraction; I am not sure that I should like that so much now. DeQuincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote of Kant, or theFlight of the Crim-Tartars, than when he wrote of his own boyhood or themiseries of the opium habit. He had the hospitable gift of making you athome with him, and appealing to your sense of comradery with something ofthe flattering confidentiality of Thackeray, but with a wholly differenteffect. 

In fact, although De Quincey was from time to time perfunctorily Tory, and always a good and faithful British subject, he was so eliminated fromhis time and place by his single love for books, that one could be in hiscompany through the whole vast range of his writings, and come awaywithout a touch of snobbishness; and that is saying a great deal for anEnglish writer. He was a great little creature, and through his intensepersonality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that you loved theman, who was forever talking-of himself, for his modesty and reticence. He left you feeling intimate with him but by no means familiar; with allhis frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted himself with thelives of his contemporaries, he is to me a figure of delicate dignity, and winning kindness. I think it a misfortune for the present generationthat his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I believe thatthey will emerge from it again to the advantage of literature. 

In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in myaffections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for morethan those two great poets there was then not much room. I read him thefirst winter I was at Columbus, and when I went down from the village thenext winter, to take up my legislative correspondence again, I read himmore than ever. But that was destined to be for me a very dishearteningtime. I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my healthmore broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled inthe capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel. It wasthe beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I beganto fight with various devices and must yield to at last. I triedmedicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take myletters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual respites. I made a little journey to my old home in southern Ohio, but there andeverywhere, the sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my feet, and I came back to Columbus and tried to forget in my work the fact thatI was no better. I did not give up trying to read, as usual, and part ofmy endeavor that winter was with Schiller, and Uhland, and even Goethe, whose 'Wahlverwandschaften, ' hardly yielded up its mystery to me. Totell the truth, I do not think that I found my account in that novel. It must needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, which I had readin English; but I dare say my disappointment was largely my own fault;I had certainly no right to expect such constant proofs and instances ofwisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had led me to hope for. I remember little or nothing of the story, which I tried to find verymemorable, as I held my sick way through it. Longfellow's "MilesStandish" came out that winter, and I suspect that I got vastly more realpleasure from that one poem of his than I found in all my German authorsput together, the adored Heine always excepted; though certainly I feltthe romantic beauty of 'Uhland, ' and was aware of something of Schiller'sgenerous grandeur. 

Of the American writers Longfellow has been most a passion with me, asthe English, and German, and Spanish, and Russian writers have been. Iam sure that this was largely by mere chance. It was because I happened, in such a frame and at such a time, to come upon his books that I lovedthem above those of other men as great. I am perfectly sensible thatLowell and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets I have givenmy heart to; I have read them with delight and with a deep sense of theirgreatness, and yet they have not been my life like those other, thoselesser, men. But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do not try toaccount for my literary preferences or to justify them. 

I dragged along through several months of that winter, and did my best tocarry out that notable scheme of not minding my vertigo. I tried doinghalf-work, and helping my father with the correspondence, but when itappeared that nothing would avail, he remained in charge of it, till theclose of the session, and I went home to try what a complete andprolonged rest would do for me. I was not fit for work in the printing-office, but that was a simpler matter than the literary work that wasalways tempting me. I could get away from it only by taking my gun andtramping day after day through the deep, primeval woods. The fatigue waswholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other creature suffered lossfrom my gain except one hapless wild pigeon. The thawing snow left thefallen beechnuts of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves, and the forest was full of the beautiful birds. In most parts of themiddle West they are no longer seen, except in twos or threes, but oncethey were like the sands of the sea for multitude. It was not now theseason when they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day;but they were in myriads all through the woods, where their iridescentbreasts shone like a sudden untimely growth of flowers when you came uponthem from the front. When they rose in fright, it was like the upwardleap of fire, and with the roar of flame. I use images which, after all, are false to the thing I wish to express; but they must serve. I triedhonestly enough to kill the pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, tillI happened to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the restin a softy tree-top. The poor creature I had widowed followed me to theverge of the woods, as I started home with my prey, and I do not care toknow more personally the feelings of a murderer than I did then. I triedto shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I could not do her thismercy, and at last she flew away, and I saw her no more. 

The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep more and more withNature, who was kinder to me than I was to her other children, or wishedto be, and I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me for nomore reason apparently than it came upon me. But I was still far fromwell, and I was in despair of my future. I began to read again--I suppose I had really never altogether stopped. I borrowed from myfriend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for me a message oflasting cheer. It was the 'Afraja' of Theodore Mugge, a story of life inNorway during the last century, and I remember it as a very lovely storyindeed, with honest studies of character among the Norwegians, and atender pathos in the fate of the little Lap heroine Gula, who was perhapssufficiently romanced. The hero was a young Dane, who was going up amongthe fiords to seek his fortune in the northern fisheries; and by aprocess inevitable in youth I became identified with him, so that Iadventured, and enjoyed, and suffered in his person throughout. Therewas a supreme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, and findinghimself apparently locked in by their mountain walls without sign or hopeof escape, but somehow always escaping by some unimagined channel, andkeeping on. The lesson for him was one of trust and courage; and I, whoseemed to be then shut in upon a mountain-walled fiord without inlet oroutlet, took the lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again. It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no means of thegreatest, should have had such an effect with me at a time when I was nolonger so young as to be unduly impressed by what I read; but it is truethat I have never since found myself in circumstances where there seemedto be no getting forward or going back, without a vision of that fiordscenery, and then a rise of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow, come out of my prisoning environment. 

XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE

I got back health enough to be of use in the printing office that autumn, and I was quietly at work there with no visible break in my surroundingswhen suddenly the whole world opened to me through what had seemed animpenetrable wall. The Republican newspaper at the capital had beenbought by a new management, and the editorial force reorganized upon afooting of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; and to my greatjoy and astonishment I was asked to come and take a place in it. Theplace offered me was not one of lordly distinction; in fact, it waspartly of the character of that I had already rejected in Cincinnati, but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties would not be so odious;and by the time I came to fill it, a change had taken place in thearrangements so that I was given charge of the news department. Thisincluded the literary notices and the book reviews, and I am afraid thatI at once gave my prime attention to these. 

It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading andstudy as I had at home. But now society began to claim a share of thisleisure, which I by no means begrudged it. Society was very charming inColumbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and aneasy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in iteverywhere. I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies, and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almostas freely as if they were our own. There we had music and cards, andtalk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any onehad said this was not the best planet in the universe I should havecalled him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not theword in those days. A world in which all those pretty and gracious womendwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat betweenabout the last instalment of 'The Newcomes, ' was good enough world forme; I was only afraid it was too good. There were, of course, some girlswho did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature, and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate ofthem. That was the day when 'Adam Bede' was a new book, and in this Ihad my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had nopassion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; andwhich has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics. 

I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I might easily refineupon them, and study that subtle effect for good and for evil which youngpeople are always receiving from the fiction they read; but this its notthe time or place for the inquiry, and I only wish to own that so far asI understand it, the chief part of my ethical experience has been fromnovels. The life and character I have found portrayed there haveappealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me;and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot. Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it nowonly in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and herfailure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment. There her work seems to me unphilosophical. 

It shares whatever error there is in its perspective with that ofHawthorne, whose 'Marble Faun' was a new book at the same time that 'AdamBede' was new, and whose books now came into my life and gave it theirtinge. He was always dealing with the problem of evil, too, and I founda more potent charm in his more artistic handling of it than I found inGeorge Eliot. Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romancewhere he liked to place his action; but I did not find his instances theless veritable because they shone out in

 "The light that never was on sea or land. "

I read the 'Marble Faun' first, and then the 'Scarlet Letter, ' and thenthe 'House of Seven Gables, ' and then the 'Blithedale Romance;' but Ialways liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and morerealistic than the others. They all moved me with a sort of effect suchas I had not felt before. They veers so far from time and place that, although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could notimagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed aremote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one mightactually meet, as not long afterward happened with me. I did not holdthe sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors, and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted meto them. But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominatedme as completely as any author I have read. More truly than any otherAmerican author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with akind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the'Scarlet Letter' bear reading now. I did not assent to the possibility, but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay. I thought how much that bookhad been to me, how much all of Hawthorne's books had been, and to haveparted with my faith in their perfection would have been something Iwould not willingly have risked doing. 

Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of thepure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out ofit, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; andperhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the'Scarlet Letter. ' But none of Hawthorne's fables are without a profoundand distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being. He came backfrom his researches with no solution of the question, with no message, indeed, but the awful warning, "Be true, be true, " which is the burden ofthe Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughtsthat we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the browin sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the thingsthat can never be said. Some of his shorter stories I have found thinand cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the 'Houseof Seven Gables, ' but the other day I was reading the 'BlithedaleRomance' again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly andstrangely true as when it first enthralled my soul. 

In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar ofGoethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry, but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through withhis Faust and come to know its power. For the present, I read 'WilhelmMeister' and the 'Wahlverwandschaften, ' and worshipped him much atsecond-hand through Heine. In the mean time I invested such Germans asI met with the halo of their national poetry, and there was one lady ofwhom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine. When I came tomeet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her houseon Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, andsome few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; andif I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear thatit might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet inthe flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I heldin the spirit. But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went onreading him much more than I read any other German author. I went onwriting him too, just as I went on reading and writing Tennyson. Heinewas always a personal interest with me, and every word of his made melong to have had him say it to me, and tell me why he said it. In a poetof alien race and language and religion I found a greater sympathy than Ihave experienced with any other. Perhaps the Jews are still the chosenpeople, but now they bear the message of humanity, while once they borethe message of divinity. I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature: hisrevengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness;and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read. Thetenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but, as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?

I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who was already a contributorto the Atlantic Monthly, and who read Browning as devotedly as I readHeine. I will not say that he wrote him as constantly, but if that hadbeen so, I should not have cared. What I could not endure without pangsof secret jealousy was that he should like Heine, too, and should readhim, though it was but an arm's-length in an English version. He hadfound the origins of those tricks and turns of Heine's in 'TristramShandy' and the 'Sentimental Journey;' and this galled me, as if he hadshown that some mistress of my soul had studied her graces from anothergirl, and that it was not all her own hair that she wore. I hid myrancor as well as I could, and took what revenge lay in my power byinsinuating that he might have a very different view if he read Heine inthe original. I also made haste to try my own fate with the Atlantic, and I sent off to Mr. Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order tomake sure that Heine had not written it, as well as authorized it. 

XXVII. CHARLES READE

This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literaryventure together in those 'Poems of Two Friends;' which hardly passed thecircle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literaryexaltation with me. I walked the streets of the friendly little city byday and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases thatit seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away;and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of mynewspaper paragraphs. Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and fromtime to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement ofthe leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp toothfor such self-betrayals in others. He wanted to print a burlesque reviewhe wrote of the 'Poems of Two Friends' in our paper, but I would notsuffer it. I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was alwaysa generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any thatcould have been dealt me then. He did not indeed care much for anypoetry but that of Shakespeare and the 'Ingoldsby Legends;' and when onemorning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson, and began to read, "The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn The love of love, "

he hitched his chair about, and started in on his leader for the day. 

He might have been more patient if he had known that this State Senatorwas to be President Garfield. But who could know anything of thetragical history that was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-60?Not I; at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and it seemedto me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was of it. To be sure I had my hard littlejournalistic misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a StateSenator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o'clock in the morning, andI dare say I felt myself superior in my point of view, though I could notresist the charm of the verse. I myself did not bring Tennyson to theoffice at that time. I brought Thackeray, and I remember that one daywhen I had read half an hour or so in the 'Book of Snobs, ' the leadingeditor said frankly, Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of that. He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, and not I, but I daresay I was a nuisance with my different literary passions, and must havemade many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors. I hadsome consciousness of the fact, but I could not help it. 

I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who wasthen beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed ofbeing a very great one. We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowingbooks, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set himabove Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, 'tulli quanti', so greatwas the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation. He was a manwho stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, andif he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of agreat school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content touse the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism. Hesaw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feignedabout it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not theclear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic whenprobably her artistic prepossessions were romantic. 

As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Readewas writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character, which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world aroundhim. He was intoxicated with the discovery he had made that the truthwas beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth inart after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly donot. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and weread him with much the same fury, that he wrote. 'Never Too Late toMend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'PegWoffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash, ' 'The Cloister and the Hearth, ''Foul Play, ' 'Put Yourself in His Place'--how much they all meant once, or seemed to mean!

The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I was reading, meantmore to me than the rumors of war that were then filling the air, andthat so soon became its awful actualities. To us who have our lives solargely in books the material world is always the fable, and the idealthe fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in theclouds, as light as any of them. I neither praise nor blame this fact;but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every time in my life, since the witchery of literature began with me. 

Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was finding opportunity andrecognition, were the heydey of life for me. There has been no time likethem since, though there have been smiling and prosperous times a plenty;for then I was in the blossom of my youth, and what I had not I couldhope for without unreason, for I had so much of that which I had mostdesired. Those times passed, and there came other times, long years ofabeyance, and waiting, and defeat, which I thought would never end, butthey passed, too. 

I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for mypassport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before Ishould set out for my post. If I hoped to serve my country there andsweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my primeintent was to add to her literature and to my own credit. I intended, while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems. Concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in thatkind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to makethe days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger. Inthis month I devoured all the 'Waverley novels, ' but I must have beendevouring a great many others, for Charles Reade's 'Christie Johnstone'is associated with the last moment of the last days. 

A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again, after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it withamazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aestheticerror shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth thatReade himself was always dimly groping for. The book is writtenthroughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjecturesacross its border, and with lapses into the fool's paradise ofromanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility. But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the lastword that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell thatheld us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety forthe years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before ourhome circle could be made whole again. I read on, and the rest listened, till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approachthrough the absolute silence of the village street. Then we shut thebook and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the palesky of the October night. There was one of the home group whom I was notto see again: the young brother who died in the blossom of his yearsbefore I returned from my far and strange sojourn. He was too young thento share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bidhim good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade eachother good-by forever!

XXVIII. DANTE

I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and frommy knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a readingacquaintance with the language. I had really wanted to go to Germany, that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I firstapplied for the consulate at Munich. The powers at Washington thought itquite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of theRoman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to declineit. Then the President's private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had writtenpoems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, andpromised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year, under the new law to embarrass privateers. It was really put up tofifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the citywhose influence changed the whole course of my literary life. 

No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that theFlorida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years ofnearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ inreading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic. The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did notquite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time;besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a gooddeal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian, preparatory to the efforts before me. 

I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted toread not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind. As amatter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of allthese, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went offfrom them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrightswho interested me so much more. After my wonted fashion I read half adozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which Ibegan with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at thattime, or ever for the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice Imet an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, andwho was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno. " Thispart of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, andwith a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do notappear in every line. 

Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about themasterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not everymoment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as iscertainly the case with Dante's. Some day, perhaps, we shall have thisway of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feelobliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not alwaysenjoying himself it is his own fault. At any rate I will permit myselfthe luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majestyand grandeur of Dante's design, many points of its execution bored me, and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhoodhistory in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblesteffect. What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante'spersonality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance itsgreatness as a work of art. I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed themthe more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began toopen all about me. Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did notunderstand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute aboutamong those who profess to know them clearly. What I finally perceivedwas that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, suchas it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expressesthat life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, itslove and its hate. 

Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the endof the ends the "Divine Comedy" will stand for the patriotism ofmedieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound andlofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. This isvague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess alsothat I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the"Inferno. " I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was thatsort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliantepisodes, the striking pictures. This was the effect with me of all thecriticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that thecriticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things "whole, "is of any definite effect. As a matter of fact we see nothing whole, neither life nor art. We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we candeal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor tocompass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger verythreatening to our intellectual integrity. 

Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am veryglad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, andpathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourthdimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. I tookmy sad heart's fill of the sad story of "Paolo and Francesca, " which Ialready knew in Leigh Hunt's adorable dilution, and most of the linesread themselves into my memory, where they linger yet. I supped on thehorrors of Ugolino's fate with the strong gust of youth, which findsevery exercise of sympathy a pleasure. My good priest sat beside me inthese rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of thesnuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in thingsthat he had often before enjoyed. No doubt he had an inexhaustiblepleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in themperennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read orrepeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself. This pleasurecame often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of aphrase quite apart from its meaning. I did not get then, and I have notgot since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and asoften as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I havefatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaningwas lost upon me. 

I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport, the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed, at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings inthe philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then hewould read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have inreading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out ofthe mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound. 

I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of thestrange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature--theprinter, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and thebookbinder--I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I who was then I, might besaid to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self inanything but the "increasing purpose" which has kept me one in my love ofliterature. He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing, quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled. I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact Iwas instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful howI consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy. I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believedhim other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I wasthen giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me. 

Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the "DivinaCommedia, " and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion soremote that no editor would print it. This was the first fruits and thelast of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as Iwould have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is toounconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is inhim, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that othersmay catch. 

XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO

However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that Iwrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity fromall the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no successwith any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedyfor the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had thenbegun to edit. I was in the mean time printing the material of VenetianLife and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejectionby the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, hadtaken the course of critical observance of books and men in theiractuality. 

That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me, and in such literature of Italy as was then modern. In this pursuit Imade a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized myinquiries. I found that the Italians had no novels which treated oftheir contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but thehistorical romance. I found that if I wished to know their life fromtheir literature I must go to their drama, which was even thenendeavoring to give their stage a faithful picture of theircivilization. There was even then in the new circumstance of a peoplejust liberated from every variety of intellectual repression andpolitical oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose plays were notonly delightful to see but delightful to read, working in the goodtradition of one of the greatest realists who has ever lived, andproducing a drama of vital strength and charm. One of them, whom I by nomeans thought the best, has given us a play, known to all the world, which I am almost ready to think with Zola is the greatest play of moderntimes; or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the modern dramathat surpasses "La Morte Civile" of Paolo Giacometti. I learned to knowall the dramatists pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on thestage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, and to lovesupremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, as one of them said, they didnot so much imitate as learn from to imitate nature. 

This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedatingconscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in theeighteenth century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with theromanticism of his day almost before that century had reached its noon. In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of hisrealism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in myhead, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was sotrue that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because Ihave loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly andlastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni. I was reading his memoirs, andlearning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature while I was learning toknow his work, and I wish that every one who reads his plays would readhis life as well; one must know him before one can fully know them. Ibelieve, in fact, that his autobiography came into my hands first. But, at any rate, both are associated with the fervors and languors of thatfirst summer in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of Goldoni'swithout a renewed sense of that sunlight and moonlight, and of the soundsand silences of a city that is at once the stillest and shrillest in theworld. 

Perhaps because I never found his work of great ethical or aestheticalproportions, but recognized that it pretended to be good only within itsstrict limitations, I recur to it now without that painful feeling of adiminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often when we go back tosomething that once greatly pleased us. It seemed to me at the time thatI must have read all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new onesafter I came home, and still I can take a volume of his from the shelf, and when thirty years are past, find a play or two that I missed before. Their number is very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have notread, I have really read once or more and forgotten. That might veryeasily be, for there is seldom anything more poignant in any one of themthan there is in the average course of things. The plays are light andamusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and where at times theydeepen into powerful situations, or express strong emotions, they do sowith persons so little different from the average of our acquaintancethat we do not remember just who the persons are. 

There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his conscience, and meantto make people think as well as laugh. I know of none of his plays thatis of wrong effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insultscommon sense with the romantic pretence that wrong will be right if youwill only paint it rose-color. He is at some obvious pains to "punishvice and reward virtue, " but I do not mean that easy morality when Ipraise his; I mean the more difficult sort that recognizes in each man'ssoul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but surely of his peace. Henever makes a fool of the spectator by feigning that passion is a reasonor justification, or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong ofanother. That was left for the romanticists of our own century todiscover; even the romanticists whom Goldoni drove from the stage, wereof that simpler eighteenth-century sort who had not yet liberated theindividual from society, but held him accountable in the old way. As forGoldoni himself, he apparently never dreams of transgression; he is ofrather an explicit conventionality in most things, and he deals withsociety as something finally settled. How artfully he deals with it, how decently, how wholesomely, those who know Venetian society of theeighteenth century historically, will perceive when they recall theadequate impression he gives of it without offence in character orlanguage or situation. This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy, that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, and so little toinexperience and worldly innocence. No doubt the Serenest Republic wasvery strict with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up tonature only when nature was behaving well, or at least behaving as ifyoung people were present. Yet the Italians are rather plain-spoken, andthey recognize facts which our company manners at least do not admit theexistence of. I should say that Goldoni was almost English, almostAmerican, indeed, in his observance of the proprieties, and I like thisin him; though the proprieties are not virtues, they are very goodthings, and at least are better than the improprieties. 

This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to do with my liking himso much, and I should be puzzled to account for my passion, as much inhis case as in most others. If there was any reason for it, perhaps itwas that he had the power of taking me out of my life, and putting meinto the lives of others, whom I felt to be human beings as much asmyself. To make one live in others, this is the highest effect ofreligion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the highest bliss weshall ever know. I do not pretend that my translation was through myunselfishness; it was distinctly through that selfishness which perceivesthat self is misery; and I may as well confess here that I do not regardthe artistic ecstasy as in any sort noble. It is not noble to love thebeautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining. I would not have any reader of mine, looking forward to some aestheticcareer, suppose that this love is any merit in itself; it may be thegrossest egotism. If you cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seekthe good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to yourself and notof yourself, and you might as well be going into business. In itself andfor itself it is no more honorable to win fame than to make money, andthe wish to do the one is no more elevating than the wish to do theother. 

But in the days I write of I had no conception of this, and I am surethat my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking andknowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped. I believe that ifI had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humaneItalian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived tobe delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth oftheir goodness. Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpsewas lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won. It is only inthinking back to there that I can realize how much they might always havemeant to me. They were both living in my time in Italy, and they weretwo men whom I should now like very much to have seen, if I could havedone so without that futility which seems to attend every effort to payone's duty to such men. 

The love of country in all the Italian poets and romancers of the longperiod of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure whichcriticism has not yet taken account of. I conceived of its effect then, but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no meanssure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, forbeauty's sake, may be considered something monstrous. There is forever apoignant meaning in life beyond what mere living involves, and why shouldnot there be this reference in art to the ends beyond art?The situation, the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified andbeautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, and evoked fromthem a quality which I was too little trained in their school toappreciate. But in a sort I did feel it, I did know it in them all, sofar as I knew any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in theromances of D'Azeglio, and yet more in the simple and modest records ofD'Azeglio's life published after his death, I profited by it, andunconsciously prepared myself for that point of view whence all the artsappear one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful that isfalse. 

I am very glad of that experience of Italian literature, which I lookback upon as altogether wholesome and sanative, after my excesses ofHeine. No doubt it was all a minor affair as compared with equalknowledge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of time. It isidle to dispute the general positions of criticism, and there is nouseful gainsaying its judgment that French literature is a majorliterature and Italian a minor literature in this century; but whetherthis verdict will stand for all time, there may be a reasonable doubt. Criterions may change, and hereafter people may look at the whole affairso differently that a literature which went to the making of a peoplewill not be accounted a minor literature, but will take its place withthe great literary movements. 

I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far from defending myselffor liking the comedies of Goldoni better than the comedies of Moliere, upon purely aesthetic grounds, where there is no question as to theartistic quality. Perhaps it is because I came to Moliere's comedieslater, and with my taste formed for those of Goldoni; but again, it ishere a matter of affection; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, andbecause he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise than find him morenatural, more true. I will allow that this is vulnerable, and as I say, I do not defend it. Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftierthan Goldoni's; and he has supplied types, characters, phrases, to thecurrency of thought, and Goldoni has supplied none. It is, therefore, without reason which I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more. I amperfectly willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I think thatif it had been Goldoni's luck to have had the great age of a mightymonarchy for his scene, instead of the decline of an outworn republic, his place in literature might have been different. 

XXX. "PASTOR FIDO, " "AMINTA, " "ROMOLA, " "YEAST, " "PAUL FERROLL"

I have always had a great love for the absolutely unreal, the purelyfanciful in all the arts, as well as of the absolutely real; I like theone on a far lower plane than the other, but it delights me, as apantomime at a theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being whollyoutside the realm of the probabilities. When I once transport myself tothis sphere I have no longer any care for them, and if I could I wouldnot exact of them an allegiance which has no concern with them. For thisreason I have always vastly enjoyed the artificialities of pastoralpoetry; and in Venice I read with a pleasure few serious poems have givenme the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini. I came later but not with fainter zestto the "Aminta" of Tasso, without which, perhaps, the "Pastor Fido" wouldnot have been, and I revelled in the pretty impossibilities of both thesecharming effects of the liberated imagination. 

I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live bysweets, unless one is willing to spoil one's digestion; but one may nowand then indulge one's self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two afterdinner may even be of advantage. What I object to is the romantic thingwhich asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground ofreality; that seems to me hopelessly bad. But I have been able to dwellin their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds andshepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and Itake the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves andsorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their politeanguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as thepurling streams of their enamelled meadows. I wish there were more ofthat sort of writing; I should like very much to read it. 

The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I began to find that Icould not help writing about the place, was in books relating to its lifeand history, which I made use of rather than found pleasure in. Mystudies in Italian literature were full of the most charming interest, and if I had to read a good many books for conscience' sake, there were agood many others I read for their own sake. They were chiefly poetry;and after the first essays in which I tasted the classic poets, they werechiefly the books of the modern poets. 

For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred toit in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; mySpanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the ageof twenty-six. My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitzeditions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then andthere. George Eliot's 'Romola' was then new, and I read it again andagain with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction toconceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in thatday. Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and Itrembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message fromthe only veritable perdition. His life, in which so much that was goodwas mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain ofegotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worstwere to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolutedivision in texture and color. The book was undoubtedly a favorite ofmine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which wereafterwards evident to me. 

There were not Romolas to read all the time, though, and I had to devolveupon inferior authors for my fiction the greater part of the time. Ofcourse, I kept up with 'Our Mutual Friend, ' which Dickens was thenwriting, and with 'Philip, ' which was to be the last of Thackeray. I wasnot yet sufficiently instructed to appreciate Trollope, and I did notread him at all. 

I got hold of Kingsley, and read 'Yeast, ' and I think some other novelsof his, with great relish, and without sensibility to his CharlesReadeish lapses from his art into the material of his art. But of allthe minor fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so much asthree books which had then already had their vogue, and which I knewsomewhat from reviews. They were Paul Ferroll, 'Why Paul Ferroll KilledHis Wife, ' and 'Day after Day. ' The first two were, of course, relatedto each other, and they were all three full of unwholesome force. As totheir aesthetic merit I will not say anything, for I have not looked ateither of the books for thirty years. I fancy, however, that theirstrength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic sort. They made yoursympathies go with the hero, who deliberately puts his wife to death forthe lie she told to break off his marriage with the woman he had loved, and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in greathappiness with her till her death. Murder in the first degree isflattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully inBoston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his storycould not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed. Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, thewife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized bythem. As a sort of atonement she wrote 'Day after Day, ' the story of adismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faintand farheard, filling the whole chamber. A carefuller study of thephenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by thesteam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid. 

As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books, and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather toexcuse it. But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and readthem with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is toown my subjection to them. It would be an interesting and importantquestion for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a. Certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly betterhave no influence with us. A curious proof of the subtlety of these PaulFerroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact thatI came to them fresh from 'Romolo, ' and full of horror for myself inTito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad whenhe got away. 

XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON

On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form thatmost of my reading was done for review. I wrote at first a good many ofthe lighter criticisms in 'The Nation', at New York, and after I went toBoston to become the assistant editor of the 'Atlantic Monthly' I wrotethe literary notices in that periodical for four or five years. 

It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began toshare these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure aslong as I had any relation to it. My reading for reading's sake, as Ihad hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake ofwriting about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it mightgive me. This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that Iforgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure. I was masterto review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed onlybooks I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book, and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do notthink were very useful, but I tried to make them honest. 

In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went to live inCambridge, a friend brought me several of the stories of Erckmann-Chatrian, whom people were then reading much more than they are now, Ibelieve; and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed since asoften as I have read one of their books. They have much the same qualityof simple and sincerely moralized realism that I found afterwards in thework of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very likely itwas this that captivated my judgment. As for my affections, battered andexhausted as they ought to have been in many literary passions, theynever went out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charming storyof 'L'Ami Fritz, ' which, when I merely name it, breathes the spring sunand air about me, and fills my senses with the beauty and sweetness ofcherry blossoms. It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that everwas written, and my heart belongs to it still; to be sure it belongs toseveral hundreds of other books in equal entirety. 

It belongs to all the books of the great Norwegian Bjorstjerne Bjornson, whose 'Arne, ' and whose 'Happy Boy, ' and whose 'Fisher Maiden' I read inthis same fortunate sickness. I have since read every other book of histhat I could lay hands on: 'Sinnove Solbakken, ' and 'Magnhild, ' and'Captain Manzanca, ' and 'Dust, ' and 'In God's Ways, ' and 'Sigurd, ' andplays like "The Glove" and "The Bankrupt. " He has never, as some authorshave, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, there I find him aslarge, and free, and bold as ever. He is a great talent, a clearconscience, a beautiful art. He has my love not only because he is apoet of the most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men, with a faith in them such as can move mountains of ignorance, and dulness, and greed. He is next to Tolstoy in his willingness to givehimself for his kind; if he would rather give himself in fighting than insuffering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less in degree. 

I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a patriot and asocialist when I read him; he is then purely a poet, whose gift holds merapt above the world where I have left my troublesome and wearisome selffor the time. I do not know of any novels that a young endeavorer infiction could more profitably read than his for their large and simplemethod, their trust of the reader's intelligence, their sympathy withlife. With him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened andregenerate will; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping God. InBjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful despair, nothing of hisanarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of apoetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in theother. I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should befar from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me withthe delight that Bjornson has. 

In those days I read not only all the new books, but I made many foraysinto the past, and came back now and then with rich spoil, though Iconfess that for the most part I had my trouble for my pains; and I wishnow that I had given the time I spent on the English classics tocontemporary literature, which I have not the least hesitation in sayingI like vastly better. In fact, I believe that the preference for theliterature of the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, ismainly the affectation of people who cannot otherwise distinguishthemselves from the herd, and who wish very much to do so. 

There is much to be learned from the minor novelists and poets of thepast about people's ways of thinking and feeling, but not much that themasters do not give you in better quality and fuller measure; and Ishould say, Read the old masters and let their schools go, rather thanneglect any possible master of your own time. Above all, I would nothave any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant ofhim; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it. When literaturebecomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering inthe world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the factotherwise. It is well to read for the sake of knowing a certain groundif you are to make use of your knowledge in a certain way, but it wouldbe a mistake to suppose that this is a love of literature. 

XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH

In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary experience withoutdoubt was the knowledge of Tourguenief's novels, which began to berecognized in all their greatness about the middle seventies. I thinkthey made their way with such of our public as were able to appreciatethem before they were accepted in England; but that does not matter. Itis enough for the present purpose that 'Smoke, ' and 'Lisa, ' and 'On theEve, ' and 'Dimitri Roudine, ' and 'Spring Floods, ' passed one afteranother through my hands, and that I formed for their author one of theprofoundest literary passions of my life. 

I now think that there is a finer and truer method than his, but in itsway, Tourguenief's method is as far as art can go. That is to say, hisfiction is to the last degree dramatic. The persons are sparelydescribed, and briefly accounted for, and then they are left to transacttheir affair, whatever it is, with the least possible comment orexplanation from the author. The effect flows naturally from theircharacters, and when they have done or said a thing you conjecture why asunerringly as you would if they were people whom you knew outside of abook. I had already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson, who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the grossdarkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of itsexcellence. When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizingof Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods andwinks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting ofDickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with ajoyful astonishment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief. 

Here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, whowas not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside fromthe whole affair, and letting the characters work the plot out. Themethod was revealed perfectly in 'Smoke, ' but each successive book of histhat I read was a fresh proof of its truth, a revelation of itstranscendent superiority. I think now that I exaggerated its valuesomewhat; but this was inevitable in the first surprise. The saneaesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, have seemed moreand more an essential part of the sane ethics of all the Russians I haveread. It was not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but thathe had painted it conscientiously. 

Tourguenief was of that great race which has more than any other fullyand freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or falseshame in its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the Frenchnovelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner andwith the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramaticpunishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personalsense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. If theend did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once readTourguenief; it became more serious, more awful, and with mysticalresponsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons werebathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with anintimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in thiswonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader'sown knowledge; who else but Tourguenief and one's own most secret selfever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at theopen window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields?I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with naturewhich scarcely put itself into words with him. As for the people of hisfiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from myexperience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin andpotentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt theirverity in every touch. 

I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impartsome sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I hadbeen waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richlycontent forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Tourgueniefsurpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine andtrue. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstancesfor the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has todo with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene isoften as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway, it isstill related to the great capitals by the history if not the actualityof the characters. Most of Tourguenief's books I have read many timesover, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years Iread them again and again without much caring for other fiction. It wasonly the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with nodiminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my firstsatisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I had reached thepoint through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even ofthe artifice that hid itself. In 'Smoke' I was now aware of an artificethat kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisiblyoperating the story. 

I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of thestories of Auerbach. It is true that I have never cared greatly for 'Onthe Heights, ' which in its dealing with royalties seems too far alooffrom the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fadesout into a German mistiness. But I speak of it with the imperfectknowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I havereally no right to speak of it. The book of his that pleased me most was'Edelweiss, ' which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very delicatelydone, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach'swork which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies. 

XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES

I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in thelives of persons, and I have at all times read it. I am not sure but Irather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back overthis record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for verylittle besides fiction. I read at the time I have just been speaking of, nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to itin its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, ortrickled from the antique urns of Italy. 

I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to readmuch in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it. 

Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, andautobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading inthe world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have neverenjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as havereasoned of themselves. 

I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not knowthat I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare andGoldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so ofMarlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeterlinck's. The taste for the oldEnglish dramatists I believe I have never formed. 

Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in my boyhood, I havenot cared for, and often I have found it repulsive. 

I have a fondness for books of popular science, perhaps because they tooare part of the human story. 

I have read somewhat of the theology of the Swedenborgian faith I wasbrought up in, but I have not read other theological works; and I do notapologize for not liking any. The Bible itself was not much known to meat an age when most children have been obliged to read it several timesover; the gospels were indeed familiar, and they have always been to methe supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testament I had not readwhen a man grown, and only passages of the Old Testament, like the storyof the Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of Job andEcclesiastes, with occasional Psalms. I therefore came to the Scriptureswith a sense at once fresh and mature, and I can never be too glad that Ilearned to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truerperspectives of experience. 

Again as lights on the human story I have liked to read such books ofmedicine as have fallen in my way, and I seldom take up a medicalperiodical without reading of all the cases it describes, and in factevery article in it. 

But I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the mainbusiness of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to thereader; he probably has had a great many of his own. I think I may classthe "Ring and the Book" among them, though I have never been otherwise adevotee of Browning. But I was still newly home from Italy, or away fromhome, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it tookme so with the old enchantment of that land, I gave my heart promptly toit. Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tiredof the same story told over and over from the different points of view, and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificentbreadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himselfheavily. There are certain books of it--"Caponsacchi's story, ""Pompilia's story, " and "Count Guido's story"--that I think ought to rankwith the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramaticexpression of the fact and character, which is without rival. There is anoble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi's statement, anartless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems tome the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia's story holds allof womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, thehelplessness. But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I haveliked, I do not know when I should stop. Yes, as I think it over, the"Ring and the Book" appears to me one of the great few poems whosesplendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presentlyfallen into abeyance. If it had impossibly come down to us from someelder time, or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition offeeling and motives ignored by the less conscious poetry of the past, itmight be ranked with the great epics. 

Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the"Life and Death of Jason, " the "Story of Gudrun, " and the "Trial ofGuinevere, " with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I haveequally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti. I have had a high joy insome of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves overConcord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled treadexpresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American museso often gets about in. 

The "Commemoration Ode" of Lowell has also been a source from which Idrank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet's own exalted mood, andI would set this level with the 'Biglow Papers, ' high above all his otherwork, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be rememberedby. Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is soobvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in whichhe shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men. The deepspiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness ofWhittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civicvirtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse. 

My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name becausethey are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure init not inconstant if not equal. I have spoken before of Longfellow asone of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; butsome of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrillsof happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter. 

Long after I had thought never to read it--in fact when I was 'nel mezzodel cammin di nostra vita'--I read Milton's "Paradise Lost, " and found init a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsedthe worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted hisworthiest. In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time Ispeak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and(shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez. After all, it is best tobe honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves thefewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that theRevenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be ableto whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the"AEneid" of Virgil; the "Georgics, " yes; but the "AEneid, " no. Sometime, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That isoften the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely. 

One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is thatwhen I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading. I fancy, that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merestpastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, andthat if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, insome other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff forit. At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for myfailure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet thatI spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge. I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given upreviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories, I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the earlydays before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy. But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month, so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparativelyspeaking. To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had readbefore, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intensepleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it. It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeplyto stir one's interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, andsuggest the most plausible theory I can think of. 

I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have itspsychological value. An important event of these years was a longsickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I wasforced to read in order to pass the intolerable time. But in this miseryI found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in theform of plays or of novels. The mere sight of the printed page, brokenup in dialogue, was anguish. Yet it was not the excitement of thefiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives oftravel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, orshipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was thedramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up toin the speech of his characters that I could not bear. I found a likeimpossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sentin to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wroughtsensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was. 

At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away theappetite for reading as completely as writing did. I recall nothing readin that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wroteof. 

XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY

In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston, in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books. Eventhen I had to wait for the time when I undertook a critical department inone of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the old enthusiasm for anauthor. That is to say, I had to begin reading for business again beforeI began reading for pleasure. One of the first great pleasures which Ihad upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary Spanish author. This was the 'Marta y Maria' of Armando Palacio Valdes, a novelist whodelights me beyond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his feelingfor character, and his subtle insight. I like every one of his booksthat I have read, and I believe that I have read nearly every one that hehas written. As I mention 'Riverito, Maximina, Un Idilio de un Inferno, La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, Espuma, ' the mere namesconjure up the scenes and events that have moved me to tears andlaughter, and filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in them. I think the 'Marta y Maria' one of the most truthful and profoundfictions I have read, and 'Maximina' one of the most pathetic, and'La Hermana de San Sulpizio' one of the most amusing. Fortunately, thesebooks of Valdes's have nearly all been translated, and the reader maytest the matter in English; though it necessarily halts somewhat behindthe Spanish. 

I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves rank Valdes with Galdos ornot, and I have no wish to decide upon their relative merits. They areboth present passions of mine, and I may say of the 'Dona Perfecta' ofGaldos that no book, if I except those of the greatest Russians, hasgiven me a keener and deeper impression; it is infinitely pathetic, andis full of humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is not lessdelicious. But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, andthough he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism thanValdes, since he has worked finally into such realism as that of LeonRoch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired. 

I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, called 'Morrina, 'which must rank her with the great realists of her country and age; she, too, has that humor of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish thanany other non-Anglo-Saxon people. 

A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less than these nobleSpaniards, is Giovanni Verga, who wrote 'I Malavoglia, ' or, as we call itin English, 'The House by the Medlar Tree': a story of infinite beauty, tenderness and truth. As I have said before, I think with Zola thatGiacometti, the Italian author of "La Morte Civile, " has written almostthe greatest play, all round, of modern times. 

But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epicgreatness? About his material there is no disputing among people of ourPuritanic tradition. It is simply abhorrent, but when you have oncegranted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to denyhis power. Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I tookup 'L'Assommoir, ' though unconsciously I had always been as much of arealist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascinationthat I felt the other day in reading his 'L'Argent. ' The critics knownow that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is fullof the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but forwhat he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, thatoutmasters him, and that is Tolstoy. For my own part, I think that thebooks of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through the factsthat they nakedly represent; they are infinitely more moral than thebooks of any other French novelist. This may not be saying a great deal, but it is saying the truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been oneof my great literary passions, almost as great as Flaubert, and greaterthan Daudet or Maupassant, though I have profoundly appreciated theexquisite artistry of both these. No French writer, however, has movedme so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor whichendears these, and is the quintessence of their charm. 

You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and Isuppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the companyof Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I shouldotherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as itis, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, havebeen a youthful rapture with me. Even without, much humor Trollope'sbooks have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness. Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to theBritish life and character present in them in the whole length andbreadth of its expansive commonplaceness. It is their serious fidelitywhich gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it werecarefully analyzed would afford a principle of the same quality in anauthor who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as themost Philistine of men. 

I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of what seems myperennial literary youth, to the love of Thomas Hardy, whom I first knewin his story 'A Pair of Blue Eyes. ' As usual, after I had read this bookand felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no otherauthor, and to read his books over and over. I love even the faults ofHardy; I will let him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not aboveplaying tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story or perplexed withit), if only he will go on making his peasants talk, and his ratheruncertain ladies get in and out of love, and serve themselves of everychance that fortune offers them of having their own way. We shrink fromthe unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy has divined in the heart ofour own race a lingering heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainlybeen no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians. Hisheroines especially exemplify it, and I should be safe in saying that hisEthelbertas, his Eustacias, his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies, are wholly pagan. I should not dare to ask how much of their charm camefrom that fact; and the author does not fail to show you how much harm, so that it is not on my conscience. His people live very close to theheart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives you a richerand sweeter sense of her unity with human nature. Hardy is a great poetas well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also hishumor would be enough to endear him to me. 

XXXV. TOLSTOY

I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of allthese enthusiasms--namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy. I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I donot know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect ofexaggeration. As much as one merely human being can help another Ibelieve that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aestheticsonly, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way Isaw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be aman; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leadsyou back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of thegentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men, but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentlemanshows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measureof his miserable egotism. I learned from Tolstoy to try character andmotive by no other test, and though I am perpetually false to thatsublime ideal myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me ashamedthat I am not true to it. Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the worldmay yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it, when allCaesars things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men shall comeinto their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruitsof their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other. He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personalhappiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the wholehuman family; and I can never lose this vision, however I close my eyes, and strive to see my own interest as the highest good. He gave me newcriterions, new principles, which, after all, were those that are taughtus in our earliest childhood, before we have come to the evil wisdom ofthe world. As I read his different ethical books, 'What to Do, ''My Confession, ' and 'My Religion, ' I recognized their truth with arapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them myallegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despairof the other. They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while Ilive. It is with inexpressible astonishment that I bear them attaintedof pessimism, as if the teaching of a man whose ideal was simple goodnessmust mean the prevalence of evil. The way he showed me seemed indeedimpossible to my will, but to my conscience it was and is the onlypossible way. If there, is any point on which he has not convinced myreason it is that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone. Eventhere he is logical, but as Zola subtly distinguishes in speaking ofTolstoy's essay on "Money, " he is not reasonable. Solitude enfeebles andpalsies, and it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the worldfrom itself, rather than themselves from the world. It was so theearliest Christians, who had all things common, understood the life ofChrist, and I believe that the latest will understand it so. 

I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, because they are ofthe first importance to me, but I think that his aesthetical works are asperfect. To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highestbeauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believethat they do this because they obey the law of the author's own life. His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will tobe true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others. Ithought the last word in literary art had been said to me by the novelsof Tourguenief, but it seemed like the first, merely, when I began toacquaint myself with the simpler method of Tolstoy. I came to it byaccident, and without any manner, of preoccupation in The Cossacks, oneof his early books, which had been on my shelves unread for five or sixyears. I did not know even Tolstoy's name when I opened it, and it waswith a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, and line byline, the truth of a new art in it. 

I do not know how it is that the great Russians have the secret ofsimplicity. Some say it is because they have not a long literary pastand are not conventionalized by the usage of many generations of otherwriters, but this will hardly account for the brotherly directness oftheir dealing with human nature; the absence of experience elsewherecharacterizes the artist with crudeness, and simplicity is the lasteffect of knowledge. Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in thissupreme grace. He has not only Tourguenief's transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value instyle, and which ought no more to be there than the artist's personalityshould be in a portrait; but he has a method which not only seems withoutartifice, but is so. I can get at the manner of most writers, and tellwhat it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy's manner is;perhaps he has no manner. This appears to me true of his novels, which, with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in theirsingle endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in theiraction and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion andcogitation. There are plenty of novelists to tell you that theircharacters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust;Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and nototherwise. If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesquedit is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; itis the only trait of his which I can put my hand on. 

After 'The Cossacks' I read 'Anna Karenina' with a deepening sense of theauthor's unrivalled greatness. I thought that I saw through his eyes ahuman affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to theInfinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature incircumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we havealmost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicitlove. When you have once read 'Anna Karenina' you know how fatallymiserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be. But the characterof Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna andVronsky. It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even meanin certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), infiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive withdignity. There is something crucial, and something triumphant, notbeyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in thiseffect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man. 

The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of 'War and Peace' madeit as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as 'Anna Karenina'had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interestsdid not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always asstrange and of a humanity always as known. 

I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came to this greatestwork of his: I read 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol, ' which is so muchof the same quality as 'War and Peace;' and I read 'Policoushka' and mostof his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as Ihad never felt with the people of other fiction. 

His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle intoallegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with thesimple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomesimpatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher, he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can moveonly through the realization of themselves in others. The simple pathos, and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of 'Poticoushka, 'the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large thanall his parables; and 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, ' the Philistineworldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the worldthan such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye havethe Light. " A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man whohas the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or tolet it rust out in disuse. 

Terrible as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' was, it had a moral effect dramaticallywhich it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, andapplied to marriage the lesson of one evil marriage. In fine, Tolstoy iscertainly not to be held up as infallible. He is very, distinctlyfallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certainthings it seems a failure. There was but one life ever lived upon theearth which was without failure, and that was Christ's, whose erring andstumbling follower Tolstoy is. There is no other example, no otherideal, and the chief use of Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age, after nineteen centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony forcharacter, and the creed for the life. I recognize the truth of thiswithout pretending to have been changed in anything but my point of viewof it. What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean andsordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy. 

Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he can never teach me. I am long past the age when I could wish to form myself upon anotherwriter, and I do not think I could now insensibly take on the likeness ofanother; but his work has been a revelation and a delight to me, such asI am sure I can never know again. I do not believe that in the wholecourse of my reading, and not even in the early moment of my literaryenthusiasms, I have known such utter satisfaction in any writer, and thissupreme joy has come to me at a time of life when new friendships, not tosay new passions, are rare and reluctant. It is as if the best wine atthis high feast where I have sat so long had been kept for the last, andI need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judgingvintages. In fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full ofmiracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, sothat I could profit most by it. I believe if I had not turned the cornerof my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have beenable to know him as fully as I did. He has been to me that finalconsciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on "Life. "I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt ofbefore, and began at least to discern my relations to the race, withoutwhich we are each nothing. The supreme art in literature had its highesteffect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with thewish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind, which any mancan pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy. 

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Account of one's reading is an account of one's life Adam Bede Affections will not be bidden Air of looking down on the highest Alliance of the tragic and the comic Anthony Trollope Authors I must call my masters Capriciousness of memory: what it will hold and what lose Celebration of the monkey and the goat in us Conquest of Granada Contemptible he found our pseudo-equality Criticism still remains behind all the other literary arts Dickens is purely democratic Escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams Fictions subtle effect for good and for evil on the young Finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort Had the sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy Hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon Hazlitt He undid my hands Hospitable gift of making you at home with him In school there was as little literature then as there is now Inexperience takes this effect (literary lewdness) for realit Jews are still the chosen people Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life Lamb Lewd literature seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the life Life of Goldsmith Live it slowly into the past Lubricity of literature Made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors Men who bully and truckle Mustache, which in those days devoted a man to wickedness My own youth now seems to me rather more alien My reading gave me no standing among the boys Neither worse nor better because of the theatre Never appeals to the principle which sniffs, in his reader None of the passions are reasoned, Not very distinctly know their dreams from their experiences Now little notion what it was about, but I love its memory Our horrible sham of a slave-based freedom Pendennis Prejudice against certain words that I cannot overcome President Garfield Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less Rape of the Lock Rapture of the new convert could not last Reservations as to the times when he is not a master Responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is Secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise Self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire Self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality Should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them Slave-based freedom So long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs Society, as we have it, was necessarily a sham Somehow expressed the feelings of his day Somewhat too studied grace Speaks it is not with words and blood, but with words and ink Spit some hapless victim: make him suffer and the reader laugh Style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb Surcharge all imitations of life and character Surcharged in the serious moods, and caricatured in the comic Swedenborg Tales of the Alhambra The great doctor's orotundity and ronderosity To be for good or evil whatsoever I really was Toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted Trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them Tried to like whatever they bade me like Truth is beyond invention Unmeet for ladies Vicar of Wakefield Vices and foibles which are inherent in the system of things We did not know that we were poor We see nothing whole, neither life nor art What I had not I could hope for without unreason What we thought ruin, but what was really release When was love ever reasoned? Wide leisure of a country village Women who snub and crawl Words of learned length and thundering sound World's memory is equally bad for failure and success Worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke You may do a great deal (of work), and not get on