Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader Part 34

=_Richard Grant White,[56] 1822-._=

From "Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare."

=_240._= THE CHARACTER OF SHAKESPEARE'S STYLE.

Writing for the general public, he used such language as would convey his meaning to his auditors,--the common phraseology of his period.

But what a language was that! In its capacity for the varied and exact expression of all moods of mind, all forms of thought, all kinds of emotion, a tongue unequaled by any other known to literature! A language of exhaustless variety; strong without ruggedness, and flexible without effeminacy. A manly tongue; yet bending itself gracefully and lovingly to the tenderest and the daintiest needs of woman, and capable of giving utterance to the most awful and impressive thoughts, in homely words that come from the lips, and go to the heart, of childhood. It would seem as if this language had been preparing itself for centuries to be the fit medium of utterance for the world's greatest poet. Hardly more than a generation had pa.s.sed since the English tongue had reached its perfect maturity; just time enough to have it well worked into the unconscious usage of the people, when Shakespeare appeared, to lay upon it a burden of thought which would test its extremest capability. He found it fully formed and developed, but not yet uniformed and cramped and disciplined by the lexicographers and rhetoricians,--those martinets of language, who seem to have lost for us in force and flexibility as much as they have gained for us in precision. The phraseology of that day was notably large and simple among ordinary writers and speakers.

Among the college-bred writers and their imitators, there was too great a fondness for little conceits; but even with them this was an extraneous blemish, like that sometimes found in the ornament upon a n.o.ble building. Shakespeare seized this instrument to whose tones all ears were open, and with the touch of a master he brought out all its harmonies. It lay ready to any hand; but his was the first to use it with absolute control; and among all its successors, great as some are, he has had, even in this single respect, no rival. No unimportant condition of his supreme mastery over expression was his entire freedom from restraint--it may almost be said from consciousness--in the choice of language. He was no precisian, no etymologist, no purist. He was not purposely writing literature. The only criticism that he feared was that of his audience, which represented the English people of all grades above the peasantry. These he wished should not find his writing incomprehensible or dull: no more. If we except the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare wrote the best English that has yet been written.

[Footnote 56: A native of New York City; distinguished as a student and editor of Shakespeare, and more recently for his critical articles on the English language and grammar.]

=_Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823-._= (Manual, p. 531).

From "Atlantic Essays."

=_241._= ELEGANCE OF FRENCH STYLE.

In France alone among living nations is literature habitually pursued as an art; and in consequence of this, despite the seeds of decay which imperialism sowed, French prose-writing has no rival in contemporary literature. We cannot fully recognize this fact through translations, because only the most sensational French books appear to be translated.

But as French painters and actors now habitually surpa.s.s all others even in what are claimed as the English qualities,--simplicity and truth,--so do French prose-writers excel. To be set against the brutality of Carlyle and the shrill screams of Ruskin, there is to be seen across the Channel the extraordinary fact of an actual organization of good writers, the French Academy, whose influence all nations feel. Under their authority we see introduced into literary work an habitual grace and perfection, a clearness and directness, a light and pliable strength, and a fine shading of expression, such as no other tongue can even define. We see the same high standard in their criticism, in their works of research, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and in short throughout literature. What is there in any other language, for instance, to be compared with the voluminous writings of Sainte-Beuve, ranging over all history and literature, and carrying into all, that incomparable style, so delicate, so brilliant, so equable, so strong,--touching all themes, not with the blacksmith's hand of iron, but with the surgeon's hand of steel.

In the average type of French novels, one feels the superiority to the English in quiet power, in the absence of the sensational and exaggerated, and in keeping close to the level of real human life. They rely for success upon perfection of style, and the most subtle a.n.a.lysis of human character; and therefore they are often painful,--just as Thackeray is painful,--because they look at artificial society, and paint what they see. Thus they dwell often on unhappy marriages, because such things grow naturally from the false social system in France. On the other hand, in France there is very little house-breaking, and bigamy is almost impossible, so that we hear delightfully little about them: whereas, if you subtract these from the current English novels, what is there left?

=_Charles G.o.dfrey Leland,[57] 1824._=

From "Meister Karl's Sketch-book."

=_242._= ASPECT OF NUREMBERG.

There is a picturesque disorder--a lyrical confusion about the entire place, which is perfectly irresistible. Turrets shoot up in all sorts of ways, on all sorts of occasions, upon all sorts of houses; and little boxes, with delicate Gothic windows, cling to their sides and to one another, like barnacles to a ship; while the houses themselves are turned round and about in so many positions that you wonder that a few are not upside down or lying on their sides by way of completing the original arrangement of no arrangement at all. It always seemed to me as if the buildings in Nuremberg had, like the furniture in Irving's tale, been indulging over night in a very irregular dance, and suddenly stopped in the most complicated part of a confusion worse confounded.

Galleries, quaint staircases, and towers with projecting upper stories, as well as eccentric chimneys, demented door-ways, insane weather-vanes, and highly original steeples, form the most common-place materials in building; and it has more than once occurred to me that the architects of this city, even at the present day, must have imbibed their principles; not from the lecture-room, but from the most remarkable inspirations of some romantic scene-painter. During the last two centuries men appear to have striven, with a most uncommendable zeal, all over Christendom, to root out and extirpate every trace of the Gothic. In Nuremberg alone they have religiously preserved what little they originally had in domestic architecture, and added to it....

Nuremberg, like Avignon, is one of the very few cities which have retained in an almost perfect state, the feudal walls and turrets with which they were invested by the middle ages. At regular intervals along these walls occur little towers, for their defence, reminding one of beads strung on a rosary; the great watch-tower at the gate, with its projecting machicolation, forming the pendent cross,--the whole serving to guard the town within from the dangers of war, even as the rosary protects the city of Mansoul from the attacks of Sin and Death--though, sooth to say, since the invention of gunpowder and the Reformation, both the one and the other appear to have lost much of their former efficacy.

Directly through the center of the town runs a small stream called the Pegnitz, "dividing the town into two nearly equal halves, named after the two great churches situated within them; the northern being termed St. Sebald's, and the southern, St. Lawrence side."

In the northern part of the division of St. Sebaldus rises a high hill, formed, at the summit, of vast rocks, on which is situated the ancient Reicheveste, or Imperial Castle, whose origin is fairly lost in the dark old days of Heathenesse. From it the traveller can obtain an admirable view of the romantic town below. In regarding it, I was irresistibly reminded of the remarkable resemblance existing between most of its buildings and the children's toys manufactured by the ingenious artisans of Nuremberg and its vicinity.

[Footnote 57: A native of Philadelphia, who has resided much abroad, and pursued a varied literary career; he possesses a familiarity with the German language and character, which he has turned to good account in the comic ballads by Hans Breitman.]

=_George William Curtis, 1824-._= (Manual, p. 504.)

From "Nile Notes of a Howadji."

=_243._= UNDER THE PALMS.

Thenceforward, in the land of Egypt, palms are perpetual. They are the only foliage of the Nile; for we will not harm the modesty of a few mimosas and sycamores, by foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of villages. They fringe the sh.o.r.e and the horizon.

The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float gloriously among their trunks; on the ground beneath are flowers; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade, nor the tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its dusk at evening. The children play under them; the old men crone and smoke; the surly bison and the conceited camels repose. The old Bible-pictures are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer colors, than in the venerable book.

... But the eye never wearies of palms, more than the ear of singing-birds. Solitary they stand upon the sand, or upon the level, fertile land in groups, with a grace and dignity that no tree surpa.s.ses.

Very soon the eye beholds in their forms the original type of the columns which it will afterwards admire in the temples. Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in those western gardens--but to artists living among them and seeing only them! men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji be a palm, wide-waving peace and plenty, and feeling his kin to the Parthenon and Raphael's pictures.

But nature is absolute taste, and has no pure ornament, so that the palm is no less useful than beautiful. The family is infinite, and ill understood. The cocoa-nut, date, and sago, are all palms. Ropes and sponges are wrought of their tough interior fibre. The various fruits are nutritious; the wood, the roots, and the leaves, are all consumed.

It is one of nature's great gifts to her spoiled sun-darlings. Whoso is born of the sun is made free of the world. Like the poet Thompson, he may put his hands in his pockets and eat apples at leisure.

=_John L. McConnell, 1826-._= (Manual, p. 510.)

From "Western Characters."

=_244._= THE EARLY WESTERN POLITICIAN.

He was tall, gaunt, angular, swarthy, active, and athletic. His hair was invariably black as the wing of the raven. Even in that small portion which the cap of racc.o.o.n-skin left exposed to the action of sun and rain, the gray was but thinly scattered, imparting to the monotonous darkness only a more iron character.... A stoop in the shoulders indicated that, in times past, he had been in the habit of carrying a heavy rifle, and of closely examining the ground over which he walked; but what the chest thus lost in depth it gained in breadth. His lungs had ample s.p.a.ce in which to play. There was nothing pulmonary even in the drooping shoulders....

From shoulders thus bowed hung long, muscular arms, sometimes, perhaps, dangling a little ungracefully, but always under the command of their owner, and ready for any effort, however violent. These were terminated by broad, bony hands, which looked like grapnels; their grasp, indeed, bore no faint resemblance to the hold of those symmetrical instruments.

Large feet, whose toes were usually turned in, like those of the Indian, were wielded by limbs whose vigor and activity were in keeping with the figure they supported. Imagine, with these peculiarities, a free, bold, rather swaggering gait, a swarthy complexion, and comformable features and tones of voice, and, excepting his costume, you have before your fancy a complete picture of the early western politician.

=_Sarah J. Lippincott,[58]_= about =_1833-_=. (Manual p. 484.)

From "Records of Five Years."

=_245._= DEATH IN TOWN AND COUNTRY.

Up the long ascent it moved,--that shadow of our mortal sorrow and perishable earthly estate, that shadow of the dead man's hea.r.s.e, along the way his feet had often trod, past the spring over whose brink he may have often bent with thirsting lip, past lovely green glades, mossy banks, and fairy forests of waving ferns, on which his eye had often dwelt with a vague and soft delight; and so pa.s.sed out of our view. But its memory went not out of our hearts that day.

In this pure, healthful region, where nature seems so unworn, so youthful and vigorous, where dwell simplicity, humble comfort, and quiet happiness, death has startled us as something strange and unnatural....

How different is it in the city!... There, on many a corner, one is confronted with the black, significant sign of the undertaker's "dreadful trade," or comes upon some marble-yard, filled with a ghastly a.s.semblage of antic.i.p.atory gravestones and monuments; graceful broken columns, which are to typify the lovely incompleteness of some young life now full of beauty and promise; melancholy, drooping figures, types of grief forever inconsolable, destined, perhaps, to stand proxy for mourning young widows now happy wives; sculptured lambs, patiently waiting to take their places above the graves of little children whom yet smiling mothers nightly lay to sleep in soft cribs, without the thought of a deeper dark and silence of a night not far away, or of the dreary beds soon to be prepared for their darlings "i' the earth."

[Footnote 58: Originally and very favorably known by the a.s.sumed name of "Grace Greenwood."]

=_Francis Bret Harte,[59] 1837-._=