Bradford Torrey

“ In reading, as well as anywhere else, a man enjoys the thrill of discovery.
Here, in great part, lies the enduring charm of an author like Montaigne, who wrote without plan, rambling at his own sweet will, never sticking to his text, and never so much as dreaming of unity or anything else that could be called “artistic,” yet making a book to live forever. As Sainte-Beuve says, you may open it at what page you will, and be in what mood you may, and you are sure to find a wise thought expressed in lively and durable phrase, a beautiful meaning set in a single strong line. ”

“ In such a place we know little and care less whither we may be going. Standing still is a good progress. Not a step but something offers itself,—a flower, a bed of moss, a trailing, berry-covered vine, a tuft of ferns. A brook talks to us, a bird sings to us, a vista invites us, a leafy spray, as we brush against it, whispers of beauty and the summer. These, and trifles like these, are what we could specify. All of them together do not make the forest, yet the least of them is not only part of the forest, but is what it is because of the forest. ”

“ When he praises a quaking swamp as the most desirable of dooryards, or has visions of a people so enlightened as to burn all their fences and leave all the forests to grow, who shall contend with him? And yet the sympathetic reader—the only reader—knows what is meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good when he is bidden to resist not a thief, or to hate his father and mother.
Thoreau’s love for the wild—not to be confounded with a liking for natural history or an appreciation of scenery—was as natural and unaffected as a child’s love of sweets. ”

“ The public mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North, South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal: we shall never see an absolutely new book, be it the “great American novel” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and more independent, and more and more unlike the English, more and more American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature, will be but relative. ”

“ It was he who said of Renan that his most charming book was his little volume of youthful reminiscence, because he had put most of himself into it. And of M. Anatole France it is equally true that although he has an abundance of ideas, and loves not only his own past but the past of the world,—especially of all mystics, heretics, skeptics, enthusiasts, and saints,—yet he never comes quite so close to his reader as when his talk grows most intimate. It is what we who read are always after, the man behind the pen. ”

“ Arnold’s dictum, and for ourselves we have no inclination to dispute him. Our fault or the poet’s, we have always found it so. But like Mr. Arnold, we feel the breath of genius blowing through it, and therefore, as we say, we find in it not infrequently an hour of good reading.
Such reading, it has sometimes seemed to us (and the poet’s apology, now we think of it, comes to much the same thing) , is like walking in a forest, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. All about us they stand, dwindling away and away as we look, till, whichever way we turn, there is no looking farther. ”

“ Of all talk whatsoever, talk about one’s self must not be too serious. No man (or none but a great poet) can safely indulge in it unless it is natural for him to see the funny side of his own foibles, and at the right minute to make his point at his own expense. All of which is perhaps no more than to say that the writer in the first person must be a man of taste, knowing (a wisdom which nobody under the sun can teach him) what to say and what not to say, and, chiefest of all, how and when to say it.
Stevenson did not talk of himself so freely as Montaigne (how could he, in these proper days?) ”

“ Yes, and it is one of the objects that men do seek; for the history of literature proves abundantly that the world keeps a relish for that which feeds the soul as well as for that which ministers to the passion for beauty; if it crowns the literary artist, it has a wreath also for his humbler brother—if he is humbler—the originator and disseminator of thought. For it is to be considered that a man with a genius for writing is not therefore a man of original ideas, or indeed, so far as the necessity of the case goes, of any ideas at all. ”

“ They are all natural to him. “Elegant, facile, rapid,” he says; “there you have the perfect politeness of a writer.” Obscurity, difficulty, is to his way of thinking but a kind of bad manners.
He was born to enjoy beautiful things, one would say; elected before the cradle to a life of scholastic quietness and leisure: a dilettante and a saunterer, loving old streets, old shops, old books, the old literatures, fond of out-of-the-way and useless learning, the very type and pattern of an aimless reader and dreamer. ”

“ Perhaps it would be true to say that when men are most inspired, their speech becomes most like Nature’s own,—inarticulate, and so capable of expressing things inexpressible. What book, what line of verse, ever evoked those unutterable feelings—feelings beyond even the thought of utterance—that are wakened in us now and then, in divinely favorable moments, by the plash of waters or the sighing of winds? ”

“ A fog is not a cloud, though a man with his feet in the mud may hug himself and say, “Look, how I soar!” Preciosity is good for those that like it; they have their reward; but to set up a conventicle, with passwords and a private creed, is not to found a religion. In the long run, nothing is supremely beautiful but genuine simplicity, which may be a perfection of nature or the perfection of art; and the only obscurity that suits with it and sets it off is occasional, unexpected, momentary,—a sudden excess of light that flashes and is gone, surprising the writer first, and afterward the reader. ”

“ In the long poem, too, as in the forest, though we were near forgetting to speak of it, there is always the chance of finding something unexpected; a line, an epithet, an image, that seems to have come into being since we were last here. Every perusal is thus a kind of voyage of discovery. It is as if the season had changed. New flowers have blossomed, new birds have come from the South, and the wood is a new place.
In all the work of genius, as we began by saying, there is no small part that seems to come from almost anywhere rather than from the mind and intention of the writer. ”

“ The critic himself, by a happy chance, sat near one such, M. Auguste Dorchain. “He understands you, my prince, as he understands Racine, because he is himself a poet.”
And then, after a little, he concludes by confiding to Hamlet what a mystery and contradiction the world continues to find him, though he is the universal man, the man of all times and all countries, though he is exactly like the rest of us, “a man living in the midst of universal evil.” It is just because he is like the rest of us, indeed, that we find his character a thing so impossible to grasp. ”

“ To find a happy and pregnant sentence in such a place is like taking an apple out of a dish and eating it at the table; to run upon one in the reading of a book is like plucking an apple from a wayside tree in the midst of a half-day ramble, and munching it on the road. [300] The fruit may be as fair and well-flavored in the first case as in the second, but what a difference in the relish of it! It is one thing to receive a coin over the banker’s counter, and another to pick a nugget out of the gravel. ”

“ A new November was a novelty more tempting than any voyage to Europe or even to another world. “Young men have not learned the phases of nature:” so he comforted himself, when the fervors and inspirations of youth seemed at times to be waning: “I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.”
Here, as everywhere with Thoreau, nature, in his ultimate conception of it, was nothing of itself. Everything is for man. ”

“ It makes it worth men’s while to read the same book twice, or even thrice, and so is of use in relieving the tedium of the world. It renders unspeakable service to worthy people who would fain have a fine taste in literature, but for whom, as yet, it is more absorbing to guess riddles than to read poems; and it is almost as good as a corruption of the text to the favored few who have an eye for invisible meanings,—men like the famous French philosopher who discovered extraordinary beauty in certain profundities of Pascal, which turned out to be errors of a copyist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the world, even the stickler for classical perfection, loves a good sentence. Blessed is the writer who now and then makes one. We forgive him for carelessness of construction, and, almost, for every other literary fault, if once in a while—not too infrequently—he packs wit or wisdom into a score or so of memorable words.
In speaking of a quotable style, we are not thinking of works like the Wisdom of Solomon, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Thoughts of Pascal and Joubert, books that are nothing but collections of maxims and aphorisms ”

“ 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 strangely deluded, my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are composed, and how artlessly they are 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! ”

“ If a man is to disclose himself, he must first have known something about himself, a pitch of intelligence by no means to be taken for granted; he must be one of the relatively few who are affectionately cognizant of their own feelings, who delight in their own view of things, who have felt, loved, suffered, and enjoyed, to whom life and the world have been inwardly real and interesting, for whom their own past especially is like a fair landscape, here in full sunshine, there flecked with shadows, [235] but all a picture of loveliness and a thing to dream over. ”

“ Whether, having learned it, he should turn out to have original genius to go with his knowledge and put it to use, was a question that the event alone could determine. Originality is a gift of the gods; it is born with a man, or it is not born with him. The technique of a prose style, on the other hand, could be learned, and Stevenson’s present business was to learn it, in the only way of which he had any knowledge, the way in which his masters themselves had learned it,—practice based on imitation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether Thoreau’s temperance is to be credited to the restraints of stoical philosophy or to plain good taste, it is a virtue to be thankful for.
[143] With him the study of nature was not an amusement, nor even a more or less serious occupation for leisure hours, but the work of his life; a work to which he gave himself from year’s end to year’s end, as faithfully and laboriously, and with as definite a purpose,—a crop as truly in his eye,—as any Concord farmer gave himself to his farm. He was no amateur, no dilettante, no conscious hobbyist, laughing between times at his own absorption. ”

“ In vain shall a man bestir himself to run away from his own instincts. In vain, in such a warfare, shall he trust to the freedom of the will. Happily for himself, and happily for the world, Thoreau, though he “could not afford to be a naturalist,” could never cease from his “too envious observation.”
[109] By inclination and habit he liked to see and do things for himself, as if they had never been seen or done before. That was one mark of his individualistic temper, not to say a chief mark of his genius. ”

“ M. Anatole France, as has been said, seems by birth and early predilection to have been devoted to a career of studious leisure. He would always be contented, one would have thought, to be a looker-on at the game of life, sitting by the wayside, book in hand, and watching the world go past; taking it all as a show; never so much as considering the possibility of entering for any of the prizes that more ambitious men run for, nor concerned very much as to who should win or who lose; hardly so much as an observer ”

“ Houses and lands, even, as he considered them, were often no better than incumbrances. Some of his well-to-do, highly respected, self-satisfied neighbors were as good as in prison, he thought. In what sense were men to be called free, if their “property” had put them under bonds to stay in such and such a place and do only such and such things? Life was more than meat, as he reckoned, and having trained himself to “strict business habits” (his own words) , he did not believe in swapping a better thing for a poorer one. ”