But Riley’s world of common things and plain folks is always lit up by the lamp of beauty. Then there is Whittier. He was a farmer lad, and was part of the life that he wrote of. He belonged; and, like Riley, he knew his Burns. I think, indeed, that “Snow-Bound” is a much better poem than “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Whittier’s fellow Quaker, John Bright, in an address to British workingmen, advised them to read Whittier’s poems, if they wanted to understand the spirit of the American people. Well, the spirit of New England, let us say, if not of all America. For Whittier is in some ways provincial, and rightly so. But though he uses homely New England words like “chore,” he does not, so far as I remember, essay dialect except in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride”; and that is Irish if it is anything. No Yankee women known to me talk like the fishwives of Marblehead in that popular but overrated piece. Then there are the “Biglow Papers,” which remind of Riley’s work on the humorous, as Whittier’s ballads do on the serious side. Lowell made a careful study of the New England dialect and the “Biglow Papers” are brilliantly true to the shrewd Yankee wit; but they are political satires rather than idyls. Where they come nearest to these Hoosier ballads or to “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line” is where they record old local ways and institutions. “This kind o’ sogerin’,” writes Birdofredum Sawin, who is disgustedly campaigning in Mexico, like our National Guards of yesterday:—

Isn’t that something like Riley? Lowell, of course, is a more imposing literary figure, and he tapped intellectual sources to which the younger poet had no access. But I still think Riley the finer artist. Benjamin F. Johnson, of Boone, the quaint, simple, innocent old Hoosier farmer, is a more convincing person than Hosea Biglow. In many of the “Biglow Papers” sentiment, imagery, vocabulary, phrase, are often too elevated for the speaker and for his dialect. Riley is not guilty of this inconsistency; his touch here is absolutely correct.

Riley’s work was anything but academic; and I am therefore rather proud of the fact that my university was the first to confer upon him an honorary degree. I cannot quite see why geniuses like Mark Twain and Riley, whose books are read and loved by hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, should care very much for a college degree. The fact remains, however, that they are gratified by the compliment, which stamps their performances with a sort of official sanction, like the couronné par l’Académie Française on the title-page of a French author.

When Mr. Riley came on to New Haven to take his Master’s degree, he was a bit nervous about making a public appearance in unwonted conditions; although he had been used to facing popular audiences with great applause when he gave his delightful readings from his own poems, with humorous impersonations in prose as good as Beatrice Herford’s best monologues. He rehearsed the affair in advance, trying on his Master’s gown and reading me his poem, “No Boy Knows when He Goes to Sleep,” which he proposed to use if called on for a speech. He asked me if it would do: it did. For at the alumni dinner which followed the conferring of degrees, when Riley got to his feet and read the piece, the audience broke loose. It was evident that, whatever the learned gentlemen on the platform might think, the undergraduates and the young alumni knew their Riley; and that his enrolment on the Yale catalogue was far and away the most popular act of the day. For in truth there is nothing cloistral or high and dry among our modern American colleges. A pessimist on my own faculty even avers that the average undergraduate nowadays reads nothing beyond the sporting columns in the New York newspapers. There were other distinguished recipients of degrees at that same Commencement. One leading statesman was made a Doctor of Laws: Mr. Riley a Master of Arts. Of course a mere man of letters cannot hope to rank with a politician. If Shakespeare and Ben Butler had been contemporaries and had both come up for a degree at the same Commencement—supposing any college willing to notice Butler at all—why Ben would have got an LL.D. and William an M.A. Yet exactly why should this be so? For as I am accustomed to say of John Hay, anybody can be Secretary of State, but it took a smart man to write “Little Breeches” and “The Mystery of Gilgal.”

THE publication of Emerson’s journals,^[1] kept for over half a century, is a precious gift to the reading public. It is well known that he made an almost daily record of his thoughts: that, when called upon for a lecture or address, he put together such passages as would dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were finally evolved.

Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his published works, but a great wealth of matter remains—chips from his workshop—which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished writings.

The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem:

This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” (April 5, 1856):

These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, to afford the material of a new biography,^[2] which has been published uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where his little son—the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody”—being taken to the circus, said à propos of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests—even profane jests—with occasional anecdotes, bons mots, and miscellaneous witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like to know who was the “Miss —— of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’ ” Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?

In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, comparing it with Aeschylus.

The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly savage—less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used in studying jokes and bons mots at home for a dinner or a club, who laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good and never said anything wise.”

Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian Vernunft and Verstand.) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him—revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.

When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.”

Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define. . . . That which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until now. . . . It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned though all the martyrs apostatize. . . . What is this they say about wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But do I not know the Now to be eternal? . . . Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that side. . . . But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”

No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of responsibility in forma pauperis. He could argue well, when he wanted to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction. . . . The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.”

Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how far was that mind in literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne, or Longfellow, or Irving was in literature: was, above all things else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book, “Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed. Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child. . . . But I confess it has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation. . . . I need not inform you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.”

Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little, not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22, 1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which complains that “historical Christianity . . . dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons. . . . And yet, when cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men. . . . Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.”

The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more immediate—a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all.”

The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over me. As for the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart.

I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!”

In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of genius.”

All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the più and not the uno. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both.

This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in “Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying hand” with which he credits Carlyle.

As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good.

Alas! nous autres, we do not love our friends because they are more or less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘damn your attributes!’ ”

Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.

He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”

Another block of stumbling, about which much has been written, is Emerson’s optimism, which rests upon the belief that evil is negative, merely the privation or shadow of good, without real existence. It was the heresy of “Uriel” that there was nothing inherently and permanently bad: no line of division between good and evil—“Line in nature is not found”; “Evil will bless and ice will burn.” He turned away resolutely from the contemplation of sin, crime, suffering: was impatient of complaints of sickness, of breakfast-table talk about headaches and a bad night’s sleep. Doubtless had he lived to witness the Christian Science movement, he would have taken an interest in the underlying doctrine, while repelled by the element of quackery in the practice and preaching of the sect. Hence the tragedy of life is ignored or evaded by Emerson. But ici bas, the reality of evil is not abolished, as an experience, by calling it the privation of good; nor will philosophy cure the grief of a wound. We suffer quite as acutely as we enjoy. We find that all those disagreeable appearances—“swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies,”—which he assures us will disappear, when man comes fully into possession of his kingdom, do not disappear but persist.

The dispute between optimism and pessimism rests, in the long run, on individual temperament and personal experience, and admits of no secure solution. Imposing systems of philosophy have been erected on these opposing views. Leibnitz proved that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer demonstrated the futility of the will to live; and showed that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Nor does it avail to appeal from the philosophers to the poets, as more truly expressing the general sense of mankind; and to array Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and the book of “Lamentations,” and “The City of Dreadful Night” against Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and others of the hopeful wise. The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide? Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves because we are the fools of hope:—

Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron, in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we have been, it were better not to be at all.

The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light—a discipline without which we could have no notion of good,—but whether or not evil predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat of a contempt for Bryon, affirms:—

This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of misery in human life?—Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” upon the approach of age,

It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the feeling of the dramatis persona who speaks them. It may be so; but often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it.

Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new “Candide” and exclaim impatiently, Il faut cultiver notre jardin!

Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage.

Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either optimist or pessimist.

Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband: transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists—the “cranks” of our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these memoranda is—naturally—Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven, Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with. . . . He has no venture in the present.”

Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no senses. . . . We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know ‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a perfume? I did not know it.’ ”

And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly testify—those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe. Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish, wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright silly—“shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words concerning it.

Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and brilliant talker: (“such a determination to eat this huge universe,” Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.” Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation; then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence.”

This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the matter:

“In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to his native town of Wolcott; found his father’s farm in possession of a stranger; found many of his cousins still poor farmers in the town; the town itself unchanged since his childhood, whilst all the country round has been changed by manufactures and railroads. Wolcott, which is a mountain, remains as it was, or with a still less population (ten thousand dollars, he said, would buy the whole town, and all the men in it) and now tributary entirely to the neighboring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving factory village. Alcott went about and invited all the people, his relatives and friends, to meet him at five o’clock at the schoolhouse, where he had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither they all came, and he sat at the desk and gave them the story of his life. Some of the audience went away discontented, because they had not heard a sermon, as they hoped.”

Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill, which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have never renewed it.

It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in 1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime. . . . If a nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men: they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.”

Is this transcendental politics? Does it belong to what Mr. Roosevelt calls, with apt alliteration, the “realm of shams and shadows”? It is, at all events, applied Christianity. It is the principle of the Society of Friends; and of Count Tolstoy, who of all recent great writers is the most consistent preacher of Christ’s gospel.

THIS lecture was founded by Mr. George F. Dominick, of the Class of 1894, in memory of Daniel S. Lamont, private secretary to President Cleveland, and afterwards Secretary of War, during Mr. Cleveland’s second term of office. Mr. Dominick had a high regard for Lamont’s skill as a letter writer and in the composition of messages, despatches, and reports. It was his wish, not only to perpetuate the memory of his friend and to associate it with his own Alma Mater, but to give his memorial a shape which should mark his sense of the importance of the art of letter writing.

Mr. Dominick thought that Lamont was particularly happy in turning a phrase and that many of the expressions which passed current in Cleveland’s two presidencies were really of his secretary’s coinage. I don’t suppose that we are to transfer such locutions as “innocuous desuetude” and “pernicious activity” from the President to his secretary. They bear the stamp of their authorship. I fancy that Mr. Lamont’s good phrases took less room to turn in.

But however this may be, the founder of this lecture is certainly right in his regard for the art of letter writing. It is an important asset in any man’s equipment, and I have heard it said that the test of education is the ability to write a good letter. Merchants, manufacturers, and business men generally, in advertising for clerks or assistants, are apt to judge of the fitness of applicants for positions by the kind of letters that they write. If these are illegible, ill-spelled, badly punctuated and paragraphed, ungrammatical, confused, repetitious, ignorantly or illiterately expressed, they are usually fatal to their writers’ hopes of a place. This is not quite fair, for there is many a shrewd man of business who can’t write a good letter. But surely a college graduate may be justly expected to write correct English; and he is likely to be more often called on to use it in letters than in any other form of written composition. “The writing of letters,” says John Locke, “has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life, that no gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing . . . which always lays him open to a severer examination of his breeding, sense and abilities than oral discourses whose transient faults . . . more easily escape observation and censure.” Litera scripta manet. Who was the prudent lady in one of Rhoda Broughton’s novels who cautioned her friend: “My dear, never write a letter; there’s not a scrap of my handwriting in Europe”? Rightly or wrongly, we are quick to draw conclusions as to a person’s social antecedents from his pronunciation and from his letters.

In the familiar epistle, as in other forms of social intercourse, nothing can quite take the place of old use and wont. Still the proper forms may be learned from the rhetoric books, just as the young man whose education has been neglected may learn from the standard manuals of politeness, such as “Etiquette and Eloquence or The Perfect Gentleman,” what the right hour is for making an evening call, and on what occasions the Tuxedo jacket is the correct thing. The rhetorics give directions how to address a letter, to begin it, to close it, and where to put the postage stamp; directions as to the date, the salutation, the signature, and cautions not to write “yours respectively” instead of “yours respectfully.” These are useful, but beyond these the rhetoric books cannot go, save in the way of general advice. The model letters in “The Complete Letter Writer” are dismal things. “Ideas,” says one of these textbook authorities, “ideas should be collected by the card system.” Now I rather think that ideas should not be collected by the card system, or by any other system. The charm of a personal letter is its spontaneity. Any suspicion that the ideas in it have been “collected” is deadly. To do the rhetoric books justice, the best of them warn against formality in all except the necessarily formal portions of the letter. A letter, like an epic poem, should begin in medias res. Ancient targets for jest are the opening formulae in servant girls’ correspondence. “I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing;” or the sentence with which our childish communications used to start out: “Dear Champ,—As I have nothing else to do I thought I would write you a letter”—matter of excusation and apology which Bacon instructs us to avoid.

The little boy whom Dr. John Brown tells about was unconsciously obeying Aristotle’s rule. Without permission he had taken his brother’s gun and broken it; and after hiding himself all day, he opened written communications with his stern elder; a blotted and tear-spotted scrawl beginning: “O Jamie, your gun is broke and my heart is broke.”

But no general rules for letter writing give much help; nor for that matter, do general rules for any kind of writing. A little practice in the concrete, under intelligent guidance, is worth any number of rhetorical platitudes. But such as it is, the rule for a business letter is just the reverse of that for a friendly letter. It should be as brief as is consistent with clearness, for your correspondent is a business man, whose time is his money. It should above all things, however, be explicit; and in striving to avoid surplusage should omit nothing that is necessary. Ambiguity is here the unpardonable sin and has occasioned thousands of law suits, involving millions of dollars. It should be severely impersonal. Pleasantries, sentiments, digressions and the like are impertinences in a business letter, like the familiarity of an unintroduced stranger. I knew a lawyer—and a good lawyer—who suffered professionally, because he would get himself into his business letters. He made jokes; he made quotations; sometimes French quotations which his correspondents could not translate; he expressed opinions and vented emotions on subjects only incidentally connected with the matter in hand, which he embroidered with wit and fancy; and he was a long time coming to the point. Now men of business may trifle about all other serious aspects of life or death, but when it concerns the making of money, they are in deadly earnest; so that my friend’s frivolous treatment of those interests seemed to them little less than sacrilege.

Viewed then as one of the commonest means of communication between man and man, it is well to be able to write a good letter; just as it is well to know how to tie a bowknot, cast an account, carve a joint, shave oneself, or meet any other of the ordinary occasions of life. But tons of letters are emptied from the mail bags every day, and burned, which serve no other than a momentary end. The art of composing letters worth keeping and printing is a part of the art literary. The word letters and the word literature are indeed used interchangeably; we speak of a man of letters, polite letters, the belles lettres, literae humaniores. How far are such expressions justified? Manifestly a letter, or a collection of letters, has not the structural unity and the deliberate artistic appeal of the higher forms of literature. It is not like an epic poem, a play, a novel or an ode. It has an art of its own, but an art of a particular kind, the secret of which is artlessness. It is not addressed to the public but to an individual and should betray no consciousness of any third party. It belongs, therefore, in the class with journals and table talk and, above all, autobiography, of which it constitutes the very best material. A book is written for everybody, a diary for oneself, a letter for one’s friend. While a letter, therefore, cannot quite claim a standing among the works of the creative imagination, yet it comes so freshly out of life and is so true in self-expression that, in some moods, we prefer it to more artificial or more objective kinds of literature; just as the advertisements in an old newspaper or magazine often have a greater veracity and freshness as dealing with the homely, actual needs and concerns of the time, than the stories, poems, and editorials whose fashion has faded.

I am speaking now of a genuine letter, “a link between two personalities,” as it has been defined. There are two varieties of letters which are not genuine. The first of these is the open letter, the letter to the editor, letter to a noble lord, etc. This is really addressed to the public through the medium of a more or less imaginary correspondent. The Englishman’s habit of writing to the London Times on all occasions is proverbial. Professor Goldwin Smith is a living example of the practice, transplanted to the field of the American newspaper press. But private letters written with an eye to publication are spoiled in the act. To be natural they should not mean to be overheard. If afterwards, by reason of the eminence of the writer, or of some quality in the letters themselves, they get into print, let it be by accident and not from forethought. Why is it, then, that the best printed letters, such as Gray’s, Walpole’s, Cowper’s, Fitzgerald’s, written with all the ease and intimacy of confidential intercourse—“written from one man and to one man”—are found to be composed in such perfect English, with such high finish, filled with matter usually reserved by professional authors for their essays or descriptive sketches; in fine, to be so literary? The reason I take to be partly in the mutual intellectual sympathy between writer and correspondent; and partly in the conscientious literary habit of the letter writer. Hawthorne’s “Note Books,” intended only for his own eye, are written with almost as much care as the romances and tales into which many pages of them were decanted with little alteration.

Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist, Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina” and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a characteristic introduced letter here and there in a novel, as Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form; yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly unendurable.

The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection, humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s “Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the parody.

But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the sure index of a character.”

It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P. note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record. She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time, but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits. Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves, I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in 1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent for our feelings. . . . But as we grow older and find more ease of expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s case, under protest; but the habit of literary expression is strong in them; they like to practise their pens; they begin a note to a friend and before they know it they have made a piece of literature, bound some day to get into print with others of the same kind.

And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them. Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,” ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future greatness and the value of his autograph?

Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary sand flood, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. They are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional literati. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, verve, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was par excellence the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too composed. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write to his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought.

Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.

Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to desipere in loco, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.

Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and vice versa. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the ore rotundo utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.

The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word art in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.

Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to seem to say more.

There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the Gettysburg address.