Men and Letters

VERB All MAGIC.

A MUSIC-LOVER and devoted concertgoer of my acquaintance — “ uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in his own words — is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is exciting, under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and the Bach fugues ! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full face value. He means that the music thus described — heavenly music, he sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s unfinished symphony) — has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect, as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should be he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “ I don’t undertake to explain it,” he says ; “ so far as I am concerned, it is all a matter of feeling.”

Analogous to this is my own experience — and, I suppose, that of readers in general — with certain fragments of poetry, which have for me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality — though here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual limitations—is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.

The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe, at all events. Magic is magic ; if it could be explained it would be something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius and our old friend — or enemy — “ an infinite capacity for taking pains,” so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best, we can do with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our taste purified by its “ heavenly alchemy ; ” as the best that our musical friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than once express himself, up to “ heaven’s gate.”

And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it. has no thought of solving. — a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder over things that interest us. and even go so far as to talk about them, though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.

Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper : —

The linal couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he says of it, “ In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in themselves, but depend for their “high quality ” upon their association with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human consciousness may possibly not be infallible ; but at all events, it is the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am sadly deluded my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials are they composed, and how artlessly put together! Nine every-day words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, following each other in the most unstudied manner — and the result perfection !

By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from Shakespeare : —

Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose order, and not overmusical, — “ such stuff ” and “ little life ” being almost cacophonous, — have a magical force, if I may presume for once to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of literature. We hear them, if we do hear them, and all things earthly seem to melt and vanish.

Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition, and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the words, “ Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly affected, politics and government are gone, an “ insubstantial pageant faded.” “ All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself, and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the pamphlet, I care not to read further ; like Emerson at the play, who had ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost: —

I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that exalted title, — among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date, having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen : “ Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in the midst of Hamlet, as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s, who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read Milton’s description of Satan —

“ Nor appeared Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured ” — till he felt “ a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur.”

One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality : it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is too commonly estimated. It is musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether, — so completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either present or absent.¹ The appeal is to the imagination, not to the ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There is no enchantment in a riddle.

Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any conceit or play upon words.

“I could not love thee, Dear! so much, Loved I not Honor more,”— nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness of it. its courtly gracefulness, its manner (one seems to see the bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase), the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks not of itself. If you think of it, the charm has failed.

In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that future day when all things will be past; a suggestion or picture that brings an instant soberness,— reverie, melancholy, what you will, — that is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, between them, holding the words apart ; such a movement as that of the Wordsworth couplet first quoted, —

or as that of the still more familiar slowrunning line from the sonnets of Shakespeare, — a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.

And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf that separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next lower order. Take

“ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” — such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the first that offers itself for the purpose:—

Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say that less is meant than meets the ear ; but set it beside the Wordsworth couplet, so easy, so simple,

“ Without all ornament, itself and true,” so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials, but divine in its birth and in its effect: the other is made of rare and costly stuffs, but when all is done it is made. Though it sound oldfashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration.

The supreme achievement of poetic genius is not the writing of beautiful passages, but the conception and evolution of great poems, — the whole, even in a work of the imagination, being greater than any of its parts ; but poetic inspiration reaches its highest jet, if we may so speak, its ultimate bloom, in occasional lines of transcendent and, as human judgment goes, perfect loveliness. I should like to see a rigorously sifted collection of such fragments, an anthology of magical verse, nothing less than magic being admitted. It would be a small volume, —

“ Infinite riches in a little room ; ” but it would need an inspired reader to make it.

Bradford Torrey.

UPON A MISSING WORD.

QUITE lately I read a sly and mellow essay in which the American writer (I am glad we can claim him) told of his putting Montaigne into a canoe, and in that company paddling inexpertly through a lake. From the lake he had got pleasure, but from his author such delight that he quarrels delicately with Pascal; for Pascal, it seems, said that Montaigne talked too much about himself, and the canoeist retorts : “ If men dislike apparent egotism, let them leave Montaigne. Such men should vex themselves at all expression, for all fiction and art are ripe with personality.”

With this vindication fresh in mind I chanced upon another essayist, an Englishman, and fiercer, much. Montaigne, he says, and Howell’s Letters are his bedside books. “ If I wake at night, I have one or other to prattle me to sleep again. They talk about themselves forever, and don’t weary me.” Now comes the fierceness : “ You say you are angry with a man for talking about himself. It is because you yourself are selfish that that other person’s Self does not interest you.”

These two make a strong defense, said I, but abruptly remembered that the canoeist had talked about his sandwiches and his tobacco and his fatigued shoulder-blades, his thirst for ale, his meal of ham and eggs — why, of course he would be sensitive about that word of Pascal’s! With mutated name of thee shall the fable, etc. And as for the other man, Mr. Roundabout, he is simply notorious in the personal line. The Flaubertians and all well-conducted modern people deplore his indecent lack of reticence. Yet still, still, I blessed the egotists. So then I went to the dictionary, that bald interpreter of the race, but it had n’t a favorable thing to say about egotism ; indeed, it mentioned vanity as the unique synonym, and at once the pleasing thought occurred to me that nothing save my own erring modesty thwarted my producing a book like Montaigne’s. And consider, if you please, what good company I should be in. Did n’t Cicero sit down and confide his old age to us ? And Horace ? In his very first ode the fond creature says how tall he should feel if inserted among lyric persons. And he goes on through his book about his wine and his farm, his odium for Persian apparatus ; how when Lydia praises Telephus his fervent liver grows tumid with difficult bile — there ’s personality for you ! He contentedly imparts to us upon what occasions he will wrap himself in his virtue ; that he had never been particularly religious until one fine day Jupiter—but you remember what happened at the conversion of the bard. And finally (crowning impertinence) he shouts at us triumphantly that he has built himself an imperishable monument. Himself. “ Non omnis moriar,” says he. No, indeed. He knew he had said some things well and briefly, and do you blame the incomparable master of verse — the most consummate of all, to my thinking — that he foresaw what, after all, has come true : that we go on quoting his phrases to-day because none of us has yet managed to say those things so beautifully as he ?

Next, there is François Villon, who begins in the second line of his first poem to tell us all about himself and his très-amoureuse prison ; and in every following stanza comes an “ I ” or a “ me ” for I don’t know how many pages. Ah, who would have the engaging scoundrel different? Listen to him: —

What a gait, what a charm! what condensed rapidity of art beyond hope of translation !

So you see, he is another egotist. Need I remind you that Cæsar’s Gallic War is an enormous account of himself, and his bridge, and his legions, and his speeches ? Did he toss those speeches off on the battlefield, do you suppose, while Dumnorix or somebody waited to hack his head off until after the peroration, or did n’t he revise the proof just a trifle here and there before going to press? He speaks with apparent third-personality ; but those cadenced addresses to his soldiers fill me with suspicion. Then one remembers how severely enraged with the pirates he was when he was their prisoner and would read his original verses to them, and they failed to perceive their merit. I think we must count Cæsar among the egotists.

Finally, to ascend to the highest, there are the Psalmists, collectively called David. Each poem thrills with the personality of the writer, his tears and his joy. Upon the other hand, the most inveterate, the most abysmal egotist in conduct, Goethe, almost never talks about himself.

No. The dictionary has a blank in it where a word should be. Ego had nothing bad or good about it originally, any more than tu. But we, the human race, in our gradual experience (and through the trait which Mr. Roundabout so sharply pins) have colored that word dark, and never troubled to invent another that should mean the charming, the beneficent, the friendly,—the altruegotism! I’m not going to invent the word myself, for reasons of a private nature; but one is badly needed. For when we speak of Montaigne or the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, we are led to make a false apology for the very virtue, the talisman, the soul that has captured our hearts.

Owen Wister.

CONVERSATIONS WITH MR. LOWELL.

In October, 1883, I found Mr. Lowell in Paris on a holiday from the United States Legation in London. His figure had grown robust; the lines of his face were less regular, but more striking than when I had last seen him. He and Mrs. Lowell were at a small hotel on the left bank of the Seine, French and for French people, where he had once passed a winter while studying the Romance languages. On my first visit I was shown upstairs by mistake, as Mrs. Lowell was out, and he was alone; but seeing a chance for the thing which 1 believe he enjoyed more than any other, a talk, he begged me to stay with such hearty and almost plaintive eagerness that, nothing loath, I sat down. He held an open book, and I asked him what it was. After an instant’s affected hesitation he put his hand to his mouth and whispered, "Zola ! ” I laughed. He asked me what I thought of it; but not having read any of that writer’s works I had nothing to say, and asked him in turn. He broke into abuse of people who like to write filth ; he did not wish to read it, he said, but some acquaintance with all literature is requisite for a man of letters. “ I once read a book of Dean Swift’s, years ago,” he added (he did not name it), “and the stench of it reeks in my nostrils to this day.”

He and Mrs. Lowell had been to Vincennes : he knew it was not the memory of the Duc d’Enghien that took him there, but could not tell whose until they were passing the gate, when he remembered Mirabeau. I inquired whether, on the whole, he rated Mirabeau as a great force, or merely vox et prœterea nihil. “ Oh, a great force,” he answered, “ and sincere in his desire to serve both the nation and the crown.” He talked a good deal about Mirabeau and his father and uncle. I expressed a wonder whether Mirabeau’s death had changed the course of history,—if that single hand could have held back the Revolution until the humanitarian and liberal ideas of the times should have prevailed and outstripped the blind rush of the people. “ It might,” he said, “ if he had had to deal with any two persons except the king and queen: if there had been a little more in him, and a little less in her, Mirabeau might have done miracles.

But their doom was sealed, and the rest inevitably followed.”

This was my first conversation with Lowell, and I was struck by his extreme familiarity with the epoch of the French Revolution ; which, however, was not extraordinary in a literary man who was sight-seeing in Paris. I soon discovered that he was as widely and minutely informed on every subject that came up, — chiefly, indeed, history, politics, and letters ; his faculty for acquisition and his memory must have been equally remarkable. One evening I was dining with Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and three other friends, and he began to lament the renaming of old streets which was going on, and the obliteration of the last traces of the Paris of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, — the Paris of the schoolmen and their open-air debates. He spoke of the local history that lay in the mere names of streets and squares, — Rue du Fouarre, Rue des Mauvais Garçons, and several more of which he gave the origin and legend. In the midst of this picturesque and learned disquisition he stumbled upon the class of a celebrated philosopher of those times, seated on their bundles of straw, — a well-known teacher whose name I cannot now recall, — and stated that he was a Jew.

He instantly began to talk of the Jews, a subject which turned out to be almost a monomania with him. He detected a Jew in every hiding-place and under every disguise, even when the fugitive had no suspicion of himself. To begin with nomenclature : all persons named for countries or towns are Jews ; all with fantastic, compound names, such as Lilienthal, Morgenroth ; all with names derived from colors, trades, animals, vegetables, minerals ; all with Biblical names, except Puritan first names; all patronymics ending in son, —sohn, sen, or any other version ; all Russells, originally so called from red-haired Israelites ; all Walters, by long - descended derivation from wolves and foxes in some ancient tongue ; the Cæcilii, therefore Cæcilia Metella, no doubt St. Cecilia too, consequently the Cecils, including Lord Burleigh and Lord Salisbury ; he cited some old chronicle in which he had cornered one Robert de Cæcilia and exposed him as an English Jew. He gave examples and instances of these various classes with amazing readiness and precision, but I will not pretend that I have set down even these few correctly. Of course there was Jewish blood in many royal houses and in most noble ones, notably in Spain. In short, it appeared that this insidious race had penetrated and permeated the human family more universally than any other influence except original sin. He spoke of their talent and versatility, and of the numbers who had been illustrious in literature, the learned professions, art, science, and even war, until by degrees, from being shut out of society and every honorable and desirable pursuit, they had gained the prominent positions everywhere.

Then he began his classification again : all bankers were Jews, likewise brokers, most of the great financiers, — that was to be expected ; the majority of barons, also baronets ; they had got possession of the press, they were getting into politics ; they had forced their entrance into the army and navy; they had made their way into the cabinets of Europe and become prime ministers ; they had slipped into diplomacy and become ambassadors. But a short time ago they were packed into the ghetto : now they inhabited palaces, the most aristocratic quarters, and were members of the most exclusive clubs. A few years ago they could not own land : they were acquiring it by purchase and mortgage in every part of Europe, and buying so many old estates in England that they owned the larger part of several counties.

Mr. Lowell said more, much more, to illustrate the ubiquity, the universal ability of the Hebrew, and gave examples and statistics for every statement, however astonishing, drawn from his inexhaustible information. He was conscious of the sort of infatuation which possessed him, and his dissertation alternated between earnestness and drollery ; but whenever a burst of laughter greeted some new development of his theme, although he joined in it, he immediately returned to the charge with abundant proof of his paradoxes. Finally he came to a stop, but not to a conclusion, and as no one else spoke, I said, “And when the Jews have got absolute control of finance, the army and navy, the press, diplomacy, society, titles, the government, and the earth’s surface, what do you suppose they will do with them — and with us ? ” “ That,” he answered, turning towards me, and in a whisper audible to the whole table, “ that is the question which will eventually drive me mad.”

Mr. Lowell was more fond of talking than any one else I ever knew. It was not in the least that he liked to hear himself talk,—he liked to talk; he more than liked it, — he loved it to excess. He could listen, he wanted to hear what you had to say, but he could not help interrupting you, for he always had something more to say. His mind was eminently responsive, besides which it had the property of self-suggestiveness ; his conversation stimulated him in the same way that it stimulated other people. He surprised me by saying that he had difficulty in speaking French. Strange as it seemed, I could not doubt him : there was a cheerful frankness in Mr. Lowell’s admission of his deficiencies which had nothing in common with humility, as if he had a belief, certainly well founded, that they took nothing from his merit. Whether this difficulty extended to the other languages in which he was equally well versed, I do not know; it is odd that such a lack should have been associated with his amazing fluency in his own tongue, and the comprehension of others, even to dialect.

Once I found him writing a letter from a French doll to her sister in London; one, as I understood, having been given by Mr. and Mrs. Lowell to a little friend in Paris, the other to an English child. He was writing capital French-English and a plausible doll’s style. What he read me was so comical, the point of view so whimsical, that I would have wished no better entertainment if there had not been so many greater things to hear him talk about. He was in good humor with Paris and his surroundings ; he was brimming with fun ; he seemed to be in a state of perpetual mental activity, of natural effervescence and ebullition like a sparkling spa. He told me, however, that he was subject to depression, which at that time it was not easy to imagine.

That autumn in Paris was my one season of what I may call companionship with Mr. Lowell, for I saw him at least twice a week, often for hours together. I saw him again in London, later in the year, when I was about to sail for America, and that was the end of our continuous intercourse. We met a few times afterwards at long intervals, on memorable occasions : in Cambridge at Harvard’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, in New York at the performance in Greek of The Acharnians by the students of the University of Pennsylvania, and twice or thrice in Philadelphia. I had delightful talks with him, turning on the celebration which had brought us together, and on his late visit to Europe, — he had always just come back. Is it treachery to tell that once when I rallied him a little on these fond returns to a country he had scored so sharply as England, and asked what he found there that he missed here, he lowered his voice and said rather sadly, “ The charm of life ” ? One needs only to recollect that Elmwood was then closed and his faithful companion gone, that most of his early friends were dead and the “ Brahmins ” nearly extinct, to understand the comfort and cheer he found in a land where none of these associations were missed, and where congenial society was always to be had without seeking.

From first to last I saw Mr. Lowell scarcely fifty times, yet when I knew that I should see him no more I felt that a great pleasure, a great privilege, a stimulus and source of strength, were gone from my life. His conversation was interesting, instructive, amusing, brilliant, witty, racy, but to me its highest quality was tonic. I never met him, even for ten minutes, that he did not let fall some invigorating word, witness to the Puritan principle which was the groundwork of his character and the substratum of his nature, and ran through all he said and wrote like a vein of granite. It fortified my resolutions, it put my compromises and concessions to shame, it braced me to effort and sacrifice, and held up before me the true aims of life. This effect was unconscious on his part: I never spoke to him of it, and I never heard him moralize, yet it is as a moralist that I think of him most often. It is the recognition of the eternal difference between right and wrong that gives the ring to his earliest melodies, the point to his satire, the standard to his critical judgments, the sublimity to his Commemoration Ode, when, as poet and patriot, he rose to his utmost height, and made the man what he was at every stage of his progress through life to immortality.