Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

5

cent and unwary Chair. 'Did n't hear a word,' says Mr. Sealskin, sententiously, and without pausing in his course; and Madam upon his arm raises her eyebrows and looks emphatically not a word!' So the Easy Chair gradually discovers that there has been a very wide and lamentable disappointment, and that a large part of the throng has been tantalized through the evening in the vain to effort to hear-catching a few words and losing the point of the joke. No wonder they are very sober, and sail out of the hall very steadily, with an air of thinking that they have been victims, but also 15 with the plain wish to think as well of Mr. Charles Dickens as circumstances will allow. Still, they evidently hold him, upon the whole, responsible, just as an audience assembled to hear a lecture, and 20 obliged to go unlectured away, holds the lecturer chafing in a snow-bank upon the railroad fifty miles away — responsible for its disappointment. It is pleasant for the Sealskins to read, as the Easy 25 Chair did the next morning, in the eververacious and independent press, that Mr. Dickens's voice is heard with ease in every part of the hall.

But let them feel as they may, those who did not hear are sure to go again, and if they hear the next time, again and again. Let the future reader of this odd number of a magazine learn further that such was the popular eagerness to 35 attend these readings that people gathered before light to stand in the line of the ticket-office. One historic boy is said to have passed the night in the cold waiting for the opening of the office, and to 40 have sold his prize for thirty dollars in gold to a Southerner.' Another person was offered twenty dollars for his place in the line, with merely a chance of getting a ticket when his turn came at the 45 office.

The interest was unabated to the end, and under the personal spell of the enchanter that old ill-feeling towards the author of American Notes and the cre- 50 ator of Chuzzlewit melted away. And why not? Do we not all know our Yankee brother of whom Dickens told us, who has a huge note of interrogation in each eye, and can we blame the Eng- 55 lishman for using his own eyes? Is not that silent traveler whom he saw still to be seen in every train sucking the

great ivory head of his cane and taking it out occasionally and looking at it to see how it is getting on? If we had been a little angry with Lemuel Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe, could our anger have survived hearing one of them tell his story of Liliput, or the other the tale of the solitary island?

After his little winter tour Dickens returned to New York to take leave of the American public. On the Saturday evening before the final reading the newspaper fraternity gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, which was then at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, formerly the hospitable house of Moses H. Grinnell. At this dinner Mr. Greeley presided, and that the bland and eccentric teetotaler, who was not supposed to be versed in what Carlyle called the Tea-table proprieties,' should take the chair at a dinner to so roistering a blade within discreet limits and so skilled an artist of all kinds of beverages as Dickens, was a stroke of extravaganza in his own way. The dinner was in every way memorable and delightful, but the enjoyment was sobered by the illness of the guest from one of the attacks which, as was known soon afterwards, foretold the speedy end. It was, indeed, doubtful if he could appear, but after an hour he came limping slowly into the room on the arm of Mr. Greeley.

In his speech, with great delicacy and feeling, Dickens alluded to some possible misunderstanding, now forever vanished. between him and his hosts, and declared his purpose of publicly recognizing that fact in future editions of his works. His words were greeted with great enthusiasm, and on the following Monday evening he read, at Steinway Hall, for the last time in this country, and sailed on Wednesday. He was still very lame, but he read with unusual vigor, and with deep feeling. As he ended, and slowly limped away, the applause was prodigious, and the whole audience rose and stood waiting. Reaching the steps of the platform he paused, and turned towards the hall; then, after a moment, he came slowly and painfully back again, and with a pale face and evidently profoundly moved, he gazed at the vast audience. The hall was hushed, and in a voice firm, but full of pathos, he spoke a few words of farewell. I shall never recall you,' he said,

gree that the Easy Chair feared to hear the appalling ''sh! 'sh!' of the disturbed neighbors; it is a grossly immoral spectacle, and the subtler and more fascinating the genius of Mr. Jefferson in the representation, the more deadly is the effect.'

'as a mere public audience, but rather as a host of personal friends, and ever with the greatest gratitude, tenderness, and consideration. God bless you, and God bless the land in which I leave you!'s The great audience waited respectfully, wistfully watching him as he slowly withdrew. The faithful Dolby, his friend and manager, helped him down the steps. For a moment he turned and looked at 1 the crowded hall. It was full of hearts responding to his own. There was a common consciousness that it was a last parting, and his fervid benediction was silently reciprocated. Then the door 15 women were full of tears; while the orclosed behind him.

[blocks in formation]

Going the other evening to see Rip Van Winkle, the old question of its moral naturally came up, and Portia warmly asserted that it was shameful to bring 25 young children to see a play in which the exquisite skill of Jefferson threw a glamor upon the sorriest vice.

See,' she said, 'the earnest, tearful interest with which these boys and girls 30 near us hang upon the story. The charm to them of the scene and of the acting is indescribable. Do you suppose they can escape the effect? All their sympathy is kindled for the good-natured and 35 good-for-nothing reprobate, and when Gretchen turns him out into the night and the storm, they cannot help feeling , that it is she, not he, who has ruined the home, and that the drunken vaga- 40 bond, who has just made his endearments the cover of deception, is really the victim of a virago. And when he returns, old and decrepit, and. we might hope, purged of that fatal appetite which 45 has worked all the woe, it is his old victim, the woman whose youth his evil habits ruined, and who, in consequence of those habits was driven into the power of the tormentor, Derrick von Beekman, who hands him the cup that shall be death in tasting," as if it were she, and not he, who had been properly chastened and converted from the fatal error of supposing that drunkenness is not a good 55 thing.

66

'No, no,' said Portia, indignantly and cloquently, raising her voice to that de

50

The drop had just fallen, and the scene on the mountains was about to open. The house had been darkened, and as the clear, quiet, unforced tone of Rip, yielding, not remonstrating, to the doom that we all knew and he did not, fell upon the hushed audience, the eyes of men and

chestra murmured, mezzo voce, during the storm within and without the house, the tenderly pathetic melody of the 'Lorelei: '

'I know not what it presages,
This heart with sadness fraught;
'Tis a tale of the olden ages

That will not from my thought.'

It was not easy to find in the emotion of that moment a response to Portia's accusation of gross immorality. There was but a poetic figure in the mind-the sweet-natured, weak-willed, simple-hearted vagabond of the village and the mountain touching the heart with pity, and, in the drunken scene, with sorrow. This figure excludes all the rest. Its symmetry and charm are the triumph of the play as acted. Now the immorality can not lie in the kindly feeling for the tippling vagabond, for that is natural and universal. Indeed, the same kind of weakness that leads to a habit of tippling belongs often to the most charming and attractive natures, and the representation of the fact upon the stage is not in itself immoral. The immorality must be found, if anywhere, as Portia insisted, in the charm with which vice is invested.

But is it so invested in this play? It used to be urged against Bulwer's early novels that they made scoundrels fascinating, and that boys after reading them would prefer rascals to honest men. If that had been the fact, the novels would have been justly open to that censure. But, tried by this standard, Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Jefferson plays it, is far from an immoral play. The picture as he paints it is moral in the same sense that nature is moral. No man, shiftless.

5

[ocr errors]

idle, and drunken, afraid to go home, ashamed before his children, without selfrespect or the regard of others, however gentle and sweet, and however much a favorite with the boys and girls and animals he may be, is a man whose courses those boys will wish to imitate or who I will make vice more tasteful to them. The pathos of the second part of the play, in which the change of age mingled with mystery is marvelously portrayed, is largely due to the consciousness that this melancholy end is all due to that woeful beginning. The expulsion of Derrick and his nephew is nothing, the happi- 15 ness of Meenie and her lover is nothing, the release of Gretchen is nothing, there is only a wasted old man, without companions, the long prime of whose life has been lost in unconsciousness, and who, 20 suddenly awaking, looks at us pitifully from the edge of the grave.

By the most prosaic standards this should not seem to adorn vice with attraction. It is true that the spectator is 25 more interested in Rip than in his wife, and that she is made a virago. But it is not his drunkenness that charms, and her virtue is at least severe. Indeed, if this performance is to be tried by this stand- 30 ard, the play must be regarded as a temperance mission. For temperance is to be inculcated upon the youthful spectators who sit near us not so much by stories and pictures of the furious brute 35 who drives wife and children from a home made desolate by him, and who fly from him as from a demon, as by this simple, faithful showing of the kindhearted loiterer who makes wretched a 40 wife who yet loves him, and who denounces himself to the child that he loves. This is the fair view of it as a picture of ordinary human life.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

'The beauty of Israel has fallen in its high place,' said the voice of Emerson's friend and neighbor, Judge Hoar, trembling and almost hushed in emotion, and everybody who heard felt the singular felicity of the words. The plain little country church was crowded, and a vast throng stood outside in the peaceful April sunshine. Before the pulpit - the eyes forever closed, the voice forever silentlay the man whose aspect of sweet and majestic serenity Death had not touched, and which recalled his own words: 'Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house.' It was the man who was beloved of his neighbors and honored by the world, whose modest counsel in grave affairs guided the village, and whose thought led the thought of Christendom. 'He belonged to all men, but he is peculiarly ours,' said Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet historic town of which Emerson's grand-father had been the minister, and in which he lived during the larger part of his life, and to which his memory will lend an imperishable charm.

Concord when he first knew it was already famous. A hundred years ago, at the bridge over the placid river, the Middlesex farmers, hastening as minute men from all the neighboring country, had obeyed the first military summons to fire upon the king's regulars; and the redcoated regulars, turning, had begun, amid the blazing patriot volley of twenty miles, their long retreat to Yorktown and over the sea. At the point where the highway by which the soldiers marched enters the village, under the hill along whose ridge the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more than forty years the scholar who belongs to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to Stratford.

But, as we look, the low wail of the 45 sad music is in our ears, the scene changes to a weird world of faery, the story merges in a dream, and Rip Van Winkle smiles at us from a realm beyond the diocese of conscience. If conscience, in- 50 Nature,' said Emerson in his first book, deed, will obtrude, conscience shall be satisfied. It is a sermon if you will, but if you will, also, it is a poem.

Harper's Magazine, April, 1875.

written in the old Manse at Concord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhabited, and which he has so beautifully commemorated Nature stretcheth out her 55 arms to embrace man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur

and grace to the decoration of her darling
child. Only let his thoughts be of equal
scope, and the frame will suit the picture.
A virtuous man is in unison with her
works, and makes the central figure of the
visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates,
Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our
memory with the geography and climate
of Greece. The visible heavens and the
earth sympathize with Jesus. And in 10
common life whoever has seen a person
of powerful character and happy genius
will have remarked how easily he took
all things along with him, the persons, the
opinions, and the day, and nature became 15
auxiliary to a man.' So is Emerson as-
sociated with the tranquil landscape of
the old Middlesex town-the gentle hills,
the long sweep of meadow-land, the wind-
ing river, the woodland, and the pastures 2
under the ample sky. The broad horizon
and rural repose were the fitting home
of the lofty and beneficent genius whose
life and word perpetually illustrated the
supreme worth and beauty of truth, purity, 2
and morality. Whoever saw him there or
elsewhere, saw the sweet and virtuous
soul' which George Herbert likened to
seasoned timber that never gives.

message to deliver, and he bent himself to hear.

But his shrewdness of perception was exquisite. He did not take dross because 5 he hoped for gold. His reproof was as sure and incisive as the stroke of a delicate Damascus blade. When a young man, hearing Emerson say that everybody ought to read Plato, followed his advice, and read, he thought, with the audacity of youth, that he detected faults in Plato, and wrote an essay to set them forth. He asked Emerson to read it, and when he returned it to the youth, Emerson said, pleasantly, 'My boy, when you strike at the king, you must kill him.' One day he sat at dinner with a distinguished company of statesmen. He was by far the most famous man at the table; but he modestly followed the conversation, turning from each guest who spoke, to the next, with the old sweet gravity of earnest expectation. When all the notable company had gone, a guest who remained said to him: 'I saw you talking with the English Minister. He is a brilliant man, and I hope that you found him agreeable.' 'A very pleasant gentleman,' replied Emerson; but he does not represent the England that I know.'

The sincerity and serenity of Emerson's character were unsurpassed. The freshness and glow of his interest in life were perennial. With a sober tenderness of regret he said to a friend who congratulated him upon his seventieth birth- 35 day, Yet it is a little sad to me, for I count to-day the end of youth.' In no other sense than the lapse of years, however, was it true. That auroral freshness of soul which is the distinctive charm of 40 bottom of a stream. He reaches for it,

youth lingered when even memory somewhat failed. How long it is since I have seen you!' he said at Longfellow's funeral to a friend whom he had accosted just before. But he said it with all that 45 heartiness of sympathy and expectation which, in the golden prime of his life, when he was in many ways the most striking and original figure in his country, made him greet every comer as if he 50 expected to hear from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken. A youth, fascinated by this simple graciousness of manner, declared that Emerson greeted the most ordinary persons like a King of 55 Spain receiving an ambassador from the Great Mogul. The expectancy of his manner implied that every man had some

Despite this sharp apprehension, however, Emerson was sometimes unable to find any charm in writings which have apparently taken a permanent place in literature. He could see nothing interesting or valuable in Shelley. When I read Shelley,' he once said, I am like a man who thinks that he sees gold at the

but his hands come up cold, with a little common sand in them.' The waywardness and disorder of Shelley's life may have troubled him. But this would not have affected his intellectual judgment. His acute intellect was supremely independent and absolutely courageous. He must embrace solitude as a bride,' he said of the scholar; he must have his glees and his glooms alone.' When as a young man he quietly closed his pulpit door, and declined to preach any more, because he no longer felt any value in certain religious rites, there was no protest, nor ostentation, nor newspapersensation.' It was simply the closing of a book that he had read, and the amazement and censure and grief of others could not possibly per

suade him to do, or to say, or to affect, the thing that was not true. Emerson's moral and intellectual integrity was transparently simple, but it was sublime. It was not expressed in stormy self-assertion nor cynical contempt. It spoke in tranquil and beautiful affirmation, perfectly courteous, but absolutely sincere.

5

But no man more charitably and diligently sought to understand others, and to to be just to what was obscure and foreign to him. He listened patiently to music. But it did not charm him. He was punctual in the duties of a citizen. But he had no proper political tastes. Yet 15 for the true politics, the application of the moral law to the control of public affairs, no man was more perceptive or uncompromising. He was always on the right side of great public questions. His 20 hospitable sympathy entertained every good cause, and in all our antislavery literature there is no nobler or more permanent work than his address upon the anniversary of West India emancipa- 25 tion in 1844. The only cloud that ever arose upon his regard for Carlyle was his displeasure with Carlyle's contemptuous and cynical sneers at our civil war. He was deeply impatient of doubtful and 30 half-hearted Americans during the war. They call themselves gentlemen, I believe,' he said of certain persons, and in a tone which showed that his lofty and patriotic honor instinctively and utterly 35 repudiated the pinchbeck claims of educated feebleness to bear the grand old name of gentleman.'

Those who recall Emerson when he was a clergyman in Boston remember a singular spiritual beauty in the man, and an indescribable charm of manner in his public speech. But apparently he impressed his earlier associates with the purity and refinement of his mind and life, his lofty 45 intellectual tastes and sympathy, and his literary accomplishment, rather than by the peculiar force of a genius which was to give the most powerful spiritual impulse of the generation to American 50 thought. This is the more singular because there was always something breezy and heroic in his tone, which might have led to the suspicion of the fact that he was from the first a fond reader of Plu- 55 tarch, from whose Lives' he draws so many illustrations. As in a mountain walk the traveler is suddenly aware of

wafts of perfumed air, now of the wildgrape blossom, now of the azalea or sweetbrier, so the strain of Emerson suggests his sympathy with Plutarch and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and the Platonists.

But no one could describe accurately his 'system' of philosophy, nor fit him into a school' of poetry. He was content to call himself a scholar, and no name was more significant and precious to him. He shunned notoriety, but he had the instinctive desire of every artist and of all genius for an audience. When a friend asked him of a young man whose literary talent had seemed to him to promise great achievement, Emerson said: 'He does nothing; and I doubted his genius when I saw that he did not seek a hearing.' When his own first slight volume, Nature, was published, there were but a few, a very few, who perceived in it the ripe and beautiful work of a master in literature and thought. The richness and originality and picturesque simplicity of this book, its subtle perception, its tone of jubilant power, and the soft glimmering light of lofty imagination which irradiates every page, do not lose by familiarity, and are as charming, although of course not so surprising, as when they first took captive the readers of nearly fifty years ago. With the eagerness of classification which characterizes many active minds, Emerson was immediately labeled a Berkeleyan, an idealist, and a mystic. But he eluded the precise classification as noiselessly and surely as a cloud changes its form. Astonishment, satire, indignation, contradiction, spent themselves in vain. Like a rose-tree in June, which blossoms sweetly whether the air be chilly or sunny, his thought quietly flowered into exquisite expression. You might like it or leave it. But the rose would be still a rose.

There was a fashion of calling Emerson obscure. But there is no style in literature of more poetic precision than his. It is full of surprises of beauty and aptness. His central doctrine of the identity of men, the grandeur of every man's opportunity, and the essential poetry of the circumstances of common life, was a living faith. The great man,' he said, 'makes the great thing.' 'In the sighing of these woods; in the quiet of. these gray fields; in the cool breeze that sings out of these

« ElőzőTovább »