His Latest Method

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comment. Indeed, we may almost say the story itself has been thrown out with the rest. For in the later novels and tales of James there is not so much a story told as a situation revealed; revealed to the characters and so to us; and the process of gradual revelation, the calculated "release" of one item after another-that is the plot. It is as if we were present at the painting of a picture by a distinguished artist, as if we were invited to follow the successive strokes by which this or that detail of his conception was made to bloom upon the canvas; and when the last bit of oil had been applied, he should turn to us and say "Now you have heard Sordello's story told." Some of us would be satisfied with the excitement of having assisted at such a function, considering also the picture which had thus come into being. Others, and it is human nature, no doubt,-would exclaim in vexed bewilderment "But I have heard no story told!"

The stories of James tend to be records of seeing rather than of doing. The characters are more like patients than agents; their business seems to be to register impressions; to receive illumination rather than to make up their minds and set about deeds. But this is a way of conceiving our human business by no means confined to these novels; is it not more or less characteristic of the whole period in which James wrote? One passes by insensible degrees from the world of Renan to that of Pater and Swinburne, and thence to that of Oscar Wilde and of writers yet living, in whom the cult of impressions has been carried to lengths yet more extreme.

Among all these names the most significant here seems to be that of Walter Pater, whose style and tone of writingcorresponding to his intellectual quality and bias—more nearly anticipate the style of James than do those of any other writer, English or French. It does not matter that Pater's subject is the art of the past and James's the life of the present. No two writers were ever more concerned with mere "impressions," and impressions mean for them discriminations, intimate impressions, subtle and finely sympathetic interpretations. None ever found it necessary, in order to render the special quality of their impressions, to try them in so many different lights, to accompany their state

ments with so many qualifications and reservations: impulses giving rise to sentences more curiously complex and of longer breath than were ever penned by writers of like pith and moment. They were both of them averse to that raising of the voice, that vehement or emphatic manner, characteristic of the earlier Victorians and supposed to be associated with strong feelings and firm principles. These reasonable and well-bred writers, if they ever had strong feelings or firm principles, could be trusted to dissimulate them under a tone of quiet urbanity. They abhorred abrupt transitions and violent attitudes. They proceed ever in their discourse smoothly and without marked inflection, softly, as among tea-tables, or like persons with weak hearts who must guard themselves against excitement. There is a kind of hieratic gentleness and fastidiousness,—and yet withal a hint of breathless awe, of restrained enthusiasm,-in the manner in which they celebrate the mysteries of their religion of culture, their religion of art.

This, we say of James, is anything but American, indigenous; this is the Zeitgeist; this is the spirit of England in the "æsthetic nineties" reacting against the spirit of England in the time of Carlyle. But then we think of the "passionate pilgrimage" of Isabel Archer and the others; we think of James's Middle Years; we think, it may be, of ourselves and eastward prostrations of our own. And we realize that what the romancer has conjured up is a world not strange to our experience. His genius is not the less American for presenting us, before all things, this vision of a bride rushing into the arms of her bridegroom: vision of the mystic marriage (shall we say?) of new-world faith and old-world culture.

W

CHAPTER XIII

Later Essayists

HEN, speaking to his classmates on their graduation from college, William Ellery Channing1 made the address entitled The Present Age (1798), the note that he uttered was one that thenceforth reverberated throughout our national life and literature. It showed affiliation with the French Revolution, and with the England of Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth; and notable is the emphasis on the possibility of all human progress, not alone American progress, and on the importance of that culture which shall be shared by all classes of mankind. To material objects Channing gave their due, but regarded them merely as the manifestations of character and of power that have in higher fields their most inspiring representation; and beauty was for him a vast treasury of benediction wherefrom he wished his fellow men to draw the priceless blessings available to the poorest purse. Thus the essay on Self-Culture, written as an address in 1838, is a composition to which the writings of Emerson, Curtis, Higginson, Mabie, and later authors owe a decided, even if in some cases unconscious, debt-the practical and poetical blending of humanity with the humanities.

As Channing was the earliest in that firmament of lectureressayists where Emerson shone as the most benignant star, so Nathaniel Parker Willis is the prototype of later semi-literary American journalists. Now, the mark of the journalist, the trait which surely establishes both his immediate success and his final oblivion, is the intentness of seizure on what the present can give, in swift, exciting, easily apprehensible interest. It was always the present that fascinated Willis; and, save in fleeting mo1See Book II, Chap. VIII. Ibid., Chap. III.

2

ments of early days, his vision did not seek the future with any sincere scrutiny. Revelling in personalities, he is expository only secondarily, if at all; and inspiring never. The writer of our own time who works up an interview with some man of mark is following Willis not alone in his interest in the superficialities of personality, but often in the very tricks of style, varying from gaudy metaphor to the epithet that has the tang of the unexpected. Our journalists, by and large, remain lesser members of the Willis tribe.

2

Still a third writer, Washington Irving,' exerted a notable influence as the originator of a literary form which, for want of a better phrase, might be called the story-essay, wherein the narrative element runs its gentle course over a bed of personal reflections and descriptive comment of individual flavour. He had a whole school of followers, and even Hawthorne3 for a time moved among them; while two more natural inheritors of his moods of tender sentiment and gentle satire are Donald Grant Mitchell (1822-1908) and George William Curtis, with whom the history of our later essayists may well begin.

The two volumes, Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and Dream Life (1851), which Mitchell, as a young writer, issued under the pseudonym of Ik Marvel, are volumes that strike the same chords whose artistically modulated music resounds in so much of Irving, to whom the latter volume was dedicated; while in The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town (1850) we have a series of papers directly modelled on Salmagundi. These sketches, despite the facile manner of their kindly satire, belong in the topical realm of ephemera, and are of interest mainly to the historical critic, who, harking back to the days of The Spectator and The Tatler, finds in them another nexus between English and American literature. Not so, however, can we dismiss Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life. Their hold on the affections of later generations is secure despite that naïve sentimentality frequently displayed by American literature in the period just preceding the Civil War. Both these books present a series of pictures in the imaginary life of their author, and there is a general adherence to the concept of life as a succession of the seasons. This parallel does not, however, Ibid., Chap. VII.

1 See Book II, Chap. IV.

3 Ibid., Chap. XI.

lead into paths of wintry regret. We find even December logic taking on a golden hue in such a sentence as this from the Reveries: "Affliction has tempered joy, and joy adorned affliction. Life and all its troubles have become distilled into a holy incense rising ever from your fireside an offering to your household Gods." "And what if age comes"-Mitchell writes further on, in the vein of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra-"what else proves the wine? It is but retreating towards the pure sky depths." The note of joy in the springtime of life, the accent of sympathy for young griefs as well as young loves, echo from these charming pages; while the ingenuousness of Ik Marvel's sentiments is embedded in an old-fashioned form of sentimental phraseology which brings a smile to the lips of the sophisticated critic. But after all it is the smile in the reader's heart that attests the lasting human appeal of both the Reveries and Dream Life. These books were written while their author was still in his twenties, and they have the immaturity, both of technique and philosophy, which precedes the labour of the craftsman and the experiences of the man; yet they have also, with the aroma of youth, that even subtler fragrance-the gift of the gods to all who comprehend the value of the dreaming hour.

There are two elements in these works secondary in interest only to the major themes of love, sorrow, and ambition. One is the immediate affection for nature, nowhere more beautifully expressed than in this springtime picture: "The dandelions lay along the hillocks like stars in a sky of green." The other note is of love for old books. These themes are repeatedly found in Mitchell's later writings; and My Farm of Edgewood (1863)-Edgewood was his country home near New Haven -began a series of volumes among the earliest of a steadily increasing department of American literature revolving around agricultural and rural themes.

Mitchell's own experiences with the soil of his native Connecticut are, in My Farm of Edgewood, recounted with the seriousness of the scientific farmer and the grace of the man of letters. In Wet Days at Edgewood (1865) his pleasant discourse ranges from ancient country poets to the latest practical studies of soil cultivation; while in the yet later volume Rural Studies, with Hints for Country Places (1867) he continues in confidential