Americanisms and Briticisms Part 4

II. Express it honestly.

III. Don't review a book which you cannot take seriously.

IV. Don't review a book with which you are out of sympathy. That is to say, put yourself in the author's place, and try to see his work from his point, of view, which is sure to be a coign of vantage.

V. Stick to the text. Review the book before you, and not the book some other author might have written; _obiter dicta_ are as valueless from the critic as from the judge. Don't go off on a tangent. And also don't go round in a circle. Say what you have to say, and stop. Don't go on writing about and about the subject, and merely weaving garlands of flowers of rhetoric.

VI. Beware of the Sham Sample, as Charles Reade called it. Make sure that the specimen bricks you select for quotation do not give a false impression of the _facade_, and not only of the elevation merely, but of the perspective also, and of the ground-plan.

VII. In reviewing a biography or a history, criticise the book before you, and don't write a parallel essay, for which the volume you have in hand serves only as a peg.

VIII. In reviewing a work of fiction, don't give away the plot. In the eyes of the novelist this is the unpardonable sin. And, as it discounts the pleasure of the reader also, it is almost equally unkind to him.

IX. Don't try to prove every successful author a plagiarist. It may be that many a successful author has been a plagiarist, but no author ever succeeded because of his plagiary.

X. Don't break a b.u.t.terfly on a wheel. If a book is not worth much, it is not worth reviewing.

XI. Don't review a book as an east wind would review an apple-tree--so it was once said Douglas Jerrold was wont to do. Of what profit to any one is mere bitterness and vexation of spirit?

XII. Remember that the critic's duty is to the reader mainly, and that it is to guide him not only to what is good, but to what is best. Three parts of what is contemporary must be temporary only.

Having in the past now and again fallen from grace myself and written criticism, I know that on such occasions these Twelve Good Rules would have been exceedingly helpful to me had I then possessed them; therefore I offer them now hopefully to my fellow-critics. But I find myself in a state of humility (to which few critics are accustomed), and I doubt how far my good advice will be heeded. I remember that, after reporting the speech in which Poor Richard's maxims were all ma.s.sed together, Franklin tells us that "thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and approved the doctrine; and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon."

1890

THREE AMERICAN ESSAYISTS

"Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coa.r.s.e, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison," said Doctor Johnson a many years ago; and Doctor Johnson's own style, elaborate if not artificial, and orotund if not polysyllabic, might no doubt have been improved if the writer of the _Rambler_ had given more of his days and nights to the study of the chief writer of the _Spectator_. Doctor Johnson's advice is still quoted often, perhaps it is still followed sometimes. Yet it is outworn and not for to-day. We have nowadays better weapons than the Brown Bess Johnson appreciated so highly--breech-loading rifles incomparably superior to the smooth-bore he praises. Owing in part, no doubt, to the influence of Addison and to the advice of Johnson, we have had writers of late whose style is easier than Addison's, more graceful, more varied, more precise. Set a page of one of Addison's little apologues beside a page of one of Hawthorne's tales, and note how much more pellucid Hawthorne's style is, how much more beautiful, how much more distinguished. Contrast one of Addison's criticisms with one of Matthew Arnold's, and observe not only how much more complete is the terminology of the art now than it was when the _Spectator_ was appearing twice a week, but also how much more acute and how much more flexible the mind of the later critic than the mind of the earlier.

Compare Addison's essays with those which Mr. George William Curtis has recently collected into a volume, _From the Easy Chair_, and you will see no reason to adopt any theory of literary degeneracy in our day. We are all of us the heirs of the ages, no doubt, but it is in an unusual degree that Mr. Curtis is the inheritor of the best traditions of the English essay. He is the direct descendant of Addison, whose style is overrated; of Steele, whose morality is humorous; of Goldsmith, whose writing was angelic, and of Irving, whose taste was pretty. Mr. Curtis recalls all of these, yet he is like none of them. Humorous as they are and charming, he is somewhat st.u.r.dier, of a more robust fibre, with a stronger respect for plain living and high thinking, with a firmer grasp on the duties of life.

For the most part these essays of Mr. Curtis's are pleasant papers of reminiscence, of gentle moralizing, and of kindly satire; but he is a swift and a careless reader who does not detect the underlying preachment which is at the core of most of them. Mr. Curtis is not content to scourge lightly the sn.o.bbery and the vulgarity which cling to the fringe of fashion, and sometimes get nearer to the centre of society; he also sets up a high standard of morality in public life. The divorce between Politics and Society--in the narrower meaning of the words--is not wholesome for either party. Mr. Curtis reminds us that "good government is one of the best things in the world," and that the wise man "knows that good things of that kind are not cheap." This is a quotation from the highly instructive and permanently pertinent paper on "Honestus at the Caucus," which begins with the a.s.sertion that "a man who is easily discouraged, who is not willing to put the good seed out of sight and wait for results, who desponds if he cannot obtain everything at once, and who thinks the human race lost if he is disappointed, will be very unhappy if he persists in taking part in politics. There is no sphere in which self-deception is easier."

There are but few essays with a political intention in this delightful little book. The rest are papers mainly about people, about "Edward Everett in 1862," and about "Emerson Lecturing," and about "d.i.c.kens Reading," and about "Robert Browning in Florence," and about "Wendell Phillips at Harvard," and about "A Little Dinner with Thackeray," and about Th.o.r.eau, who had "a staccato style of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly as if preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker did in society." Not a few of them have to do with the players of the past, with the vocalists who are now but memories of dead and gone delight, with the performers on musical instruments--"Thalberg and other Pianists," "At the Opera in 1864,"

"Jenny Lind." Was the gentle Jenny Lind really a vocalist, or was she only a singer of songs, unforgetable now because she sang them? As we read these reminders of past delights we find ourselves wondering how Jenny Lind would please the denizens of certain Unmusical Boxes at the Metropolitan Opera-house, "who have an insatiable desire to proceed with their intellectual cultivation by audible conversation during the performance."

In the thick of the tussle of life here in this huge city of ours, where strident voices fill the market-place, the mellow note of the essayist is heard distinctly as he leans back in his Easy Chair, modulating every syllable with exquisite felicity. And perhaps the author of the _Potiphar Papers_ is in his way quite as characteristic of New York as any of the more self-seeking notorieties who din into our ears the catalogue of their merits. In a great city there is room for all, for the boss and the heeler and the tough, as well as for the _Tatler_, the _Spectator_, the _Idler_, the _Rambler_, and the _Citizen of the World_.

A citizen of the world, Mr. Curtis is, beyond all question, really cosmopolitan; and, as Colonel Higginson told us a dozen years ago, "to be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country."

When Colonel Higginson came to New York last year to deliver before the Nineteenth Century Club the lecture on _The New World and the New Book_, which gives its t.i.tle to a recent collection of his essays, this epigram was quoted by the president of the club in introducing the speaker of the evening. It is perhaps now the best known of Colonel Higginson's many sharp sayings; it is better known probably than his a.s.sertion that the American has "a drop more of nervous fluid" than the Englishman--an a.s.sertion which Matthew Arnold failed to understand but did not fail to denounce. No doubt it is hard for a writer as witty as Colonel Higginson to find one or two of his acute sentences quivering in the public memory, while others as well aimed fall off idly. But it is with the epigram as with the lyric; we shoot an arrow in the air, it falls to earth we know not where; and we can rarely foretell which shaft is going to split the willow wand.

Colonel Higginson need not be ashamed to go down to posterity as the author of one phrase, for many a writer is saved from oblivion by a single apothegm; nor need he be afraid of this fate, for there are "good things" a-plenty in this new volume, and some of them are certain to do good service in international combat, and to go hustling across the Atlantic again and again. There is an a.r.s.enal of epigram in the little essay called "Weapons of Precision," and it is pleasant to see that their effective range is more than 3000 miles. At that distance they have already wounded Mr. Andrew Lang, and forced from him a cry of pain.

So sensitive did Mr. Lang show himself to these transatlantic darts that he allowed himself to reveal his ignorance of Colonel Higginson's work, of the Peabody Museum, and of various other men and things in America--a knowledge of which was a condition precedent to debate on the question.

This question is very simple: Is there such a man as an American? Has he ever done anything justifying his existence? Or is he simply a second-rate, expatriated Englishman, a colonist who is to say ditto forever and a day? If we are only debased duplicates of the Poor Islanders, then our experiment here is a failure, and our continued existence is not worth while. If we are something other than English, then it may be as well to understand ourselves, and to throw off any lingering bond of colonialism. This is what Colonel Higginson's book was intended to help us to do. "Nothing is further," he has said in his preface, from his "wish than to pander to any petty national vanity,"

his sole desire being to a.s.sist in creating a modest and reasonable self-respect. "The Civil War bequeathed to us Americans, twenty-five years ago, a great revival of national feeling; but this has been followed in some quarters, during the last few years, by a curious relapse into something of the old colonial and apologetic att.i.tude." No doubt this att.i.tude is not characteristic of the best; it is to be seen only in the East--chiefly in New York and in Boston--chiefly among the half-educated, for the man of wide culture looks for light rather to Paris and Berlin than to London.

Colonel Higginson proves abundantly, with a cloud of witnesses, that one of the differences between the American and the Englishman is the former's greater quickness. We are lighter and swifter in our appreciation of humor, for example. Indeed, it is amusing to observe that we speak of the English as obtuse in humor, just as they speak of the Scotch. I think that Colonel Higginson succeeds also in showing that there is greater fineness of taste in literature and in art in America; at least we do not take our dime novels seriously, while in England the leading weekly reviews really consider the stories of Miss Marryat and of Mr. Farjeon.

Of course "the added drop of nervous fluid" must be paid for somehow; in all international comparisons the great law of compensations holds good.

Recently a leading American scientist told me that he thought there was, in American scientific work, a lack of the energy he had observed in the English. It was of pure science he was speaking; as far as applied science is concerned, there seems to be no lack of energy visible in the United States. That this criticism is just I cannot deny, having no wish to fall into the pitfall of discussing a subject of which I have no knowledge whatever. But if there is a possible loss of energy, there is an indisputable gain in mental flexibility, in openness of mind. There are Philistines in the United States, as there are in Great Britain, a many of them on both sides of the Atlantic; but between the British Philistine and the American there is an essential difference. The British Philistine knows not the light, and he hates it and he refuses to receive it. The American Philistine knows not the light, but he is not hostile, and he is not only ready to receive it, but eager. This is a difference which goes to the root of the matter.

I have delayed so long over the subject of Colonel Higginson's book that I have now no s.p.a.ce to speak of its style or of its separate chapters.

"Weapons of Precision" I have already praised; it is a protest against vulgarity of style--against the bludgeon and the boomerang as arms of debate; it is a series of swift, rapier-like thrusts, to be considered by all who think that our language is inferior to the French in point and in brilliancy. Indeed, the whole book may be commended to those who can enjoy style and wit and learning and a knowledge of the world and a wisdom derived from men as well as from books. Especially may the essays on the "Shadow of Europe," on the "Perils of American Humor," on the "Evolution of an American," and on the "Trick of Self-Depreciation"

be recommended to all who are downcast about the position of literature and of the arts in these United States, or about the United States as a nation. These essays are tonic and stimulant; and if their Americanism may seem to some aggressive, this is a failing which might become more common than it is without becoming dangerous--if always it were characterized by knowledge as wide as Colonel Higginson's and by wit as keen.

To no one may I venture to recommend Colonel Higginson's book more urgently than to Miss Agnes Repplier, who has sent forth a second volume of her entertaining magazine articles grouped under the excellent t.i.tle of _Points of View_. Miss Repplier is very clever and very colonial.

Although a Philadelphian, she has apparently never heard of the Declaration of Independence. From the company she keeps it is perhaps not an unfair inference to suggest that she seems to be sorry that she is not herself a Poor Islander. She is a well-read woman, with all literature open before her, yet she quotes almost altogether from the contributors to the contemporary British magazines; and we feel that if birds of a feather flock together we have here in the eagle's nest by some mischance hatched a British sparrow.

Miss Repplier's subjects are excellent--"A Plea for Humor," "Books that Have Hindered Me," "Literary Shibboleths," "Fiction in the Pulpit," and the like; and she discusses them with ready humor and feminine individuality. She quotes abundantly and often aptly--and apt quotation is a difficult art. But the writers from whom she quotes are not always of that compliment. Bagehot had the gift of the winged phrase, and a quotation from his masculine prose is always welcome. But a glance down the list of the others from whom Miss Repplier quotes will show that she mischooses often. She seems to lack the sense of literary perspective; and for her one writer is apparently as good as another--so long as he is a contemporary Englishman.

There is no index to Miss Repplier's book, but I have found amus.e.m.e.nt in making out a hasty list of those from whom she quotes. I do not vouch for its completeness or for its absolute accuracy, but it will serve to show that she is more at home in Great Britain than in the United States, and that her mind travels more willingly in the little compartments of a British railway carriage than in the large parlor cars of her native land. Besides Bagehot she cites Mr. Lang, Mr. Birrell, Mr.

Shorthouse, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Radford, Mr. Swinburne, Mr.

George Saintsbury, Mr. Gosse, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Pater, Mr.

Froude, Mr. Oscar Wilde, and Miss "Vernon Lee." There is also one quotation from Doctor Everett, and one more from Doctor Holmes, or perhaps two. But there is nothing from Lowell, than whom a more quotable writer never lived. In like manner we find Miss Repplier discussing the novels and characters of Miss Austen and of Scott, of d.i.c.kens, of Thackeray, and of George Eliot, but never once referring to the novels or characters of Hawthorne. Just how it was possible for any clever American woman to write nine essays in criticism, rich in references and quotations, without once happening on Lowell or on Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable.

Colonialism is scarcely an adequate explanation for this devotion to the first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate writers of a foreign country to the neglect of the first-rate writers of her own. Perhaps the secret is to be sought rather in Miss Repplier's lack of literary standards. In literature as in some other things a woman's opinion is often personal and accidental; it depends on the way the book has happened to strike her; the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Miss Repplier fails to apprehend the distinction between the authors who are to be taken seriously and the writers who are not to be taken seriously--between the man of letters who is somebody and the scribbler who is merely, in the French phrase, _quelconque_--n.o.body in particular.

There is no need to go over the list of the persons from whom Miss Repplier quotes, and with whose writings she seems to have an equal familiarity; certain names on it are those of comic personalities not to be accorded the compliment of serious criticism.

Despite Miss Repplier's reliance on those British authors who have come to America to enlighten us with lectures in words of one syllable--to borrow a neat phrase of Colonel Higginson's--her _Points of View_ are well chosen, and the outlook from them is pleasant. She writes brightly always, and often brilliantly. She does herself injustice by her deference to those whom she invites to her board, for she is better company than her guests. Her criticism one need not fully agree with to call it generally sensible and well put, and sometimes necessary.

Perhaps her best pages contain her protest against critical shams and literary affectations. She has no patience with the man who, while really liking Mr. Haggard's tales of battle, murder, and sudden death, absurdly pretends to a preference for Tolsto and Ibsen, whom his soul abhors. She has pleasant humor in her remark that those who read _Robert Elsmere_ nowadays would think it wrong to enjoy _Tom Jones_, while the people who enjoyed _Tom Jones_--when it first came out--would have thought it wrong to read _Robert Elsmere_; and "that the people who, wishing to be on the safe side of virtue, think it wrong to read either, are scorned greatly as lacking true moral discrimination."

A bias in favor of one's own countrymen is absurd when it leads us to accept native geese for swans of Avon; but even then it is more creditable than a bias in favor of foreigners. So it is to be hoped that some of Miss Repplier's Philadelphian friends will take her to Independence Hall next Fourth of July and show her the bell that proclaimed liberty throughout the land. Then, on their way home, they might drop into a book-store and make Miss Repplier a present of Colonel Higginson's _The New World and the New Book_, and of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge's _Studies in History_ (wherein is to be found his acute account of "Colonialism in America"), and also of that volume of Lowell's prose which contains the famous essay "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners."

1892

DISSOLVING VIEWS

I.--OF MARK TWAIN'S BEST STORY

The boy of to-day is fortunate indeed, and, of a truth, he is to be congratulated. While the boy of yesterday had to stay his stomach with the unconscious humor of _Sandford and Merton_, the boy of to-day may get his fill of fun and of romance and of adventure in the _Story of a Bad Boy_, in _Treasure Island_, in _Tom Brown_, and in _Tom Sawyer_, and then in the sequel to _Tom Sawyer_, wherein Tom himself appears in the very nick of time, like a young G.o.d from the machine. Sequels of stories which have been widely popular are not a little risky. _Huckleberry Finn_ is a sharp exception to the general rule of failure. Although it is a sequel, it is quite as worthy of wide popularity as _Tom Sawyer_.

An American critic once neatly declared that the late G. P. R. James. .h.i.t the bull's-eye of success with his first shot, and that forever thereafter he went on firing through the same hole. Now this is just what Mark Twain has not done: _Huckleberry Finn_ is not an attempt to do _Tom Sawyer_ over again. It is a story quite as unlike its predecessor as it is like. Although Huck Finn appeared first in the earlier book, and although Tom Sawyer reappears in the later, the scenes and the characters are otherwise wholly different. Above all, the atmosphere of the story is different. _Tom Sawyer_ was a tale of boyish adventure in a village in Missouri, on the Mississippi River, and it was told by the author. _Huckleberry Finn_ is autobiographic; it is a tale of boyish adventure along the Mississippi River told as it appeared to Huck Finn.

There is not in _Huckleberry Finn_ any one scene quite as funny as those in which Tom Sawyer gets his friends to whitewash the fence for him, and then uses the spoils thereby acquired to attain the highest distinction of the Sunday-school the next morning. Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and the girl are lost in the darkness; and when Tom Sawyer suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in _Tom Sawyer_ was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single foot-print in the sand of the sea-sh.o.r.e.

But though _Huckleberry Finn_ may not quite reach these two highest points of _Tom Sawyer_, the general level of the later story is indisputably higher than that of the earlier. For one thing, the skill with which the character of Huck Finn is maintained is marvellous. We see everything through his eyes--and they are his eyes, and not a pair of Mark Twain's spectacles. And the comments on what he sees are his comments--the comments of an ignorant, superst.i.tious, sharp, healthy boy, brought up as Huck Finn had been brought up; they are not speeches put into his mouth by the author. One of the most artistic things in the book--and that Mark Twain is a literary artist of a very high order all who have considered his later writings critically cannot but confess--one of the most artistic things in _Huckleberry Finn_ is the sober self-restraint with which Mr. Clemens lets Huck Finn set down, without any comment at all, scenes which would have afforded the ordinary writer matter for endless moral and political and sociological disquisition. I refer particularly to the accounts of the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, and of the shooting of Boggs by Colonel Sherburn. Here are two incidents of the rough old life of the South-western States and of the Mississippi Valley, forty or fifty years ago, of the old life which is now rapidly pa.s.sing away under the influence of advancing civilization and increasing commercial prosperity, but which has not wholly disappeared even yet, although a slow revolution in public sentiment is taking place. The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is a vendetta as deadly as any Corsican could wish, yet the parties to it were honest, brave, sincere, good Christian people, probably people of deep religious sentiment. None the less we see them taking their guns to church, and, when occasion serves, joining in what is little better than a general ma.s.sacre. The killing of Boggs by Colonel Sherburn is told with equal sobriety and truth; and the later scene in which Colonel Sherburn cows and lashes the mob which has set out to lynch him is one of the most vigorous bits of writing Mark Twain has done.

In _Tom Sawyer_ we saw Huckleberry Finn from the outside; in the present volume we see him from the inside. He is almost as much a delight to any one who has been a boy as was Tom Sawyer. But only he or she who has been a boy can truly enjoy this record of his adventures and of his sentiments and of his sayings. Old maids of either s.e.x will wholly fail to understand him, or to like him, or to see his significance and his value. Like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn is a genuine boy; he is neither a girl in boy's clothes, like many of the modern heroes of juvenile fiction, nor is he a "little man," a full-grown man cut down; he is a boy, just a boy, only a boy. And his ways and modes of thought are boyish. As Mr. F.