Emerson and Other Essays

n itself. To speak strictly and not irreverently, he had his own panacea,-the development of each individual; and he was impatient of any other. He did not believe in association. The very

y: "He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for t

Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, had in fact got hold of the issue which was to control the fortunes of the republic for thirty years. The difference between them and the other reformers was this: that the Abol

, an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of some sort. The abolition movement afforded the purest form of an indulgence in human feeling that was ever offered to men. It was intoxicating. It made the ag

d are narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and affect us as the insane do." And again: "By the side of these men [the idealists] the hot agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than others. Of the two, I own I like the speculators the best. They have some piety which looks with faith to a fair future unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it." He was drawn into the abolition cause by

t the social order without hesitation or misgiving. I like these; they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of any sort. But the professed philanthropists, it is strange and horrible to say, are an altogether odious set of people, whom one would shun as the worst of bores and canters. But my conscience, my unhappy conscience respects that hapless class who see the faults and stains of our social order, and who pray and strive incessantly to right the wrong; this annoying class

r, was at the bottom of Emerson's anger. His abolitionism was secondary to his main mission, his main enthusiasm. It is for this reason that he stands on a plane of intellect where he might, under other circumstances, have met and defea

as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. Their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? Their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare the

inely developed understanding only works truly and with all its force when it stands for animal good; that is, for property. He looks at the Union as an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence of it so far. What he finds already written he will defend. Lucky that so much had got well written when he came, for he has no faith in the power of self-government. Not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all question, have been a refugee. He praises Adams and J

and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. It cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it, and made the law.... Nobody doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. How came he there? ... But the question which history will ask is broader. In the final hour when he was forced by the peremptory necessity of the cl

nd hooted at by young law students." Emerson records a similar experience at a later date: "If I were dumb, yet would I have gone and mowed and muttered or made signs. The mob roar

state of excitement about the same idea, who years before spoke

ry of Webster drew Emerson into the arena, and made a dramatic episode in his life. But his battle with those forces had begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta Kappa

n we come to analyze the relations he bore to some of the local agitations of his day, it becomes necessary to weave in with the matter a discussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded in the life of his ti

ration to generation the course of a truth which at first sustained the spirit of man, till we see it petrify into a dogma which now kills the spirits of men. Conscience may destroy the character. The tragedy of the New England judge enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law was no n

life is, is the timidity with which we assert our moral sentiment. We are made of it, the world is built by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves by its side.

king passage no one will quarrel,

moral law. There is no escape from it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and snow, wind

egrades all statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent revelation. They report the truth. It is the truth." In this last extract we have Eme

all other men; makes known to him that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being existed; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all anew." Here we

s been put into the porridge of every Puritan child for six generations. A grown man can digest doctrine and sleep at night. But a young person of high purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie as

ered up by Miss Wilkins, and of which Miss Emily Dickinson was the last authentic voice. The spirit of this age has examined with an almost pathological interest this rescued society. We must go to it if we would u

guess. It was rescued by the two great regenerators of mankind, new land and war. The dispersion came, as Emerson said of the barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too soon. It happened that the country at large stood in need of New England as much as New England stood in need of the country. This congested virtue, in order to be saved, must be scattered. This ferment, in order to be kept w

iven land to till, foes to fight, the chance to renew its youth like the eagle. But during this period the relief had not yet come. The terrible pressure of Puritanism and conservatism in New En

t, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance o

e best citizens of the commonwealth,-statesmen, merchants, soldiers, men and women of affairs. They retained their idealism while becoming practical men. There is hardly an example of what we should have thought would be common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and mali

the reigning conventionalities. The rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the Bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to

want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasonable word." After discussing one or two of their proposals,-one of which was that the tiresome "uncles and aunts" of the enthusiasts should be placed by themselves in one delightful village, the dough, as Emerson says, be placed in one pan and the leaven in another,-he continues: "But it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims." Young Americans "are educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism ... which only embitters their sensibility to

n of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote." A less sympathetic observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them: "While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils sat 'gorgeously dressed,' talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go at a breach which another sort of elect persons were dev

were neither geniuses nor artists nor complete beings. Nor had they found their places or uses as yet. They were men and women seeking light. They walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. The Transcendentalists are not collectively important because their Sturm und Drang was intellectual and bloodless. Though Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau condemn, yet from the memorials that survive, one is more impressed with the sufferings than with the ludicrousness of these persons. There is something distressing about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries. They worry and contort and introspect. They rave and dream. They peep and theorize. They cut open the bello

e to her on October 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it unwritten. I ought

: "Strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I

s core of this seraph had once, but not for long, been shot with blood: he recalls only the pain of it. His relations with Margaret Fuller seem never normal, though they lasted for years. This brilliant woman was in dis

fterward. She wrote: "Mr. Greeley I like,-nay, more, love. He is in his habit a plebeian, in his heart a nobl

n human relationship, and was not only a very noble, but also a very womanly creature. Her marriage, her Italian life, and her tragic death light up with the splendor of reality the earlier and unhappy period of her life. This woman had been driven into her vagaries by the lack of something which she did not know existed, and which she sought blindly in metaphysics. Harriet Martineau writes of her: "It is the most grievous loss I have almost ever known in private history, the deferring of Margaret Fuller's married lif

hat almost reconciles us to all loss, so splendid is the outcome. The practical, dominant, insuppressible active temperaments who have a word for every emergency, and who carry the controlled force of ten men at their disposal, are

g up,-namely, Asceticism. It is probable that in dealing with Emerson's feelings about the plastic arts we have to do with what is really th

than his; with a walk which the public never see; with a fist in it which his own hand never gave him the model for; and with a gentleman in it which his parochial and 'bare-necessaries-of-life' sort of exterior gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine nothing in nature (which seems too to have a type for everything) like the want of correspondence between the Emerson that goes in at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at the ear. A heavy and vase-like blosso

s of an exasperating kind. One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from the taste of the Abolitionists. It was not merely their doctrines or their methods which offended him. He at one time refused to give Wendell Phillips his hand because of Phillips's treatment of his friend, Judge Hoar. One hardly knows whether to be p

the universe? "Is it not so much death?" The accounts of Emerson show him to have been a man in whom there was almost a hiatus between the senses and the most inward spirit of life. The lower register of sensations and emotions which domesticate a man into fellowship with common life was weak. Genial familiarity was to him impossible; laughter was almost a pain. "It is not the sea and pov

himself at will, nor could another reach him. The sensuous and ready contact with nature which more carnal people enjoy was unknown to him. He had eyes for the New England landscape, but for no other scenery. If there is one supreme sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of Venice seen from the water. This sight gr

ll time. The most vulgar plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from Athens than this cultivated saint. Everything in the world which must be felt with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him dead-letter. Art w

and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the weakness of the other.... At last they discover that all which at first drew them together-those once sacred features, that magical play of charms-was deciduous, had a prospective end like the scaffolding by which the house was built, and the purificati

met Burton at Boulogne. They met in the street, but did not speak. A few days later they were formally introduced at a dance. Of this she writes: "That was a n

e the corporation of a ship's company or of a fire club." In speaking of modern novels, he says: "There is no new element, no power, no furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. She was beautiful, and he fell in love.... Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed by character; after the highest and not after the lowest; the house in which character marries and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.... To each occurs soon after puberty, some event, or society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and t

ken, his conclusions will appear not merely false, but offensive. It makes no matter how exalted the personal character of the writer may be. N

the priesthood. We are not to imagine that there was in this doctrine anything peculiar to Emerson. But we are surprised to find the pessimism inherent in the doctrine overcome Emerson, to whom pessimism is foreign. Both doctrine and pessimism are a part of the Puritanism of the times. They show a society in which the intellect had long been used to analyze

, the primum mobile of the world. The books of any philosopher who slurs them or distorts them will hold up a false mirror to life. If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of huma

xponent of his own and of the New England temperament, which distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded as a sole guide to life for a young person of stro

nd the fire in the ice. On the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of professed lovers of poet

o should become a cult and a convention, and whose main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly canonized and embalmed in amber

these men he is cold. His temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands on the shelf of English poets like

orship of the New England landscape amounts to a religion. His poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we are alone in the fields and with the trees,-not English fields nor French lanes, but New England meadows and uplands. There is no human creature in sight, not even Emerson is there, but the wind and the flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the

The question is idle. The poems are alive now, and they may or may not survive the race whose spirit they embody; but one thing is plain: they have q

an be traced to various well-known and dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. The Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a few others belong to that class of poetry which, like

ly the ha

blue urn w

but the rest of the lines are commonplace. Throughout his poems there are good bits, happy an

fted through

lasted soun

, and his verse is often lame and unmusical, a fault which can be countervailed by nothing but force, and force he lacks. To say that h

a thousa

e univer

th one of

r of all

the impression his verse is apt to

t not freez

nt, very subtle and rare, very refined and elusive, if not altogether unique. This is the mystical

mulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will say nothing, but the presumption among those who are inclined towards the cult is that i

ing a bell at night, on our observing any common object, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our mind is or has just been thoroughly preoccupied with something else. This displacement of the attention occurs in its most notable form when we walk from the study into the open fields. Nature then attacks us on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissipates all focus of thought and dissolves our attention. If we happen to be mentally fatigued, and we take a walk in the country, a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, which nothin

reductio ad absurdum of poetry, because such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters the attention, and does to a certain extent superinduce the "blank misgivings" of mysticism. It does this, however, without going further and filling the mind with new life. If I bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and then say, "I am the slayer and the slain, I am the doubter and the doubt," I puzzle his mind, and may succeed in reawakening in him the sense he has often had come over him that we are ignorant of our own de

he has brought us to the hypnotic point. His prologue and overture are excellent, but wh

succeeding verses we are lapped into a charming reverie, and then at the end suddenly jolted by the question, "What is it all about?" In this poem we see expanded i

creates an ideal atmosphere in which his thought has the directness of great poetry. But he cannot do it in verse. He seeks in his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose: follow a logical method. He seems to know too much what he is about, and to be conten

ner of t

stars and t

hand and Pl

heart and Shake

corner feels to be true of himself." He has failed in the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which was stronger in its simplicity; becau

ertain words, gleam with rare significance." At the close of his essay on History he is trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. He is speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the Romans. For this he has been quit

closely following a thesis. Indeed, the lines are a translation. They were thought first, and poetry afterwards. Read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at once. Read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the connecti

a dramatic vigor, a mystery

Time, the hy

umb like bare

single in an

and fagots i

offer gifts a

stars, and sky th

hed garden, wa

orning wish

rbs and apple

parted silent

emn fillet sa

y is rich who owns the day.... They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friend

e matched in English only by bits from Sir Thomas Browne or Milton, or from the great poets. Heine might have written the following parable into verse, but it could n

mself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their wi

shall be expressed before it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish during a period when everybody is preoccupied with the fear of revolution. The provincial note which runs through all our literature down to the war resulted in one sense from our dependence upon Europe. "All American manners, language, and writings," says Emerson, "are derivative. We do not write from facts, but we wish to state the

ellow, and the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. The ravages of the war carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. The war did more than kill off a generation of scholars who would have succeeded these older scholars. It emptied the universities by calling all the survivors into the field of practical life; and after the war ensued a period during which all the learning of the land was lodged in the heads of these older worthies who had made their mark long before. A certain complacency which

an do, and no more eminent literati have lived during this century. They gave the country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. They chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely sources. They lived stainless lives, and die

come new learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next age. To their own times these secondary men often seem great because they are recognized and understood at once. We know the disadvantage under which these Humanists of ours worked. The shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs over us still. The conserv

. It has happened, however, that some of the tendencies of our commercial civilization go toward strengthening and riveting upon us the very traits encour

trading class, and here is the literary. A broad gulf separates the four; and provided a member of either can conciliate his own section, he can afford in a very large measure to despise the opinions of the other three. He has to some extent a refuge and a breakwater against the tyranny of what we call public opinion. But in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach; and the result is that if yo

re has always been so strong a factor in moulding the character of our citizens, that there is less differ

in the people about him. If one were obliged to describe the America of to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a sentence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Martineau written in 18

to account for the mediocrity of American literature. The merit of Emerson was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. He felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man about him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, and every da

elf-Reliance, Fate, Experience, or what-not, leads him to the same thought. His conclusion is always the finding of eloquence, courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the humblest reader. He knows that we are full of genius and surrounded by genius, and that w

mpossible. It is a fine thing, but it is imitative and secondary. It has paid the inheritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of pressure, Lowell assumed his real self under the guise of a pseudonym; and with his own hand he rescued a language, a type, a whole era of civilization from oblivion. Here gleams the dagger and here is Lowell revealed. His l

how literature should be created. The other men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, believed that literature was a very desirable article, a thing you could create if you were only smart enough. But Emerson had no litera

olt the very essence of all the age is not, and that part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and breaks into utter

reign influence might deserve a chapter by itself. Conservatism is not confined to this country. It is the very basis of all government. The bolts Emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his perception, are not provincial. They were found to carry inspiration to England and Germany. Many of the important men of the last half-century owe him a debt. It is not yet possible to give any account of his influence abroad, because the memoirs which will show it are only beginning to be published. We shall have them in due time; for Emerson was an outco

s revolting against the evils whose roots were in universal suffrage. By showing the identity in essence of all tyranny, and by bringing back the attention of political thinkers to its st

WHI

d but for them his notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of "American Lite

e, as a something or a somebody, would write up into the best possible m

he genius of Greece. His wealth outvalues the combined wealth of all modern Europe. The English mind is the o

England consists either of an academical bandying of a few old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or Aristotle

or the purpose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for the purpose of

to the student of church history. They are a part of his subject, of course, but if he insists upon using them as a tape measure and a d

ong ago rushed to America with their theodolites and their quadrants in their hands. They sized us up and they sized us

" and who corresponded to the English imagination with the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in America,-with Mormonism and car factories, stea

da, as the Greek poets arose out of the repulse of the Persians. It was impossible, it was unpre

an as a poet caused many a hard-thinking Oxford m

aking with him his portmanteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and his portmanteau. He would as soon think of getting his coats from Kansas as his thoughts from travel. And therefore every impression of America which the t

ous, so uniform that one man can hardly be distinguished from another, law-abiding, timid, and traditional; a community where the individual is suppressed by law, custom, and instinct, and in which, by

ed, he would recognize a somewhat feeble imitation of English poetry. The newspaper verses very fairly represent the average talent for poetry and average appreciation of

greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy are the same as t

can poets, and between them and the sky, float the Constitution of

d Longfellow have been much read in their day,-read by mill-hands and clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and doctors and divines

Whitman at all. He would never have met a man

London, and read the current essay on Whitman, would have been face

d he speaks for a class and type of human nature whose interest is more than local, whose prevalence is admitted,-a type which is

revolt from the drudgery of it, content themselves with the simplest satisfactions of the grossest need of

r and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed, has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined nature might well dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. Society has no hold on him. The trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as nothing compared with its satisfac

se of them, or define his relation to them. He spends the whole agony of his existence in an endeavor to docket them and deal with them. Hampered as he is by all that has been said and done bef

y an act as simple as death, he has

of suicides annually. It is no wonder, though the sociologists have been late in noting it,

civilized life. Their early training, at least their early attitude of mind towards life, has generally been respectable. That they should be criminally inclined goes without saying, becaus

how life appeared to him; what solace and what problems it presented. How often have we longed to know the

ed sincerely and normally through this entire experience, himself unconscious of wh

perfect education may be seen merging together, floating and sinking in a sea

ual state, comes from this: that the revolt he represents is not an intellectual revolt. Id

ef? Is it individualism of any statable kind? Do the thoughts and phrases which float about in it have a meaning which bears any relation to the meaning they bear in the language of thinkers? Certainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the talk about the United States and its future, have any significance as patriotism? Does it poetically represent the state of fee

ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men r

. But there is this to be said for Whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an authen

was no false light that led the Oxonians to call some of his phrases Homeric. The pundits wer

es poetry, as a profession, impossible. The lyric poets have always spent most of

worth, great genius though he was, succeeded in half drowning his talents

, autocratic, vain, and florid,-the class of quacks. There are, throughout society, men, and they are generally men of unusual natural powers, who, after gaining a little unassimilated education, launch out for themselves and set up as authorities on their own account. They are, perhaps, the successors of the old astrologers,

occult powers. The phrenologists, the venders of patent medicine, the Christian Scientists, the single-taxers, and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same maj

eories and professions. If he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he would have been ruined from th

be said in his favor. The field of his experience was narrow, and not in the least intellectual. It was narrow because of his isolation from human life. A poet like Browning, or Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life

d seems to be submerged and to have become almost a part of his body. The utter lack of concentration which resulted from living his whole life in the open air has lef

the physical joy of mere living more completely. He is robust, all tingling with health and th

eeping, has a thrill of joy such as Walt Whitman has here and there thrown into his poetry. One might say that to have done this is th

ithout a trace of self-consciousness. It is little more than a description of nature. The allusions to Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two-merest suggestions of the tragedy. But

d to be found in King Lear or Gu

have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought of death, the beauty of nature, a

stand the life about him. Even his work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems and notes upon the period are picturesque. As to his talk about comrades and Manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawn

l as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would probably

criptions of American sights and scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cataracts, an

ce, and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. This man committed every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole lif

stirring merit. And he gave, in his writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,-a picture whi

DY OF

as they continue to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. At the moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh interest in

k in a fragmentary and inconclusive manner, lest by giving way to conviction, by encourag

ons on the character of Romeo which are here thrown together,

e actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table before us, convinced that one of them was Shakespeare's draft or acting copy, and the other Shakespeare's finished work; and if, by comparing the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,-it would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this great

es as they were spoken on the stage. The stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of the reporter (or the p

ising pen. We should observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and true meaning, the secret

Shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he fared at the hands of the early actors. Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally difficult play to act, and

the horns were to take up the aria in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the moment came for the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. The composer had arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could not sound except with closed stops. The passage had to be rewritten. The young painter is frequent

fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors. In conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a cours

essness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. He lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with real life

tinely. He must be banished for having taken part in a street fi

ng to his rejection by a woman not otherwise connected with the story. It is perfectly true that this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first sight. The effect upon Romeo's very boyish, unreal, and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the rejec

es the explanation. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental notion of

dream. On learning of the death of Juliet he passes into still a third and quite different dream,-or stage of dream,-a stage in which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating intellect of a maniac. The mental abstraction of Romeo continues even after he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden, despite the directness of Juliet, he is still in his

wings did I o'er-

mits cannot

an do that dare

kinsmen are

der blessed

ilver all these

l that calls

sound lovers' t

music to at

ever, another and unfortunate influence: they retard the action of the play. As we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of lyric

eeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. It is no wonder that

lebration in petalled phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour of his need. In fact, throughout the play, Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. For one instant only does he rise into respectability,-at the moment of his quarrel with Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a man

iumph! and Me

ven, respec

d fury be my

ake the 'villa

gay'st me;-for

tle way abov

thine to kee

I, or both, mu

s, Romeo, the man of words and moods, when once roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,-when once pledged to action,-Romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is now visibly dedicated to this q

ng the news of his banishment. The boy seems to be without much stamina, aft

he himself takes note of he wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom'd spiri

eeps to Cape

tal part with

low in her ki

took post to

rt. He seems suddenly to be grown up,-a man, and not a boy,-and a man of action. "Is it even so?" is all he says. He orders post-horses, ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences; it is evident that before speaking at all he has determined what he will do, and from now on to the end of the play Romeo is different from his old self, for a new Romeo has appeared. He is in a state of intense and calm exultation. All his fluctuating emotions have been stilled or stunned. He gives his orders in staccato. We feel that he knows what he is going to do, and will certainly accomplish it. Meanwhile his mind is dominant.

automatic. The thought has already begun to be executed even while it is being formed. This occurs especially where the int

acting of a d

motion, all

asma, or a h

nd the morta

uncil; and the

ttle kingdom

of an ins

ng on the way from Mantua to Verona. His own w

man when my

tend him a

hen he stands before the bier of Juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for the first time,-only then is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; t

fairly impossible. The very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing h

reference to this self-destroying consummation. From his first speech we

of civilization. Their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. They know no compromise. If they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. Romeo is not suffering in this final scene. He is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. He glories in his deed. It satisf

,

up my everl

yoke of inau

world-wear

rit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. It is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. The reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. No doubt, in Shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. It is impossible that the longer plays, like King Lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from sc

y comment. A character on the stage has need, at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of something we know in real life. The types of Shakespeare which have been found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in intensity, very different from their interest to us. The

ven us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! How different is the thing from the abstract! Or, to put the same thought in a more

the reality. As we read we translate all things into the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we translate the dialect of the English province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,-and indeed he is

ANGELO′S

ed, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. The fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and we

atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. But the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to the p

elves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of Guasti's labors. But it has not been left to the Italians to protect the treasures of their land. The barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. The last tribute has come from Mr. John Addington Symonds, who has done the sonnets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. His translations of the more g

academical disquisition. They absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. Place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. This is their quality. It is hard to say whence the vitality comes. They have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,-a brilliancy like that produced by unblended col

ust dose them with elegance. This itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. A translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphra

ifferent styles in the original. They have been chosen from among th

The seeds of flowers from the Alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of English literature in their struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the auth

t not to be. We feel throughout the poetry of the Latin races a certain domination of the intelligence which is foreign to our own poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we may sympathize with this domination. Let us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they were prose; let us seek first the thought and

t in these sonnets they are touched with new power; they become exalted into mystical importance. We feel almost as if it were Plato himself that is talking, and the interest is not lessened when we remember that it is Mic

d forth by the poet's friendship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly written towards the close of his life. While he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna and to have been greatly attached to

himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of wit and tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other places, where she had gone for pleasure, and to pass the summer, and came to Rome for no other reason than to see Michael Angelo. And in return he bore her so much love

st belong to a period anterior to his friendship with Vittoria. This appears from the

f a kind inborn and native to us. Whether we be reading the English prayer-book or listening to the old German Passion Music, there is a certain note of the spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly recognize as a part of ourselves. What we recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which swept over Europe during the century of Michael Angelo's existence; which conquered Teutonic Europe, and w

is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? The intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. But the meaning survives the craft. The lost arts retain their power over us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. We cannot decipher the s

y and so powerfully, indeed, that we whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute,

ith a vehicle of expression with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. We may throw a bridge from th