LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide? Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves because we are the fools of hope: —

      When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat.

      Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron, in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we have been, it were better not to be at all.

      The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light – a discipline without which we could have no notion of good, – but whether or not evil predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat of a contempt for Bryon, affirms: —

      .. There’s a simple test

      Would serve, when people take on them to weigh

      The worth of poets. “Who was better, best,

      This, that, the other bard?”.

      End the strife

      By asking “Which one led a happy life?”

      This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of misery in human life? – Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” upon the approach of age,

      Let me not live after my flame lacks oil.

      It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the feeling of the dramatis persona who speaks them. It may be so; but often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it.

      Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new “Candide” and exclaim impatiently, Il faut cultiver notre jardin!

      Grow old along with me,

      The best is yet to be.

      Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage.

      Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,

      Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain,

      And from the dregs of life hope to receive

      What the first sprightly runnings could not give.

      I’m tired of waiting for this chymic gold,

      Which fools us young and beggars us when old.

      Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either optimist or pessimist.

               .. Life still

      Yields human effort scope.

      But since life teems with ill,

      Nurse no extravagant hope.

      Because thou must not dream,

      Thou needs’t not then despair.

      Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband: transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists – the “cranks” of our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these memoranda is – naturally – Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven, Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with… He has no venture in the present.”

      Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no senses… We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know ‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a perfume? I did not know it.’ ”

      And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly testify – those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe. Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish, wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright silly – “shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words concerning it.

      Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and brilliant talker: (“such a determination to eat this huge universe,” Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.” Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation; then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence.”

      This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the matter:

      “In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut

Скачать книгу