Leon H. Vincent

“ A man of Poe’s genius can ill afford to waste his time in attacking other men of genius whose conceptions of literary art differ from his own. Still less can he afford to assail the swarm of petty authors whose works will perish the sooner for being let alone. Of all harmless creatures authors are the most harmless and should be allowed to live their innocent little lives. But Poe took literature hard, and authors had a disquieting effect on him. ”

“ To certain hardy investigators Emerson is not a mere man of letters whose thought, radiantly clothed, takes the philosophical form, he is a philosopher almost in the strict sense. They find a place for him in their classification. They know exactly what ideas, derived from what pundits, have come out with what new inflection in his writings. They have done for Emerson more than he could do, or perhaps cared to do, for himself; they have given him a system.
All this is important and valuable. No little praise is due to results worked out with so much courage and critical acumen. ”

“ And our interest increases when we discern in the unhappy wanderer, mingled among his vices, the germs of heroic virtues,—a hand bountiful to bestow, as it is rapacious to seize, and, even in extremest famine, imparting its last morsel to a fellow sufferer; a heart which, strong in friendship as in hate, thinks it not too much to lay down life for its chosen comrade; a soul true to its own idea of honor, and burning with an unquenchable thirst for greatness and renown.’ Neither poet nor novelist really needs to embroider such an account of the Red Man. ”

“ POET AND PROSE WRITER Lowell’s prose is manly, direct, varied, flexible, generally harmonious, abounding in passages marked by grace, beauty, and sweetness, and capable of rising to genuine eloquence. In its overflowing vitality and human warmth it is an adequate expression of the man, imaging his mocking and humorous moods no less than his deep sincerity, his strength of purpose, and his passion. Much of it has the confidence and ease that go with successful improvisation. ”

“ A historian of American literature says: ‘Irving had no message.’ He was not indeed enslaved by a theory literary or political; neither was he passionate for some reform and convinced that his particular reform was paramount. But he who gave to the world a series of writings which, in addition to being exquisite examples of literary art, are instinct with humor, brotherly kindness, and patriotism, can hardly be said not to have had a message. ”

“ To be sure the Revolution was a great event, and Irving was a gifted writer. Nevertheless for a historian who delights in movement, color, variety, the Revolutionary War must often seem no better than a desert of tedious fact relieved now and then by an oasis of brilliant exploit. Irving complained of the dulness of many parts of the theme. Notwithstanding this he brought to the work so much of his peculiar winsomeness that the Washington is a book always to be taken up with pleasure and laid down with regret. ”

“ What preposterous criticism is that of Frederic Harrison, who characterizes Evangeline as ‘goody-goody dribble’!
Perhaps Longfellow should be most praised for his exquisite taste. He was refined to the finger-tips, a gentleman not alone in every fibre of his being but in every line of his work. The poet of the fireside and the people was an aristocrat after all. Generations of culture seem to be packed into his verses. In a country where so much is flamboyant, boastful, restless, and crude, the influence of such a man is of the loftiest and most benignant sort. ”

“ A Week on the Concord and Merrimack records the unadventurous adventures of the two young men both on this and other excursions.
It is a medley of prose and verse, of homely common-sense and lofty speculation. Side by side with realistic portraits of plain people, farmers, fishermen, boatmen, and lock-keepers, are minute and exquisite descriptions of the life of field, mountain, stream, lake, and air. The literary allusions are many, and taken from sources as wide apart as the poles, Shattuck (the historian of Concord) and Anacreon, Gookin and Chaucer. ”

“ Many people are, but they must find elsewhere the gratification they seek. Whoever wishes at any time absolutely to escape anecdotage, homely detail, and piquant gossip, has it always in his power to do so; he can read Bancroft’s three volumes on the Colonial period and dwell among abstractions.
Even if not at this stage of his career the most human of writers, Bancroft is a comforting historian to return to, after having dwelt for a while with those who instruct us how low and mercenary in motive, how impervious to liberal ideas, were the men who planted English civilization in America. ”

“ To some readers the essay on ‘The Over-Soul’ is at once the clearest and the most darkened, the plainest and the most enigmatic of the essays in this book. But there is no misapprehending the value of this effort to put, not in rigid scientific terms, but in glowing and lofty imagery, the dependence of man on the Infinite, the marvel of that Immensity which is the background of our being. ‘From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.’ It is the universal mind by which all being is enveloped and interpenetrated. ”

“ Love does not awaken the intellect, however; the youth remains a child until the wrathful moment when he holds the mad Capuchin, Miriam’s persecutor, over the edge of the precipice, and reads in the girl’s consenting eyes approval of the deed he is about to commit. At this point Donatello’s real life begins.
The crime is far-reaching in its consequences, blighting for weary months the happiness of the gentle Hilda, a terrified eye-witness; but is most sinister in its effect on Donatello, whose dumb agony and remorse Hawthorne has painted with a strong but subdued touch. ”

“ Or as Swinburne puts it with characteristic emphasis: ‘Under the dirty paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature—the passion of man for woman or the passion of woman for man.’
But along with that first impression of Whitman’s verse as the product of a strong, coarse nature, wilfully brutal at times, comes the no less marked impression that the man is serenely honest, and animated by a benevolence which helps to relieve the brutality of its most repulsive features. ”

“ Prue and I is a book of the sort Zola used to hate—literature which ‘consoles with the lies of the imagination.’ It is the idyl of contented obscurity, the poetic side of humble life. Delicately wrought, light in texture, shot with charming fancies and dainty conceits, having the grace that belongs to old-school manners, this little prose poem is justly accounted its author’s masterpiece.
Curtis wrote one novel, Trumps, and was disappointed in the result. The book is readable, but not because it is a story. Many good novelists are made, not born. Trumps is the work of a novelist in the making. ”

“ In Bracebridge Hall Geoffrey Crayon returns to the English country house where he had spent a Christmas, to enjoy at leisure old manners, old customs, old-world ideas and people. Never were simpler materials used in the making of a book; never was a more entertaining book compounded of such simple materials. The incidents are of the most quiet sort, a walk, a dinner, a visit to a neighboring grange or to a camp of gypsies, a reading in the library or the telling of a story after dinner. The philosophy is naïve, but the humor is exquisite and unflagging. ”

“ There is a provision for the writer in the scheme of things. Nature insists on being reported. To Man the universe is something to be recorded. The instinct exists in different degrees. One has the power to ‘see connection where the multitude sees fragments.’ Lift this faculty to a high degree and you have the great German poet who well-nigh restored literature to its primal significance. ‘There must be a man behind the book.’ ‘The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than any other.’ Goethe is the type of culture. ”

“ The first is the Phi Beta Kappa Oration, ‘The American Scholar,’ in which Emerson sounds with resonant tone that note of independence so marked in all his teaching. It was time,163 he thought, for the ‘sluggard intellect’ of America to ‘look from under its iron lids’ and prove itself equal to something more than ‘exertions of mechanical skill.’ We have been too long the bond slave of Europe.
True emancipation consists in freedom from the idea that only a few gifted ones of the earth are privileged to learn truth at first hand. Let us not be cowed by great men. ”

“ The memoir of John Lothrop Motley, in addition to being a formal record of personal history and literary achievement, is a spirited defence of a proud, a gifted, and (in the biographer’s opinion) an ill-used man, a man who, after years of successful public service, was needlessly and wantonly humbled and mortified. Hence the note of fine indignation which vibrates through the narrative.
The life of Emerson contributed by Holmes to the series of ‘American Men of Letters’ was a surprise to the public. ”

“ The oration on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ delivered when Curtis was thirty-two years of age, is an extraordinary performance. Few addresses hold one in the reading like this. What it must have been in the delivery we can but faintly imagine. It is another splendid proof that literature and oratory may occupy a common ground, neither usurping the other’s place. With the amplest use of oratorical arts the speaker makes rhetoric subordinate to thought. It shows fully (does this oration) one marked virtue of Curtis’s public discourse, its perfect urbanity. ”

“ Beauty is the second, and meets a nobler want. ‘Nature satisfies by its loveliness,’ and ‘without any mixture of corporeal benefit.’ ‘Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.’ This is not enough, there must be a spiritual element. Such element is found in the will and virtue of man. An act of truth or heroism ‘seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple.’ Beauty in Nature also becomes an object of the intellect. It reforms itself in the mind, leads to a new creation, and hence Art. ”

“ Economy of phrase is one of his virtues. In Hawthorne there are no wasted or superfluous sentences, not even a word in excess. Something inexorably logical enters into his work, as in the poetic art. This economy extends to his books as a whole. For stories so rich in ideas, so heavy with suggestion, they are short rather than long. Yet the movement is always leisurely. There is no haste or eagerness. A few strokes of the pen, made with restful deliberation, serve to carry the reader into the very heart of a tragedy. ”

“ PRESCOTT’S CHARACTER To those who knew him in varying degrees of intimacy, whether as friends, neighbors, or chance acquaintance, Prescott seemed the incarnation of urbanity, thoughtfulness, good humor. To us who know him only through the story of his life he seems notable for his heroic qualities.
He had enormous courage and force of will. That other men have performed great tasks under like difficulties cannot lessen the glory of his individual achievement. Handicapped by partial blindness, he wrote history, a type of literature which makes the most exacting demands on the physical powers. ”

“ THE GREAT ROMANCES SCARLET LETTER, HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, MARBLE FAUN In addition to being an engrossing narrative and in every way a supreme illustration of Hawthorne’s art, The Scarlet Letter is a study in will power. Of the four human lives involved in this tragedy, that of Hester Prynne is the most absorbing, as her character is the loftiest. Carried to the place of shame, her dark Oriental beauty irradiates all about her, and she bears herself like a queen. Her punishment is her own, she will ask none to share it. ”

“ When does a poem begin to be long—is it when the poet has achieved a hundred verses or a thousand, when he has written six cantos or twelve?
To say, as Bryant is reported to have said, that ‘a long poem is no more conceivable than a long ecstasy,’ is to make all poetry dependent on an ecstatic condition. And it reduces all poetic temperaments to the same level. Why may not poetry be an outcome of ‘the true enthusiasm that burns long’?
Bryant showed skill in handling a variety of metrical forms; it is unsafe to say that he excelled only in blank verse. ”

“ If unwearied devotion through nearly forty years to the literary life, great fecundity in production, much taste, no little scholarship, and unquestioned sincerity in the exercise of his art entitle one to be called by the honorable name of man of letters, who is more deserving than the author of The Masque of the Gods? To be sure, only a few of his many books are read. But Taylor is in no worse case than many men who tower giant-fashion above him. ”

“ A dominant trait of Motley’s character was intensity of the patriotic sentiment. Much was required of a ‘good American’ who, living in Europe during the Civil War, frequented the circles Motley frequented—much in the way of tact, patience, and, above all, courage and hopefulness. Motley, who was far from being a placid, unreflecting optimist, had need of all his philosophy as he saw everywhere proofs of satisfaction in America’s misfortune. ”

“ It makes no difference ‘whether Orion is up there in heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul.’ Culture has the uniform effect of leading us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance. Nature herself gives us the hint of Idealism. The poet teaches the same lesson. The philosopher seeking, not Beauty, but Truth, dissolves the ‘solid seeming block of matter’ by a thought. ”

“ It was a happy thought of Lowell’s to show how stable democracy might be as a system of government. He made the argument from expediency, that ‘it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up481 than to hold them down, and that a ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.’ He would not have been Lowell had he not also shown that a democracy has its finer instincts, or failed to recognize the fact that as an experiment in the art of government it must stand or fall by its own merits. ”