Emerson and Other Essays

ot the life of

ve thee with

sin and mortal

's habitatio

ouls were parte

of thee, sple

rts of thee wh

glory; I hav

heat you may

from eternal

es the love

Paradise all wi

ed thee. 'T is fo

e with thine, be

ies expressed in terms of the chords merely. The transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. And Michael Angelo has left behind him, as it were, the po

can transpose and illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. They claim no comment. Comment claims them. Call them not poetry if you will. They

athom. No one epoch has held the key to him. There lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's works." It will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. But as to

CANTO OF

e whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. The scenes vary i

, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can r

'l altiss

mbra che er

now to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lin

, he is lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but

feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,-palsied, as it were, with fear,-there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the

hey have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The eighteenth century in England, with all its striving after classical precision, has left behind it no great laconic English classic who stands in the first rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnecte

ep a sullen

k myself, spri

kened by a s

fixed eyes and

t me,-awful

ace that held

ound myself

valley of the

finite wailing

d cloudy, to t

obe, and though

vain conjectu

n to the blind

t, with a fac

st, thou second

again could f

n the whitene

ome if thee it

d: "The angui

dwell there thu

t with fear.

journey pricks

, and take me

st great cir

e deep abyss

e borne upon t

ighs that filled

eternal breez

ief, but grief

unnumbered peop

owds of childr

. "Thou dost n

e these thou se

ke. "But ere

e that these fee

ell deserved,-

baptism, whic

holdest. If t

st, though sinle

ht never wor

am such an

tcoming-on no

nd most of all

ope we live in

heart to hear th

lendid souls an

hung in that

aster dear, te

st, with eage

cing faith,-"bu

hence,-made happ

wn merit or a

e into this pl

uess the purpor

brows were bou

uering through

de of our firs

nd the build

gave the la

m, obedien

ing, and an

d his childre

achel that he

Paradise,-and

f salvation t

se while he wa

nstant course a

hickly thronged

hed a point whe

, when I, still

, that, struggli

of a luminou

distant still,

t the fire, as

an auster

honor science

these, whose

ly set them

ered me, "The

ives illustrious

e them." Then a

mighty poet

urns,-do honor

oice had finis

giant shado

sad nor joyous

ster said: "Se

sword and walks

father of the

ovran poet.

ext; third, Ov

lone voice tha

hare with me; th

me honor;-nor

the assembled s

f the most e

eagle soars a

alked together,

o me, nodding

ster smiled, b

e in honor. A

them as of t

ixth among tho

he light we wa

silence wisel

weet to speak th

en times circl

e watered by a

ed over as it

ven gates that

a meadow, gr

re with deep, s

ere weighted

speech, but ri

eding left a

ll of light an

e each spirit

efore my eyes

e the souls of

it exalts me

her comrade

, and knew

armor C?sar,

d the Amaz

ith Lavinia

id avenge the

ornelia, M

elf the lon

f all thinke

philosoph

urned on him wi

crates were

litus and

d Anaxago

orld on chance;

nes, and th

ollector,

aw, Livy an

d Seneca's de

lemy, and with

and Avicen

wrote the mast

ith Galen

cians. But my

l of that ma

many an anti

rive me on, and

ught the thing

were now cut

ed me forth b

uiet of that t

entle shining

e all light wa

T BRO

is difficult to give any succinct account of him. We are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. The element which we attempt to isolate for purpose

Guide to Browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on Browning, which covers many finely printed pages. This class of book-the text-book-is not the product of impulse. The text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the

teresting secondary outcome of his influence. It has its roots

t Emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. Browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,-a treasury of plunder from

him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,-a poet by profession. He was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous lif

d and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that Robert Browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in Christian theology. Everything that was hopeful his spirit

life in trying to show that a poet is always really both-'and he has almost convinced us. The expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are

nce in Himself, but as the end towards which man tends. That irreverent person who said that Browning uses "God" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. In Browning, God is adjective to man. Browning believes that all conventional morality m

search to which we look for light, however dim. In the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. Since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it-in revolt against it

s travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed f

le of him. The public which loves him is made up of people who have been through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. The public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped th

of order and organization-of monarch or public opinion-weights him and presses him down. This is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements. Now and again there arises some strong natu

y soul are more important than C?sar-or than the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the voice of Christ, and the les

r whom is it in the last analysis that you legislate? You talk of man, I see only men." To men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came Robert Browning as a liberator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first in this country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. We had suffered more. We needed to b

rejoice and not find the reason in John Stuart Mill; some one who should justify the claims of the

story based on nothing but worship of the individual. Browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France and Italy. He glorified what we had thought crime and error, and made m

stress point." If this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,-if the struggles and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or hereafter,-then the truth-to-feelin

morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. He searches the world till he finds the man whom everybody will concur in despising, the mediaeval grammarian, and he writes to him the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute

equires it as a stage property. In A Death in the Desert you have the East in the first century-so vividly given that you wish instantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with which your Bible ought always to have been filled. His reading brings him to Euripides. He sees

n our time, as the odd moments prove which he gave to the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to Aix, Incident in the Fren

literary historians. It is idle to look to the present generation for an intelligible account of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra,

casionally into paradox and jeux d'esprit. Bishop Blougram is an attempt to discover whether a good case cannot be ma

e glow of a great truth, but it remains a paradox and a piece of exaggeration. The same must be said of a large part of Browning. The New Testament is full of such paradoxes of exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich

as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. He builds up;

of the education which they correct. They are built like Palladio's Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. In order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. The colors are dropping from the poems already. The feeblest

person in the same state of mind. In fact, the family likeness is great. They will say that the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other. It cannot be denied that there is much repetition,-much threshing out of old straw. Those who have read Browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,-over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,-we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity

and that he was a master of euphony. This cannot be admitted except as to particular ins

ustom which has grown up unconsciously, and most of

with what is essentially a mystery, the outcome

xpress it modestly, the excuse for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the matter. Rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been reached. It punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our attention from the strain of suspended interest. All of the artifices of poetical form seem

more considerations of the same negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or verse, may

ead absolute nonsense with satisfaction. We sometimes hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry is likely to endure just in proportion as the form of it is superior to the content. As to the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's reflection shows that the ideas and feelings which prevail from age to age, and in which we may expect posterity to delight, are in their natur

pon this that he has emerged and attacked the heart of man. It is upon this that he may po

emphasis demanded by the sense is very often not the emphasis demanded by the metre. He cuts off his words and forces them ruthlessly into lines as a giant might f

e the emphasis of speech, and throw over all effort to follow the emphasis of the metre. This is also the reason why Browning is so unquotable-why he has made so little effect upon the language-why so few of the phrases and turns of thought and metaphor with which poets enrich a language have been thrown into English by him. Let a man who does not read poetry take up a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will

hey are speech not reduced to poetry. They do not sing, they do not

cents of his speech do fall into rhythm, his words will have unimaginable sweetness. The music is so

no epoch in the verse. The clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming leads Browning into invers

rain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of course no o

e Book is one of the most beautif

, half angel

er and a wild

hat ever br

ry within th

ndred soul ou

the red-ripe

summons from th

thy chambers, bl

m of the glor

man, to suff

voice: can thy

hearken from th

commence my

t taught song

nt head and be

pite the distan

in may be; so

splendor once t

tion ancient

e, but raisin

es, that cannot

all sustainmen

up and on-so

lms of help, tha

hich, I judge, th

re, I think, thy

marred when one of the eyes seems sightless. We re-read the lines to see if we are mista

he order in which they occur to him,-pursues two or three trains of thought at the same time, claims every license which either poetry or conversation could accord him. The effect of this method is so startling, that when we are vigorous enough to follow the sense, we forg

once, weaving all together his passions, his philosophy, his narrative, and his commands. His reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical as anything in Browning

ther and thy uncl

rk me,-that a

ous!-he whom

rld I lov'd,

my state; as

e seignories i

he Prime Duke,

nd for the l

lel: those bein

nt I cast up

grew stranger, b

secret studies.

ou atte

can scarcely be pronounced. They are mentioned only as throwing light on Browning's cast of mind and methods of work. His inability to recast and correct his work cost the

feels might have been struck out or corrected in half an hour. How many of the poems are too long! It is not that Browning went on writing after he had completed his thought,-for the burs

beyond all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. In the poems which he revised, as, for instance, Hervé Riel, which exist

than he did. When the music came and the verse caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer, then he could sweep down like an arc

egin. His way of beginning is to seize the end of the thr

never have l

I should no

damned flo

save it! Seven

e, the mouth, th

o feel the fog

nes at haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in order to have any organic effect, would have to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be judge of his success in

ents a reaction of a violent sort. He was too great an artist not to feel that his violations of form helped him. The blemishes in The Grammarian's Funeral-hoti's business, the enclitic de-were stimulants; they heightened his effects. They helped him make cle

e pretended that, even from this point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic.

himself was the truth which he taught. His life was the life of one of his own heroes; and in the close of his life-by a

. Neglect caused him to suffer, but not to change. It was not until his work was all but finished, not till after the publication of The Ring and the Book, that complete recog

ould no longer float the raft of doctrine, as it had done so light

nd to his uttermost. It was not for him to know that his work was done. He wrote on manfully to the end, showing, occasionally, his

ed his back, but ma

ed clouds w

h right were worsted

rise-are baffle

to w

LOUIS S

in. Most of the great novelists were then dead, and the scientific school was in the ascendant. Fiction was entering upon its death grapple with sociology. Stevenson came, with his tales of ad

an engaging humorous touch which made friends for him everywhere, and excited an interest in his fragile and somewhat elusive personality supplementary to the apprec

s work was done under conditions which made any productivity seem a miracle. The heroic invalid was seen through all his books, still sitting before his

tuity, which makes Stevenson and his work a fair subject for study. It is not impossible that a man who met certain needs of t

ead them too recently to need a prompter. The high spirits and elf

sions of his childhood with accuracy, and he has recorded them without affectation, without sentimentality, without exaggeration. In depicting children he draws from life. He is at home in the mysteries of their play and in the inconsequent operations of their minds, in the g

irers of his more ambitious works. His understanding of two such opposite types of men as Burns and Thoreau is notable, and no less notable are the courage, truth, and

e in him that rare combination,-a man whose theories and whose practice are of a pi

aning at the first reading. Whether he be writing a tale of travel or humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story of horror, a morality, or a fable; in whatever key he plays,-and he seems to have taken delight in showing mastery in many,-th

Stevenson's books and essays were generally brilliant imitations of established things, done somewhat in the spirit

tyle," we mean that it is done as we have seen things done before. Bunyan, De Foe, or Charles Lamb were to

on as a writer is established, his manner of writing is adopted by the literary conscience of the times, and you may follow him and still have "s

adigm and original to copy from), says that he longs for a "moment of style," he means that he wishes there would

as himself described the manner in which he went to work to fit himself for his career as a writer. His boyish am

he inward service of the mind and soul grows wide withal;" and an author's own style breaks through the coverings of his education, as a hyacinth breaks from the bulb. It is noticeable, too, that the early and imitative work of great men generally belongs to a particular sch

ecame a remarkable, if not a unique phenomenon,-for he never grew up. Whether or not there was some obscure connection between his b

, and why he feels so. The intellect is developed in the child with such astonishing rapidity that long before phy

f the matters themselves. He cannot disentangle what is conventional from what is orig

He has no means of knowing that in writing in this manner he is using his mind in a very peculiar and artificial way,-a way ent

rowing up,-and that is that good things in art have been done by men whose entire attention was ab

, senses, affections, passions. To a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating. But Stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towa

an undertone of insincerity in almost everything which he has written. His attention is never wholly a

ich interferes with the enjoyment of some people, and enhances that of others. It is

of looking not so much to the nature of the

the young man, with anothe

lts of the artistic doctrines which he professed and practised.

some "effect," he disqualifies himself from making that effect; for he draws the interest of his audience to the same matters that occupy his own mind; namely, upon

re of others, for a subordination of himself to the production of this "effect" in the mind of another. They degrade and belittle him. Let Stevens

his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of men. The poor Daughter of Joy carrying her sm

re as insulting to the comic actor as they are to Michael Angelo, for the truth and beauty of low comedy are as dignified, and require of the artist the same primary passion for life for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of The Divine Comedy. The doctrines are the outcome of an Alexandrine age. After art has once learnt to draw its ins

ges and assign each as a presiding genius over a share of his work. Not that Stevenson purloined or adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity. His enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he did. He was well read in the belles lettres of

s and Charles Reade, their Dumas and their Cooper, were the very people whose hearts were warmed by Stevenson. If you cross-question one of these, he will admit that Stevenson is after all a revival, an echo, an after-glow of the romantic movement, and that he brough

aws, is transferred from Guy Mannering almost literally. But the curse of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering-which is one of the most surprising and powerful scenes Scott ever wrote-is an organic par

Treasure of Franchard is a French farce or light comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic. The tone, the mise-

n French play in verse and in one act. The version of Stevenson is

; for it is a story out of the Arabian Nights, told with a perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the English in which the later translators

ish sunshine of Carmen. But we have "fables," moralities, and psychology, Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will O' the Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say, "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew-aye, and by St. Mary till the Sun

em off on us as his own. He has absorbed them. He does not know their origin. He gives them out

nate and remarkable. They will not bear an immediate comparison with their originals; but we ma

ether delightful departure in light literature. The stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the French detective story. They are legitimate pieces of literature

uous setting. The setting in this case Stevenson found about him in the

realizing the treasure trove, for he hardly returned to the field of humor, for which his gifts mos

riginal as a point of departure, and as a scheme for treatment some

re written, in the humor of forty fancies and without any heavy-fisted intention of getting new ideas about life. It will be said that the defect of Stevenson is expressed by these very qualitie

ir daily lives, have a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a very low degree of energy, which delights to be occupied with the unreal and the impossible. More than this, any mind which is daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some of the true relations governing things as they are,

erit, books which can hardly be classed as imitations or arabesques,-Kidnapped, Weir of Hermiston, The Merry Men. These b

he tension is gone; we are in contact with a great, sunny, benign human being who pours a flood of life out before us and floats us as the sea floats a chip. He is full of old-fashioned and absurd pas

and broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. If we return now to Weir of Hermiston, we seem to be entering the cell o

writings. Across the Plains, for instance, represents his most straightforward and natural style. But it happens that certain great writers who lived some time ago, and were famous examples of "directness," have expressed themselves in the

due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits of biography and autobi

t during the last years of his life he lived under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a writer of English can pass through. There was one ye

to its embellishment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that in the letters Across the Plains the lights were turned down. But, in truth, the light is daylight. The

, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. It is not a single sty

tevenson's natural style, and it

eful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were

by Stevenson while under the influenc

ghter attended on his coming.... From this disaster like a spent swimmer he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing never more to rise. Bu

e sprightly style of t

oice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or will have

ccordingly we find that, when the subject invites him, St

cating one of his smaller

erd not unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule....

age and writes a NOTE in the language of two and one-half centuries later. He is no

ngenial field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect, so that in

can be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of s

ill find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen throug

s a sort of intoned voluntary pla

, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in h

ht it the proper tone in which to speak of death, duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. He derived this impression from the

th semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath

it were to reason too curiously to pin Stevenson down to Browne. All the old masters stalk like spec

s titles tread closely on the heels of former titles. He can write the style of Charles Lamb better than Lamb could do it himself, and his Hazlitt is very nearly as good. He fences w

at we now and then come across a style

master like Stevenson. Those persons belong to the bookish classes. Their numbers are insignificant, but they are

nglish literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours' traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that literature. He is the Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is impossible to assign him rank in any line of writing. If you shut your eyes to try and place him, you find that you cannot do it. The effect he produces whil

lonic force which turned him from a secondary London novelist into something of importance and enabl

in primers and handbooks by the million. All the books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in popular editions. The magazines fulfil the sa

s tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply u

something just as good. Everything he did had the very stamp and trademark of Letters, and he was as strong in one department as another. We

ucated people for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this importation of culture by the carload. The state of mind it shows is a definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through, and which precedes the disco

or all that is paradoxical in his effect. He often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. And yet we do not reproach him. He has by stating his artistic doctrines in their

sive and questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. The truth is that as a literary force,

llumine all his works with a personal interest. The las

This courage and the lovable nature of Stevenson won the world's heart. He was regarded with a peculiar tenderness such as is usually given only to the young. Honor, and admirat