Edwin Percy Whipple

IT takes many years after an author’s death to award to him a decisive allotment of fame ; but literary history prizes some men as landmarks, when they are not permanently recorded as light-houses, still less as fixed stars. It is a comfort to think that many a modest author, and indeed many a mediocre one, may have an unquestioned value in relation to his time, without awaiting the result of any appel à l’impartiale postérité, like that which Madame Roland so laboriously prepared. In such a case as that of the late Mr. Whipple, this preliminary estimate may be made at once and without hesitation. He was an essential part of the literary life of Boston at a time when that city probably furnished a larger proportion of the literary life of the nation than it will ever again supply. He was unique among the authors of that time and place in his training, tastes, and mental habit; the element that he contributed was special and valuable ; he duplicated nobody, while at the same time he antagonized nobody, and the controversial history of that period will find no place for his name. How much more than this can be claimed for him it is too early to determine ; but nothing can take from him the position of an essential and noticeable landmark in our American literary history.

It is an important feature in his early career that he constituted a link between the literary and commercial Bos-

ton of forty years ago. As Dr. Holmes derived, at the beginning, a certain well-defined prestige from being in literature the representative of the medical profession,— its hero, its one conspicuous bid for literary preëminence, — so Whipple had, in like manner, the mercantile community, a far larger constituency than the physicians, behind him. He was one of themselves : the Boston Mercantile Library had been his study, the lecture room of the same association his first field of prominence, his occupation that of secretary of the Merchants’ Exchange. At a time when almost all New England authors came from Harvard College and the training of Edward Channing, he stepped into the arena with only the merchants’ powerful guild behind him. These sponsors could justly claim that he stood already equipped with that clearness of thought and accuracy of statement which professors of rhetoric often vainly crave in their pupils; and it is no wonder that he in turn felt the value of his backing, and repaid it by courageous labors and undoubted successes. He was, indeed, the almost solitary instance, at that period, of the self-made man in American literature ; and to represent this type, now familiar enough, was in those days a distinction. He had also the merit of having visibly modeled his style upon Macaulay, then at the height of his fame, and of having been complimented by Macaulay himself; and this, to a community just beginning the process of self-emancipation from colonial dependence, — a process still incomplete, but then inchoate, — was something. He partook too of that reaction which was just setting in from the rather grave and colorless literary style of Channing ; and his crisp and often pungent sentences made this reaction palatable to many who could not yet inure themselves to Emerson. His even temperament saved him from extremes and his amiability from rancor, so that while Poe was dealing out bitter personalities in the Broadway Journal, and many younger writers were following in his track, Whipple, like Longfellow, passed along undisturbed.

By the mere exercise of these moral qualities, combined with great keenness of insight, he doubtless did a great deal for the American criticism of his day, and must rank with Margaret Fuller Ossoli and far above Poe in the total value of his work. It is certainly saving a great deal in his praise to admit that up to a certain time in his life there was probably no other literary man in America who had so thoroughly made the best of himself, —extracted so thoroughly from his own natural gifts their utmost resources. His memory was great, his reading constant, his acquaintance large, his apprehension ready and clear. He had no gift of extemporaneous oratory, but in conversation he excelled. What he said or wrote was so well grounded, so pithy, so candid, so neat, that you felt for the moment as if it were the final word; it was only upon the second reading that you became conscious of a certain limitation. After all, the thought never went very deep ; the attraction of style was evanescent ; there was no very wide outlook, no ideal atmosphere. There were wit and keenness and kindly frankness, but no subtle depths, no haunting quality, none of the “seeds of things.” These restrictions may have been al-

most inseparable from the form of a popular lecture, which was that he commonly chose ; but they were restrictions, all the same. In a time and place which had produced Emerson, this narrowness of range was a defect almost fatal. It did not harm his immediate success, and he is said, in those palmy days of lecturing, to have appeared a thousand times before audiences. But now that his lectures — or his essays which might have been lectures — are read critically, many years later, we can see that the same shrinkage which has overtaken the work of Bayard Taylor and Dr. Holland, his compeers upon the lecture platform, has also overtaken his. Whether it was that this platform, by its direct influence, restricted these men, or whether it was that a certain limitation of intellect was best fitted for producing the article precisely available for this particular market, it is clear that these three illustrate alike the successes and the drawbacks of the lecturing profession. Now that this vocation itself has nearly vanished, these comparisons have become instructive. The pursuit obviously had its perils ; if it sometimes developed genius, it more often substituted for it mere talent. How insignificant seemed Thoreau, for instance, in his Concord shanty, beside the least of these three popular and successful men ; yet the influence of Thoreau began to grow from the time of his death, and of the eight volumes of his writings demanded by the public six were posthumous. Already his fame surpasses that of these others, as the fame of William Blake has surpassed that of his almost forgotten patron, the one eminently popular and successful poet of his time, William Hayley. Thus tardily does the flavor of original genius vindicate itself. “ The glorious emperor, the mighty potentate, has passed away, and of all his attributes there is remembered only this. — that he knew not the worth of Firdousi.” The book in which Mr. Whipple set his highest mark was his Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Here one sees him at his best, and for that reason perceives these barriers most clearly. All that industry can do is here done, and there is proof of ample literary inquiry as distinct from the severer task we call scholarly research. The characters pass before us, but not one of them is, in Jonson’s phrase, “ rammed with life,” although Jonson himself is one of them. The precise value of the book is to be best seen by measuring it with that of Hazlitt on the same subject. Hazlitt is not one of the immortals, and yet it requires no very careful examination to show that he gives fresher, stronger, and deeper suggestions, that he teaches us far more, than Whipple. Again, the style of Whipple is more even, more carefully adjusted, than that of Lowell ; he has fewer irrelevancies, fewer cumbrous sentences, fewer involved metaphors ; and yet Lowell’s Conversation on the Old Dramatists, his first crude prose work, still remains more fertile and suggestive to any cultivated mind than the comparatively neat and prosaic essays of Whipple. Lowell’s exuberant wealth goes far to atone for his rhetorical sins ; while Whipple’s rhetorical virtues do not reconcile us to his lack of exuberance.

There was a good deal of the publicist in Whipple ; and while he would never have had the presence or perhaps the nerve for public debate, he would have shone as private secretary to a statesman or clerk of some high commission. He had no vanity; and in such a position all his stores of knowledge and his trained skill in statement would have been placed unselfishly at his country’s service. He enjoyed better, perhaps, what was in those days the cultivated decorum of English politics than the seething tumult of our own ; he read the English journals, remembered past debates in Hansard, and could at any time have sent across the Atlantic a good leading article for the London Times. At home his lot fell in a period of revolution ; the great anti-slavery movement touched him, though not at first profoundly ; and, while never a recusant, he was never a leader in those early days. He had the literary temperament, and his willingness to accept for life a vocation then somewhat subordinate and underpaid was nothing less than admirable. In his youth, it was so much easier to be a business man than to be an author that there was really something of chivalry in his thus siding with the weaker party. Even now, when we observe how much more important to any of our universities appears the man who erects for it a great building than he who honors it by a great book, we can see how much more seductive are the paths leading to wealth than those which point toward learning. Of course one may never be rich enough to pay for the building, but so he may never be wise enough to write the book ; the literary temperament is seen in the decision made by a young man as to which risk he shall incur. Whipple had no hesitation : literature was his first and last choice, and he did not swerve from it; and though he never attained to wealth, and perhaps not to an immortal fame, he doubtless never repented his decision. He unquestionably had a happy life, at least in his prime ; he enjoyed his profession and found a steady demand for his work ; he had a circle of warm friends and a delightful home ; nor was he ever forced to that overwork found by some men so crushing. No pangs of envy ever saddened or disturbed him; he liked better to write or talk of others than of himself, and, like Leyden in Scott’s description, “ praised other names, but left his own unsung.”

He was singularly free from all borrowed or second-hand qualities ; his style was perhaps formed on Macaulay, as has been said, but it is far terser and less measured, while less pointed and brilliant; and after Macaulay he certainly had no personal master. Coleridge and Landor, Carlyle and Emerson, came and went, but left no trace upon him. Lowell in his Biglow Papers swerved sometimes into the most flagrant Carlylese, but in Whipple there is no sign of any passing or present mannerism. This too he owed to his happy equipoise of temperament, preserving him from many faults and from some merits. His latest writings were almost his best; the essay on George Eliot, for instance, was full of discrimination and sympathy. Though fond of illustration and anecdote, he was never garrulous in talk or writing; never diluted or spun out an essay, but wrote only so long as he had, or thought he had, something to say. He had a great deal of wit, and some of his phrases will long be current, at least in Boston: “ the effete of society,” “ the gentlemen of wealth and pleasure,” and so on. But the wit played and never wounded, in his case ; when he left a club room there was no crowding together of guests who lingered to repeat his latest sarcasms, each admirer thrilling with pleasure that the bitter arrow had penetrated somebody else than himself.

Landor’s one aspiration was to have a seat, however humble, upon the small bench that holds the really original authors of the world. No man can tell for himself, we can scarcely tell for another, whether any such dream has been fulfilled. A man can no more see his own genius than his own face ; if he looks in the glass for the purpose, all other expression vanishes, and the face that his friends or foes see is not there. It was one of the fortunate traits of Whipple’s temperament that he cared little about the mirror; he did his work industriously and conscientiously, letting it then stand as it was done. Where so large a portion of this work is criticism, such a habit is no slight merit. Never to write frivolously, or in malice, or with any exultation of power, or in any half-conscious spirit of retaliation for what your victim and his set have said about you and your set at some other time,— this is a rare point of superiority. But this was so essential a part of Whipple’s equipment that it did not actually seem like superiority in him; nobody ever imagined that he could be anything else than dispassionate, fairminded, and self-controlled. In this magazine, where much of his writing appeared, he contributed to the first volume a paper on Intellectual Character, of which the key-note is that all intellectual success is connected with personal manliness. His conclusion is “ that virtue is an aid to insight; . . . that the austerities of conscience will dictate precision to statements and exactness to arguments; that the same moral sentiments and moral power which regulate the conduct of life will illumine the path and stimulate the purpose of those daring spirits eager to add to the discoveries of truth and the creations of art.” And in making these broad statements he was but explaining the manner in which thought and character stood mutually related within his own career.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson .