Arts and Letters

Compared with the men treasured in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's inexhaustible memories, he himself belonged to the "second growth" of our literature, but he had sprung tall and straight and graciously from the as yet unexhausted New England soil. In the attics of old houses in Salem there may still be seen wide boards of clear, straight-grained pine, toned to a mellow violin coloring by the stray shafts of sunlight. Colonel Higginson's prose had that same flawless texture, the same heritage and tinge of sunshine. His style matured very early. It was already perfected when he wrote the gay, supple, singing Charge with Prince Rupert. It is as difficult to date one of his essays by the test of its style as it is to date one of Aldrich's songs or Longfellow's sonnets. He did not have the fortune, like his friend Mrs. Howe, to win fame by one ecstatic lyric, or, like Watson and Ellery Channing, to be remembered by one famous line. Yet there is quality throughout Higginson's prose and his slender pages of verse, and there is rich variety.

It would be hard to find in American literature any nature essays which surpass his Water-Lilies, Foot-Paths, and A Summer Afternoon; or an ethical essay more tonic than Saints and Their Bodies. We have had no biographical essay more wholly admirable than the Theodore Parker, and certainly none more delightful than the John Holmes; while a more clever controversial essay than Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet has not been written since the alphabet came into general use. Higginson coasted by the shores of Romance in Malbone and The Monarch of Dreams. He tested repeatedly his gifts as a biographer. In Army Life in a Black Regiment we touch autobiography. The book demanded tact and humor, a sense of human and historical values, and a professional pride in which the colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers was never wanting. I remember that upon one of the last occasions when he attended a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society a paper was read demonstrating the ignorance and illiteracy of the negroes of the South Atlantic States, who, we were assured, could scarcely speak or even understand English. The veteran colonel of the First South Carolina rose very unsteadily to his feet and made this perfect reply: "My men could understand me when I gave the word 'Forward!’"

To praise Higginson's Cheerful Yesterdays is to praise him, so perfectly was it a part of him; not the mere inevitable and conscious betrayal of the personality of an author, but the unconditional surrender of it to the minds and hearts of his friends. In other words, Mr. Higginson was one of those fortunate writers who could transfer to his pages the whole of his personal character. You can no more subtract from his books his idealism, his consistent courage, his erect Americanism, than you can subtract Sir Philip Sidney's knightly qualities from his essay on the nature of poetry.

Higginson loved children and all innocent things. He was chivalrous not merely toward women, which is easy, but toward "woman," which is somewhat more difficult. His wit had always a touch of tartness for the American parvenu, for he had lived long in Newport and was a good field naturalist. His satire also amused itself with the Englishmen who could not understand what our Civil War was fought for. But in general Higginson's list of antipathies was not much longer than such a list should be. Surrounded all his life by reformers, he had, like Emerson, a shrewd, detached sense of the eccentricities of reformers. He wrote an amusing essay about it. He used to bare his noble gray head whenever he entered a polling-booth, but he never took off his hat to any mere vulgar political or literary majority. To the very end he remained what Europeans call an "1848" man; he carried that old idealism serenely through the demoralized American epoch of the eighties and nineties into the new idealistic current of to-day. It is no wonder that he was idolized by the young.

Yet his good fortune lay not merely in this identification of his character with his work as a man of letters. He was also fortunate in settling upon a form of literature precisely adapted to the instincts of his mind. He was a born essayist and autobiographer. Too versatile a workman, and too dependent upon his pen for bread, to confine himself to his true genre, he still kept returning to it, like the homing bee. The flexibility of the essay form, its venturesomeness, its perpetual sally and retreat, tempted his happy audacity. But beneath the wit and grace and fire of his phrases there is the fine conservatism of the scholar, the inimitable touch of the writer whose taste has been trained by the classics. His essays on An Old Latin Text-Book and Sunshine and Petrarch reveal the natural bookman. That style of his, as light and flexible as a rod of split bamboo, is the style of many of the immortal classics and humanists; and it holds when the bigger and coarser styles warp and weaken.

No contemporary of any writer can solve what Higginson once called "the equation of fame." That equation contains too many unknown quantities. Lamb's Essay on Roast Pig, which has simply a good deal of Charles Lamb in it, is now as sure of immortality, as far as we can see, as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At least we can say, here are a dozen volumes into which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has put a great deal of himself, clear-grained, seasoned, sun-bathed stuff. They will outlast our day and many days.