Part 22

_Poems of Home and Travel_ shows very well the range of Taylor’s art. Here are rhymed stories (‘The Soldier and the Pard’ and ‘Kubleh’), graceful settings of classic or Indian legend (‘Hylas’ and ‘Mon-da-Min’), together with a pretty fancy from Shakespeare (‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’). A deeper chord is struck in poems of human love and loss (‘The Two Visions’) and in poems expressing aspiration for the ideal (‘Love and Solitude’), or in those which voice the poet’s joy in a life of action and struggle (‘The Life of Earth’ and ‘Taurus’). There is an ode, ‘The Harp,’ lamenting the silence of song in our America where there is so much to sing. And there are yet other odes, songs, and sonnets.

_Poems of the Orient_ is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are less prominent. The flavor of _Poems of the Orient_ may be known by such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’ (an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’

_The Poet’s Journal_, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings, is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life.

_The Picture of St. John_, an Italian romance, seems made for a popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist after months of conflict with the Power that Denies--these are elements in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts.

_Lars_, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth,

I do confess I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills, Where winter sits, and sees the summer burn In valleys deeper than yon cloud is high:

* * * * *

I love the frank, brave habit of the folk, The hearts unspoiled, though fed from ruder times And filled with angry blood.

_Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_ contains his fine studies of Westchester County life, ‘The Quaker Widow,’ ‘John Reed,’ and ‘The Old Pennsylvania Farmer,’ together with such happily conceived poems as ‘The Sunshine of the Gods,’ ‘Notus Ignoto,’ ‘Iris,’ ‘Implora Pace,’ and ‘Canopus,’ with its richly colored lines.

Taylor wrote three dramatic poems, none of which his critics are willing to admit is a success. _The Masque of the Gods_, a lofty conception, fails (if indeed it is a failure), not through feebleness of touch, but through brevity. So vast a design needs room to expand. As it stands, the _Masque_ is a preliminary sketch of what might have become in the hands of its creator a great canvas. It is something that the poet has succeeded in awakening pity for the worn-out deities terrified because of their loss of power, terrified even more by the possibility that they have no principle of life and are only the creatures of men’s brains.

_The Prophet_ was a courageous dramatic experiment, and will always be read with curiosity if not with pleasure. But to assume that Mormonism is wholly unfitted for poetic drama is perhaps to assume too much.

_Prince Deukalion_, written under the inspiration of _Faust_, is another of those gigantic conceptions with which Taylor’s imagination loved in later life to busy itself, as if eager to try its powers to the uttermost. A theme like this, wholly removed from human interest, dealing with titanic and mythical figures, is the most dangerous in the whole range of possible subjects. Taylor rises so easily to a high level of poetic achievement that it seems as if he must presently touch some mountain peak. Yet he always leaves the impression of really having the strength to do that in which he fails. He disappoints through the very display of power.

* * * * *

His poetic work lacks idiosyncrasy, and to credit him with having given rise to a ‘school’ is to be generous rather than just. His talent fell just short of his ambition. A busy life with its multitude of cares and interests left him too little time for brooding upon the great themes he affected, and there was wanting the gift for relentless self-criticism which operates almost like the creative power. None the less his countrymen have not begun to discharge the debt of gratitude they owe him. Taylor had great virtues. It should be imputed to him for literary righteousness that he was willing to undertake the long poem. He never, so far as is known, made the excuse our poets continually offer, and which is almost infantile, that the general public does not care for long poems,--as if a poet were under any obligation to the general public.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] _The Picture of St. John_ was begun eleven years before Worsley published his fine version of the _Odyssey_ in Spenserian stanza.

XVI

_George William Curtis_

REFERENCES:

=Parke Godwin=: _George William Curtis, A Commemorative Address_, 1892.

=J. W. Chadwick=: _George William Curtis, an Address_, 1893.

=Edward Cary=: _George William Curtis_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1894.

I

HIS LIFE

Henry Curtis, who sailed for New England from the port of London on May 6, 1635, was the founder of the Curtis family in America. His grandson, John Curtis of Worcester, was ‘a sturdy and open loyalist’ of Revolutionary times whose personal character was as heartily esteemed as his political principles were detested.

George Curtis, a great-grandson of John, married Mary Elizabeth Burrill, daughter of James Burrill, Jr., Chief-justice of Rhode Island. Of their two sons George William Curtis was the younger. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1824.

With his brother James Burrill, his closest friend and almost inseparable companion, he was sent to C. W. Greene’s school at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, and remained there five years. He was afterwards at school in Providence for four years. In New York, whither his father had removed (in 1839) to become connected with the Bank of Commerce, Curtis studied under private tutors and had some experience of practical life in the counting-room of a German importing house.

The education given the Curtis boys had also an irregular though very agreeable side. They spent much of the time from 1842 to 1844 as students at Brook Farm. The greater part of the two following years they were at Concord, their object being to combine study and out-of-door life, and above all to be near Emerson. Taking up residence with one or other of several farmers whose local fame almost equalled that of the Concord men of letters, they spent half of each day in farm work and the other half in study or studious idleness. They were to be found regularly at the Club which met on Monday evenings in Emerson’s library and which numbered among its members Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Alcott.

In August, 1846, provided by his father with a sum of money sufficient to give him what he called ‘a generous background,’ Curtis went abroad. He planned to be gone two years, but the background was more than generous and he did not return until 1850. He travelled leisurely through France, Germany, Italy, and the East, made notes of what he saw and used them partly in the form of letters to the New York ‘Courier and Enquirer’ and partly in the famous ‘Howadji’ books. His literary plans were ambitious, including as they did a life of Mehemet Ali, on which he worked for some years only to abandon it at last.

On his return to New York he began writing regularly for the ‘Tribune,’ and was associated with C. F. Briggs and Parke Godwin in the editorship of ‘Putnam’s Magazine.’ When the magazine passed into the hands of Dix, Edwards, and Company, Curtis put money into the firm. By their failure he not only lost everything he had, but he also assumed a debt for which he could not have been legally held and devoted the proceeds of his lectures to paying it. He was eighteen years in ridding himself of the burden.

In 1854 he began printing the famous ‘Easy Chair’ papers in ‘Harper’s Monthly,’ and in 1857 the department of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ called ‘The Lounger.’ The latter was a frank imitation in part of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, even to the letters from lady correspondents such as Nelly Lancer, Sabina Griddle, and Xantippe. During the ten years following his return from abroad Curtis published six books: _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, 1851; _The Howadji in Syria_, 1852; _Lotus-Eating_, 1852; _The Potiphar Papers_, 1853; _Prue and I_, 1857; _Trumps_, 1861. His ambitions had hitherto been chiefly literary. To be sure, in 1856, at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, he had given his address on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ and had followed it with his oration on ‘Patriotism’ and his lecture on ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question.’[58] He had taken the stump for Frémont in 1856, and been a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1860, where his courage, adroitness, and impassioned eloquence had saved the platform at a moment when it needed salvation. Nevertheless it may be said that the first ten years of Curtis’s life as a writer and speaker were ‘literary’ with a strong emphasis on politics, and that the last thirty years were political with an undiminished interest in letters.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1856, Curtis married Anna Shaw, a daughter of F. G. Shaw, formerly of West Roxbury, and a sister of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He had made her acquaintance at Brook Farm twelve years earlier. There is a pretty reference to her in one of his letters to Dwight written in 1844. Curtis had been in Boston for the day: ‘Anna Shaw and Rose Russell passed me like beautiful spirits; one like a fresh morning, the other like an oriental night.’

In 1863 Curtis became the political editor of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ with the proviso that he was to have a free hand. He represented political ideals than which there can be no higher; his discussions were marked by absolute frankness, joined to perfect courtesy. The parts which fell to him in the drama of political life were always important and often conspicuous. He was a delegate both to National and to State conventions, and a delegate-at-large to the convention for revising the State constitution of New York. Although ‘nominated by acclamation’ for Secretary of the State of New York (1869), he refused to serve. He did allow his name to be presented for governor in the convention of 1870, supposing all to be in good faith; but when he discovered that he was the victim of a trick,--the object being to defeat Greeley,--he withdrew.[59]

Next to Anti-slavery his favorite cause was that of Civil Service reform. In 1865 he became ‘second in command’ to Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island, the pioneer in the movement. He was the head of the Civil Service Commission appointed by President Grant in 1871. As president of the New York Civil Service Reform Association and of the National Civil Service Reform League, he did a work of immediate and lasting value.

In 1877 President Hayes offered Curtis his choice of the foreign missions, supposing that he would elect to go to England. In refusing the honor Curtis expressed the doubt whether ‘a man absolutely without legal training of any kind could be a proper minister.’ Later the German mission was urged on him, but he saw no reason to change his former opinion. As an Independent, Curtis voiced opposition to machine methods in the State campaign of 1879, and in 1884 broke with his party and gave his support to Cleveland.

Albeit he was not college bred, Curtis received a full share of the honorary degrees which American colleges lavish every June upon those who have acquired reputation. For the two years prior to his death he was Chancellor of the University of New York.

The literary work of his middle and later years remains for the most part embedded in the files of ‘Harper’s Monthly.’ Three or four little volumes of ‘Easy Chair’ papers (less than a tenth part of the whole number of his contributions) were printed in 1893–94. Written to serve an ephemeral purpose, these essays have a permanent value. It is singular that there is no demand for more reprints of the work of a writer whose journalism was better than most men’s books. Besides the ‘Easy Chair’ papers there were published posthumously _Orations and Addresses edited by C. E. Norton_, 1894; _Literary and Social Essays_, 1895; _Ars Recte Vivendi_, 1898; _Early Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight, edited by G. W. Cooke_, 1898.

Curtis died, after a long and painful illness, on August 31, 1892.

II

THE MAN

Of Curtis it may be said that his character is revealed in every line of his writing and in every act of his public and private life. He was gracious, winning, generous, quick to forgive, and slow to take offence. Goodness as exemplified in not a few good men is alike painful to those who possess it and to those on whom its influence is exerted. Virtue as exemplified in him never wore the austere garb or the gloomy countenance.

At the time of Curtis’s defection from the Republican party incredible abuse was showered on him, not only in the press but through anonymous letters. He was much saddened by it, less from the personal point of view than because of the revelation it gave of the meanness and vindictiveness of human nature. Having thought too well of his fellows, he suffered under the disillusionment, all of which goes to show how optimistic at heart this disciple of Thackeray and writer of satires was. And when Senator Conkling made a savage personal attack on him in the New York State convention of 1877, Curtis seems to have had no feeling towards his enemy but that of pity: ‘It was the saddest sight I ever knew, that man glaring at me in a fury of hate and storming out his foolish blackguardism.’

If Curtis’s career illustrates one thing above another, it is his willingness to sacrifice mental ease and personal comfort for an ideal. But the sacrifice was made with such good nature, such grace in the acquiescence, that one forgets its extent, and even makes the mistake of thinking that possibly it cost him little. Undoubtedly it cost him much, this giving up of literature for politics, this putting aside of all public honors because there was a nearer duty which could not be neglected.

III

THE WRITER AND THE ORATOR

The author of _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ loved alliteration. In his early books he amused himself with pleasant arrangements of words such as ‘camels with calm, contemptuous eyes,’ or ‘lustrous leaves languidly moving,’ or ‘slim minarets spiring silverly and strangely from the undefined mass of mud houses.’ Note this description of the date-palm: ‘Plumed as a prince and graceful as a gentleman, stands the date; and whoever travels among palms travels in good society;’ or this of the sakias: ‘Like huge summer insects they doze upon the bank, droning a melancholy, monotonous song. The slow, sad sound pervades the land--one calls to another, and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored with sound no less than sand.’

Alliteration is a mark of youth. Employed to excess it has a cloying effect, like that of diminished sevenths in music. Of minor rhetorical arts it is the poorest, the most seductive, the most readily abused. But we should miss it sadly from the ‘Howadji’ books. Removed from the context these phrases quoted have an artificial sound, in their place they blend perfectly.

Curtis’s style grew less florid and sensuous after the early writings. At all times it is singularly easy. One gets the impression that he was a spontaneous writer. Great productivity is not possible when there must be a constant retouching of phrases and paragraphs. The unlabored nature of his writing may explain the light estimate Curtis put on it. He is said to have been quite unwilling to reprint a volume of essays from the ‘Easy Chair.’ That anything which came with so little effort could be worth re-reading seemed not to occur to him.

He was the orator almost as soon as he was the man of letters. A rhetorician by taste and training, he knew the dangers of rhetoric and in his oratory avoided them. Clarity and grace are the most obvious characteristics of every sentence. Curtis could no more have been awkward and heavy than he could have been obscure.

He can hardly be praised enough for the ease and naturalness of his allusions. We auditors grow restless when a speaker begins to cite classical names. We fear our old friends Cicero and Catiline, Cæsar and Brutus. We cannot away with Hannibal and Hamilcar. The ear has been dulled by constant repetition. Curtis knew how to make the oldest of these tiresome references seem new. All his allusions have an air of freshness and spontaneity. One would suppose the declaimers had long since exhausted the virtues of Spartacus. Curtis dared to make the old gladiator accessory to his argument in a passage like this:--

‘Spartacus was a barbarian, a pagan, and a slave. Escaping he summoned other men whose liberty was denied. His call rang clear through Italy like an autumn storm through the forest, and men answered him like clustering leaves.... He had no rights that Romans were bound to respect, but he wrote out in blood upon the plains of Lombardy his equal humanity with Cato and Cæsar. The tale is terrible. History shudders with it still. But you and I, Plato and Shakespeare, the mightiest and the meanest men, were honored in Spartacus, for his wild revenge showed the brave scorn of oppression that beats immortal in the proud heart of man.’

Nature had bestowed on Curtis gifts which, if not indispensable to a speaker, are like free-will offerings as against tribute, and make the pathway smooth. His commanding presence, his winning smile and manner, his glorious voice, the air of high breeding, a self-possession which when accompanied by unaffected good nature is one of the most attractive traits--all combined to place him among the first of American orators. He was properly said (in a phrase which through vain repetition has almost lost its meaning) to ‘grace’ the platform.

IV

_NILE NOTES OF A HOWADJI_, _PRUE AND I_, _TRUMPS_

‘In Shakespeare’s day the nuisance was the Monsieur Travellers who had swum in a gundello,’ wrote Fitzgerald in a half-petulant, half-humorous mood, ‘but now the bores are those who have smoked _tchibouques_ with a _Peshaw_!’ He was speaking of _Eothen_. The fever for Eastern books was at its height when Curtis went abroad in 1846.

The _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ describes the four weeks’ flight of the ‘Ibis’ up the river to Aboo Simbel, and the ‘course of temples’ on the return voyage. It is a book of impressions and rhapsodies, a glowing record of travel in which realism struggles with poetry and is usually worsted. It is a dream of the Orient, delightfully parsimonious as to improving facts, and prodigal of whatever helps the home-keeping reader to comprehend the witchery and fascination of the East. A few timid souls were disturbed by ‘Fair Frailty’ and ‘Kushuk Arnem,’ which seem innocent enough now, but the timid souls no doubt found peace in other chapters, such as ‘Under the Palms.’

_The Howadji in Syria_ continues the record. The conditions are changed. Instead of the dahabieh, the camel; for the Ibis was substituted MacWhirter, whose exertions in trotting ‘shook my soul within me;’ for the mud villages and mysterious temples of the Nile, Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus. The temper of the book differs from that of its predecessor. In this volume Curtis is poetical, in the other he was a poet. The mocking American note is heard, as when the Howadji says ‘a storm besieged us in Nablous and a fellow Christian of the Armenian persuasion secured us for his fleas, during the time we remained.’ The Howadji has evidently undergone a measure of disenchantment. The wonders of the East are less wonderful because less vague. In Egypt there was intoxication, in Palestine and Syria there is curiosity, mingled with amusement and contempt. The characteristic quality of the second Howadji book is to be found in the descriptions of the cafés, the bazaars, and in that most excellent account of the Turkish bath (‘Uncle Kühleborn’), quite the best thing of the kind that has been written.

_Lotus-Eating_ is a series of journalistic letters on the Hudson, Trenton Falls, Niagara, Saratoga, Newport, and Nahant, when Nahant was ‘a shower of little brown cottages fallen upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn beach.’ Not in this wise do young men now write for newspapers, with ornate periods and quotations from Waller and Herrick. The book abounds in happy characterizations. At Saratoga ‘we discriminate the arctic and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, stately, with a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a bland Southern morning. We mark the crisp courtesy of the New Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive in association, a pallid ghost of Paris--without its easy elegance, its _bonhomie_, its gracious _savoir faire_, without the _spirituel_ sparkle of its conversation, and its natural and elastic grace of style.’ And so it runs on.

_The Potiphar Papers_ is in another key. The placid observer, who, in _Lotus-Eating_, quoted from De Quincey a delectable passage on the poetry of dancing, is now a bitter satirist contemplating a corps-de-ballet of society buds gyrating in the arms of the _jeunesse dorée_. These ‘bounding belles’ and their admirers shock the observer with a style of dancing which in its whirl, its ‘rush, its fury is only equalled by that of the masked balls at the French opera.’ The

## book is a new treatment (new in 1853) of the old subject of Vanity

Fair. The humor is severe. The touch is not light and the caustic writing is not happy. Curtis was never a master of the whip of scorpions. Nevertheless _The Potiphar Papers_ had a vogue.

_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.