Richard Grant White

THE publication, in a volume, of the very interesting articles upon England Without and Within, originally contributed by Mr. Richard Grant White to this magazine, affords us an opportunity to give a brief review of the other writings of the author, and of the principles which have guided his career as an American man of letters. He has, for years, been recognized as a thinker and scholar of singular independence of character. He has shown, in treating every topic he has discussed, so confident a mastery of the subject matter relating to it, and has been so bold in rigidly following out to their logical conclusions the novel, and occasionally somewhat eccentric, trains of thought he has started, that he has become a constantly questioned, although still a palpable force in our critical literature. Perhaps he is most eagerly read by those who most vehemently disagree with him in opinion. On the whole, it may he said that no other American man of letters has had his great merits more grudgingly allowed, and his minor defects more assiduously magnified.

The reason of this appears to be that he assumed at the start too much of a “militant” (how cordially he hates that word !) attitude towards his opponents. There are two kinds of dogmatism, which, though essentially different, are apt to be confounded in the popular mind. First, there is the illegitimate dogmatism of ignorance and prejudice, which insolently emphasizes the personal pronoun, puts wilfullness in the place of reason, and is always hateful to the reader because it expresses something hateful in the disposition of the writer. Then there is what may be called the legitimate dogmatism, which springs from conscious superiority to others in some department of thought and investigation, because it has earned the right to say “ I ” by long-continued research into matters which the general reader has only superficially considered, and by patient reflection upon matters to which the general reader may have given only a loose and careless attention. Mr. White’s dogmatism is, on the whole, of this kind. His positiveness of statement has its source in the intensity of his thinking, and what he considers the certainty of his knowledge. The controversial tone he adopts is that of the reasoner and the explorer, not of the egotist. It would of course have been better for his own comfort if he had uniformly adopted, toward the opponents he necessarily provoked, a less pugnacious and more persuasive tone ; but still, in all his contentions, be strives to make it appear that it is good sense speaking through him, and not Richard Grant White speaking for himself, that lays down the law which he defies his antagonists to overthrow. All the force and pertinacity he displays come naturally from that vigor of character and depth of conviction which sustain a man in the championship of opinions he has formed on grounds of reason, after a wide survey of the facts and principles on which they rest. Such men are always misunderstood. Still it is well to state the real mental facts which make their moral and intellectual earnestness a wholly different thing from the stupid and willful self-assertion of the ignorant egotist.

The dogmatism to which we have referred was shown in his first elaborate work, published twenty-six years ago, called Shakespeare’s Scholar. Every thoughtful student of Shakespeare who carefully read that volume must have felt that it was a positive contribution to Shakespearean literature, written by an honest, fearless, intelligent, and discriminating critic, who had prepared himself for his task by assiduous study, and who had really cast new light on the meaning of some of the most obscure lines which had puzzled Shakespeare’s editors and commentators. His criticism of Mr. Collier’s corrected Folio of 1632 was especially acute. The “ corrections ” were evidently made by a man of the age of Charles II., taking a prosaic view of the imaginative audacities of a poet of the age of Elizabeth, and translating his “ obscurities ” into the baldest commonplaces.

This volume was followed by his edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, which occupied many years of careful and conscientious labor, and which, when completed, placed him in the front rank of the five or six persons who were known as preëminently American “ scholars ” of Shakespeare. The Life of Shakespeare, forming a part of Mr. White’s edition of the dramatist’s works, is now published in a separate volume. Most biographies of Shakespeare are overloaded with matter having but slight relation to the poet himself. Mr. White sifted the scanty facts of Shakespeare’s life from the numerous fictions and ingenious conjectures with which they were blended, and produced an interesting narrative. He then ventured on a biography of Shakespeare’s Mind, — which is of course the only true biography of Shakespeare, — and exhibited the marvelous genius from its first youthful efforts through all the stages of its rapid growth, until it culminated in such works as Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. The condition of the English stage during the reigns of Elizabeth and James is elaborately described; the leading Elizabethan dramatists are acutely criticised ; and all the exterior circumstances of Shakespeare’s age, which inspired him as well as his brother poets and dramatists, are lucidly set forth. The whole volume is full of solid information and sound criticism. It is specially distinguished for good sense. A true scholar aids his readers by undertaking all the drudgery of investigation himself. We are as thankful to him for what he rejects as for what he admits; and when we are assured of his intellectual integrity we know that he has refrained from boring us with a mass of irrelevant material, the critical study of which must have intensely bored him.

Like many other American authors, Mr. White has been an indefatigable journalist. The separate books he has published convey an incomplete idea of the amount of work he has performed as a writer of political and social articles for newspapers and magazines, and as a literary, dramatic, and musical critic. In our estimate of the position of an American man of letters we are apt to overlook what may have been his daily literary occupation, and what should be his title to rank. Take, in illustration, Bryant. His original poems occupy a moderate octavo volume, and his translation of Homer two octavos more ; but of his forty years’ labor on the New York Evening Post, in which the pith and force of his mind were lavished on what we call ephemeral topics, we remember nothing, though probably his best intellectual activity was in writing, day after day, “ leaders ” on subjects which, as they referred to matters of pressing public importance, doubtless did much to give a right direction to public opinion in important junctures. Take George Ripley. There may be a volume or two, under his name, which give him a position among American authors ; but the immense work he did as the literary critic of the New York Tribune, in which all the resources of his powerful mind, wide scholarship, and genial nature were devoted to seemingly perishing articles on new hooks, is comparatively forgotten, though he was notoriously a far greater man than most of the writers of the volumes he condescended to review. Take George William Curtis. For many years he has written, month after month, short essays, displaying exquisite literary workmanship, for Harper’s Magazine, under the leading title of The Editor’s Easy Chair. Every cultivated reader of that excellent and widely circulated periodical turns instinctively to Curtis’s department as soon as a number is issued. A selection from these charming essays would fill more volumes than Addison’s contributions to The Spectator, and would now be much more attractive than Addison’s, because they relate to subjects which interest the England and America of to day. Yet Mr. Curtis is still represented as an American author by a few volumes, which, however good in their kind, convey no adequate idea of the force of his character, of the ripeness of his culture, of the variety of subjects on which he ventures to give intelligent opinions, and of the sweet persuasiveness of his method in discussing controverted topics. He was among the first to adopt unpopular doctrines : he has made them more or less popular by the beautiful urbanity of nature with which he has enforced their claims on public attention; and he has managed to insinuate into minds most reluctant to receive new ideas — especially when stormed in upon them according to the violent method adopted by most earnest reformers — a whole code of novel opinions. This he has done by the airy ease and elegance of expression with which he warns fashionable people that they will lose ton if they continue to resist principles which have become accepted by the acknowledged leaders of society. He has not only conquered gentility, but made philanthropy genteel. Among these four or five hundred brief essays, there are also delicious criticisms on art and literature, on great authors, composers, singers, actors, and musicians ; there are memories of travel in foreign lands, recording fine and exceptional experiences ; and there are little suggestive treatises on matters of domestic and business life, which appeal directly to our homely good sense. Indeed, whatever may be the subject on which he discourses, his manner of doing it leaves on our minds the impression of a certain indefinable grace and charm. Yet Mr. Curtis has never condescended to gather into volumes even a selection from these delightful products of his mind.

We might go on enumerating other men, some of them very obscure indeed, who make no pretension to be called American authors, and yet have the satisfaction of knowing that their productions sink and melt into the public mind, and do their part in moulding public opinion. When we consider that writers like Bancroft, Ticknor, and Prescott owed to their opulence the means of leisurely indulging in the luxury of research and reflection, and of writing books every sentence of which was carefully revised, with no fear that a printer’s devil should dare to disturb their sacred privacy and seclusion while they were engaged in the solemn task of verifying a quotation, or testing the exact significance of a word, we have a feeling of the injustice done to humbler men of letters, who may have possessed powers as bright as theirs, but who had to write under conditions which such authors would have called destructive to accuracy in matters of fact, and to judgment in matters of opinion.

Now, by far the larger part of Mr. White’s literary work has probably, as we have already intimated, been thrown off in the rapid method of the journalist. But, like many other contemporary journalists, his mind was originally so imbued with leading principles that the subject he discussed at a moment’s notice required little more than the mere effort of putting clear ideas into consecutive sentences and paragraphs. The writing was done in a few hours ; but the culture expressed in the writing was the result of years of patient study and reflection, accidentally directed to a particular topic of the day.

We suppose that to his labors as a journalist, familiar with the closing scenes of the war of the rebellion and the ferment of passions and opinions connected with the hardly less violent war of reconstruction, we owe the most extensively circulated of all Mr. White’s works. We cannot venture to assert how many thousands of copies of The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin, have been sold. There can be no doubt that the production was an astonishing political and literary tour de force. It occupies in our political literature somewhat the position which Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull and Sydney Smith’s Letters of Peter Plymley occupy in the political literature of England. It was, however, purely original, in phrase, scope, and purpose. It probably did more to make what was called " Copperheadism ” both ridiculous and detestable than scores of republican harangues in and out of Congress. In fact, it was the great party pamphlet of the latter period of the war, and of the reconstruction period which followed. It cannot be read now without admiration for its ingenuity, and without enjoyment of the richness, breadth, and audacity of its humor. The mystery, or rather the mystification, respecting its authorship was not the least entertaining of the circumstances attending its publication.

In 1868 Mr. White published in the Broadway Magazine, a London periodical, an article on The American View of the Copyright Question, which he has recently republished, with additions, in a thin duodecimo of seventy pages. He anticipated the position now taken by leading American publishers, which is that they are ready to pay copyright to the foreign author, provided the book is manufactured iu this country. The question of international copyright is complicated with the question of our whole tariff system of protection to American industry. The contest is between English and American manufacturers of books. The American publishers are right in asserting that as long as free trade is not universally accepted they should have the right of printing what they are willing to pay the foreign author for writing.

Mr. White, as a matter of course, brings up the old question of the right of property which an author ought to have in his thoughts and creations, and puts this right on an equality with the title to any other kind of property. Abstractly, there can be no answer to this claim, unless the right of property is denied as a natural right. The legislation which limits the period to which an author, or the publisher who buys a manuscript of an author, can hold exclusive possession of a book as property can with equal justice, or injustice, be applied to ownership in land, in ships, in houses, in any tangible thing which a man thinks he possesses. Macaulay, in his celebrated speech on copyright, takes the ground that property is the creature of the law, and that the law which creates it can be defended only on the ground that it is a law beneficial to mankind. It is therefore under the control of legislation, and he professes his disbelief in any natural, indefeasible right of property, independent of utility and anterior to legislation, or in any natural right of succession to it older and of any higher authority than any human code. As a result of this reasoning, he considers the limitation of the right of property in books to be properly within the jurisdiction of the law-making power, and that the public benefit should be taken into view whenever the question comes up as to the number of years an author or his heirs and assigns should have a monopoly of the works of the author’s brain. It is curious that in all statements regarding literary property one vital fact is overlooked. The honor of the human race is concerned in the production and preservation of such works as the Iliad, the tragedies of Sophocles, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the great dramas of Shakespeare, the Paradise Lost of Milton. The indebtedness of the world to such men is incalculable, for on them rest most of our ideas of the intellectual dignity and moral grandeur of human nature. There would seem to be no property more worthy of recognition than property in such pure creations of exceptional genius. Yet these, and the thousands of works of genius inferior to these, but still of shining merit, are thought not to be property in the sense in which a stupid lout has a perpetual ownership in his acres of land, and an acute knave has an indefeasible property in his bonds and stocks.

It would be amusing to trace, if one could, the progress of the series of articles which have resulted in two of Mr. White’s works: the first entitled Words and Their Uses, Past and Present, which the author modestly calls “ a study of the English language; ” and the second called Every-Day English, issued nine years after the first had appeared. It cannot be supposed that when Mr. White began his crusade against the misuse of his mother tongue he foresaw the controversies he eventually provoked. He was drawn away from topics which would probably have more pleasantly engaged his attention into a seemingly endless squabble about the meaning and collocation of words. He entered into a contest which might have delighted the leisure of a scholar to whom the thousand years of Methuselah were assured, but which was hazardous for a student to attempt whose life was limited to the modest modern term of fourscore and ten. Nobody could have watched his intrepid battle with the learned antagonists he naturally forced into opposition without thinking that his case was worse than that of any poor man who claimed priority in the discovery and application of the almost death-sleep latent in the properties of ether. But the philologists were not his only enemies. He laid himself open to the criticism of hundreds of more or less ignorant private correspondents, who demanded that he should reply to the special bit of sense, or half sense, or pure nonsense which they dared him to answer on his own principles. Nothing since the death of President Garfield has more awakened public sympathy for his honored wife and widow than the twelve hundred letters she has received from correspondents, each expressing horror of the assassination, each deeply bewailing her affliction, and each asking money of her for his own pecuniary benefit. It would not be hazardous to assert that Mr. White had received, during ten or twelve years, an equal number of private letters, having for their subject matter his distinction between “ shall and will,” and his acceptance or rejection of this or that word as good English. His correspondence, indeed, must have been fearfully large, and had he been compelled to pay the postage the gains on his volumes would have been seriously reduced.

It has been often asserted that most literary and theological controversies consist in a war of words. No one but a philologist knows how much more virulent this contest becomes when it is concentrated in a war about words. The anarchy, the absence of “ grammatical order,” in the English language enables the combatants to wage a “ still beginning, never ending ” battle. Each appeals to authorities; but the trouble is that the authorities do not agree ; and such an appeal commonly results in leaving the warriors on both sides dead on the plain.

Mr. White escapes this fate, as he thinks, by broadly asserting that English is almost a “ grammarless language ; ” that, “ with a minimum of exception in pronouns, in one case of nouns, and a few persons and numbers of verbs, English words have but one form.” Again, “ Grammar may be found in Greek, in Latin, in German ; in English little else can be found than logic.” He declares that what is called English grammar was unknown to Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Hooker, Bacon, Shakespeare, the translators of the Bible, and other authors of the great Elizabethan age. The only grammars that the scholars among them studied were those of ancient and modern languages, different from English in being grammatical, while their own mother tongue was essentially logical and grammarless. As a boy, Shakespeare studied the “ rudiments ” of Latin grammar, but of what is called English grammar he knew nothing ; Lowth and Lindley Murray following him after the lapse of a century and a half ; and as to John Bunyan, a master of singularly pure, sweet, and forcible English, he knew nothing of grammar at all, foreign or native.

Now, declining to venture an opinion on the correctness or the incorrectness of Mr. White’s leading principles, who ever reads Words and Their Uses, and Every-Day English, without being instructed as well as stimulated and entertained ? Into matters seemingly sacred to the labors of the philologist or the pedagogue, he throws all the force, keenness, and brilliancy of his mind. There is hardly a dull paragraph in the thousand pages which make up these two fascinating books. In the analysis of words and idioms brought into dispute, Mr. White shows abundant acuteness of intellect and abundant fullness of information regarding the “uses” of English words by English authors. In the homelier aspects of the topics presented, where he enters, perhaps, into somewhat too minute details, he enlivens the discussion by the throng of apt quotations and humorous anecdotes which he has ever at command. But next to the value which these two books possess in following out his logical method of treating the English tongue, in opposition to the formal grammatical method, is his appreciation of the processes by which the English language has been enriched by the fine audacities of writers of creative imagination, who have given to its literature its strong hold on our intellect and sympathies. From Chaucer to Tennyson, there has been going on an intellectual coinage, more precious than the coins which have come fresh and bright from the English mint. This is the coinage of new words and new combinations of old words, which the thoughts and sentiments of men of original genius autocratically exacted from the old mine. Shakespeare, for example, is a notable instance of a creative mind, who left the language in which he began to write a different language from that which served him in his first efforts in composition. He forced it to express Shakespeare, in all the marvelous variations of his comprehensive genius, and it obediently yielded to his imperative plastic touch. Mr. White understands, as few writers on the English language have understood, the authority which poetic genius thus confers on a word or a phrase which bears its stamp ; for he has the poetic sense to discern the imaginative value and justification of expressions which formal grammar abhors, but which even the dictionary makers are at last forced reluctantly to admit into their pages.

The last book which Mr. White has published, England Without and Within, must be considered the best work on England by an American author since the appearance of Emerson’s English Traits and Hawthorne’s Our Old Home. The difference between Emerson and White is obvious at the first glance. The merit of Emerson is in his condensed generalizations; the merit of White is in his elaborate detail of facts and observations, on which generalizations rest for support. Emerson states conclusions, the result half of insight, half of observation. The eye of his mind is always wide open ; it detects ideas and principles in the mass of miscellaneous and confused facts which attract his keen observation of external peculiarities ; but his sight, clear as it is, is not so remarkable as his insight. His mere impressions of English life and character are transformed by his reason and imagination into something “ rich and strange.” He so condenses his matter, in stating the results of his study and thought, as to give point to the remark of a wit, who declared that English Traits always affected him as if, when engaged in an inquiry into the agricultural resources of England, he was presented with a mince pie as their compact and complicated result. Indeed, everything he says demands such a constant strain of mind on the part of the reader, to fill up for himself the spaces which separate premises from judgments, that Emerson’s brilliant, epigrammatic brevity is constantly liable to be misunderstood. His verbal abstemiousness oddly contrasts with his prodigality of thought. He is like a miner who, by mechanical help, crushes out from a ton of slag and refuse a few grains of gold. He embodies in one short, scintillating sentence matter which could be more readily recognized at its worth if he had expanded it into a paragraph or a page. One is sometimes reminded, in this overdone compactness, of the declaration of the pugilistic Chicken, in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, to Mr. Toots. This prize-fighter declares that his patron, in favoring his rival’s pretensions to the hand of Florence Dombey, while disinterestedly giving up his own, is doing something “ mean.” The Chicken, to give force to his utterance of the offensive epithet, adds, “ I ain’t a cove to chuck a word away.”. From the lowest level of life comes this announcement that words should always be identical with acts and thoughts ; and Emerson, with a large vocabulary tempting him into diffuseness, never chucks away a word. The result is that he is ever in danger of being alternately called a mystic, a fanatic, a worldling, and a cynic. Still, English Traits remains the most noticeable volume ever written by an American on England ; and, a hundred years hence, when the largest portion of the English race will be in the United States, sentences from it will be quoted to show how deep was Emerson’s perception of the radical characteristics of the English race.

Hawthorne’s Our Old Home stands by itself as a criticism of English life and character, written by a shy man of genius, who avoided rather than welcomed the persistent attempts of cordial Englishmen to dine and wine him, and do him honor in a bluff English way. It is curious that the modest American consul at Liverpool so secluded himself that be was unrecognized as a writer whose English was as simple, pure, and sweet as Addison’s, while it expressed, what Addison was incapable of expressing, the moods of a great creative mind, attracted to what was certainly exceptional and mysterious in human experience, but imaginatively embodying profound meditations in characters which vividly represent, in action, some of the psychological puzzles which physicians and metaphysicians had long labored to explain, and had abandoned in pure despair of finding a solution. Dickens disliked The Scarlet Letter, and expressed his dislike in a private letter, which is ludicrously shallow in criticism. Tennyson seemed never to have sought the acquaintance of a writer whose power he must have discerned, had he condescended to read one of his works. Mrs. Hawthorne mentions, in her Diary, that she and her husband saw the Poet Laureate at a public exhibition, but did not presume to go forward and introduce themselves. Hawthorne was so diffident a man that he thought the poet whom he so warmly admired, and whose popularity was as great as his merits, had never heard of him. So the great romancer considered that to accost the eminent poet without a formal introduction would be an intrusion on his privacy. The only person he met in England who seems thoroughly to have won his esteem was Francis Bennoch, an English merchant, gifted with literary tastes and literary ambition, who had an enthusiastic admiration of men of letters, and who, when he made the acquaintance of a man of genius, cordially opened to him all the hospitality of his heart, as well as all the hospitality of his house and table. The result was that Hawthorne, in judging England and English character, depended on his power of external observation, sharpened, of course, by his power of spiritual insight. His book, accordingly, has too much of that inspiration which springs not from sympathy, but from antipathy. This quality is detected in those passages where he applauds as in those where he censures. It is evident that he did not like England or the English. The demure humor of his satire reminds us of Addison and Goldsmith, but with an additional subtle scorn, natural to a shy man of unrecognized ability when he comes in contact with the boisterous self-assertion of an average Englishman of the middle class, who seems to condescend whenever he compliments. Hawthorne’s Our Old Home is a work of genuine power; indeed, next to his weird romances, it is the best thing he ever wrote; but we rise from reading it with a feeling that our New home is infinitely better than our Old.

These two volumes are, as we have said, the only rivals of Mr. White’s England Without and Within. Each has its separate charm; in each there is no indication that the tourist is moving too rapidly through the country to pause for reflection on what meets his eye ; and in each there is evidence of a thorough previous culture in English history, literature, and manners. Mr. White specially attracts the reader by making him his companion. We might call his volume a “ transporting ” book, for it literally transports us, without effort on our part, from our firesides to every spot which he visits, and into every circle to which he is admitted. His large, minute, and accurate knowledge of England, which he carries with him, enables him easily to find what he seeks. It would be dangerous to state how short was the period of his residence in England, for his familiarity with its social, industrial, literary, and political life suggests that he must have spent many years in observing what really occupied him only a few months. It is a new illustration of the old fact, that the value of a traveler’s judgments depends not so much on his bodily as on his mental eye. And then Mr. White has the art of concealing the haste with which he must have passed from one place to another by the leisurely, almost lounging tone of his remarks and reflections. In his wanderings, he picks up, here and there, a novel fact, or finds that what he observes starts an entirely original vein of thought, and he communicates fact and thought as though the reader was walking by his side, ready to agree with him or to contradict him, but never violating the amenities of cordial good-fellowship. Whatever may be the judgment on England Without and Within, it may be safely said that nobody will find a page of it dull. But the book is not merely entertaining; it is full of valuable matter, and is a new mental and moral introduction of Jonathan to John Bull, such as few American tourists have been able hitherto to make. In all the notices of it in the literary journals of Great Britain, it is recognized as the book of a scholar, a thinker, and a gentleman, — as a book which rightly claims attention, because it deserves it; and it is also to be said that, in almost every case where exception has been made to its statements, the supercilious critic has had the bad luck to hit upon something where he was ludicrously in the wrong. Thus Mr. White, in speaking of British “ Philistinism,” called it “ the unreadiness of the Saxon Athelstane developed into a social and intellectual power of inertness.” Now almost any reader on this side of the Atlantic would have seen at once that the reference here was to the Athelstane of Scott’s Ivanhoe. But a learned critic in the London Academy, quoting this sentence, exclaimed, “ Shade of Æthelstan ! has it come to this, — that a scholar of English history should confound your name with that of the redeless Ætheried ? ” One wonders, reading this, if we have a critic in the United States who is at once so profound in Saxon lore and so forgetful of Walter Scott!

In this rapid review of Mr. White’s works we have not lingered on his faults, because we have had insufficient time and space to set forth adequately his merits. What most attracts us in his career as a professional American man of letters is the courage with which he has expressed his opinions, whether popular or unpopular ; the patience with which he has investigated the materials of literary and social history on which just opinions regarding such matters are founded; and the acuteness, independence, force, and fertility of thought he has brought to the discussion of every debatable question which has attracted his attention as a critic and a scholar. We might clamorously demur to many of his most confident judgments, but the spirit which animates him as a thinker and seeker after truth appears to us pure, wise, and unselfish.

E. P. Whipple.