four years of faithful friendship through thick and thin."

Mrs. Craik's marriage took place in 1865, and rendered her completely happy. It was the fashion of our generation a fashion perhaps not without drawbacks, though we have been unanimous in it-that whatever our work for the public might be, our own homes and personal lives were to be strictly and jealously private, and our pride to consist, not in our literary reputation, which was a thing apart, but in the household duties and domestic occupations which are the rule of life for most women. Perhaps there was a little innocent affectation in this studious avoidance of all publicity. It is not the weakness of this day; but we who are now the seniors still prefer it to the banal confidences now so often made to public curiosity in newspapers and elsewhere. No such invasion of her privacy was ever permitted by Mrs. Craik. Her life became larger and fuller after her marriage, as was meet and natural. The days of the little houses at Camden Town or Hampstead were over; but not the friends, who moved with her wherever she moved, always surrounding her with faithful admiration and regard. Not even the closer ties of a home in which she filled the place of wife and mother disturbed these earlier bonds. She became known in her own locality as a new centre of pleasant society and life, always hospitable, kind, full of schemes to give pleasure to the young people who were her perennial interest, and always fondly attached to the old who had been the companions of her life. Her interest in youth no doubt blossomed all the more in the much-cared for development of her Dorothy, the adopted daughter on whom she lavished the abundance of her heart; but the instinct was always strong in her, making her the natural confidant, adviser, patron saint of girls, from the time when she was little older than her devotees. Her more recent writings have been

the records of simple journeyings taken as the guide and leader of such enthusiastic and cheerful groups. She was surrounded by her bevy of maidens in Cornwall, in the house-boat on the Thames in which so many pleasant days were passed, and still more lately in Ireland, where the gentle company travelled, like a mother with her daughters. On the occasion to which I have referred, my last meeting with her in the Lake country, she and her husband had the unfailing attendance of two of these voluntary maids of honour.

During these latter years she has not written very much, not at least with the constant strain of some of her contemporaries whose lot has fallen in less pleasant places, but yet has never relinquished the labour she loved. In earlier days she received from the Queen that only mark of public approval which is possible to the professors of literature-a small pension, about which there is a little explanation to make. It has been remarked by at least one ungracious commentator that the pension granted to Miss Mulock was unsuitable, being quite unnecessary, to Mrs. Craik. For my own part I should think it needless to reply to this, for the reason above said, that it is according to our traditions the only recognition ever given to a writer. But I am asked to say that though Mrs. Craik, when her husband suggested the relinquishment of this small pension, preferred to retain it for this and other reasonsit was, from the period of her marriage, religiously set aside for those in her own walk of literature who needed it more than herself. Her Majesty has no star or order with which to decorate the writers she approves. It is the only symbol by which it may be divined that literature is of any value in the eyes of the State.

There remains little more to say, unless indeed I were at liberty to enter much more fully into a beautiful and harmonious life. For some time

past Mrs. Craik had been subject to attacks, not sufficient to alarm her family, who had been accustomed to the habitual delicacy of health, which was yet combined with much elasticity of constitution and power of shaking off complaints even when they seemed more serious. Her medical advisers had enjoined a great deal of rest, with which the pleasant cares of an approaching marriage in the family, and all the necessary arrangements to make the outset of her adopted daughter in life as bright and delightful as possible, considerably interfered. In one attack of breathlessness and faintness some short time before, she had murmured forth an entreaty that the marriage should not be delayed by anything that could happen to her. But even this did not frighten the fond and cheerful circle, which was used to nothing but happiness. On the morning of the twelfth of October, her husband, before going off to his business, took a loving leave of her, almost more loving than his wont, though without any presentiment,-provoking a laughing remark from their daughter, to which Mrs. Craik answered that though so long married, they were still lovers. These were the last words he heard from her lips, and no man could have a more sweet assurance of the happiness his tender care had procured. When he came home cheerfully in the afternoon to his always

cheerful home, the sight of the doctor's carriage at the door, and the coachman's incautious explanation that "the lady was dying," were the only preparations he had for the great and solemn event which had already taken place. He found her in her own room, lying on her sofa, with an awestricken group standing round—dead. She had entertained various visitors in the afternoon. Some time after they were gone, she had rung her bell, saying she felt ill: the servants alarmed called for assistance, and she was laid upon the sofa. A few minutes' struggle for breath, a murmur, "Oh, if I could live four weeks longer: but no matter— no matter!" and all was over. Thus she died as she had lived her last thought for others, for the bride whose festival day must be overshadowed by so heavy a cloud, yet of content and acquiescence in whatever the supreme Arbiter of events thought right. An ideal ending such as God grant us all, when our day

comes.

Her fame may well be left to the decision of posterity, which takes so little thought of contemporary judg

ments. It is for us the sweet and spotless fame of a good and pure woman full of all tenderness and kindness, very loving and much beloved. The angels of God could not have more.

M. O. W. O.

86

MR. ELLIOT CABOT has made a very interesting contribution to a class of books of which our literature, more than any other, offers admirable examples he has given us a biography intelligently and carefully composed.

These two volumes are a model of responsible editing-I use that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from letters: nothing could resemble less the manner in which the mere bookmaker strings together his frequently questionable pearls and shovels the heap into the presence of the public. Mr. Cabot has selected, compared, discriminated, steered an even course between meagreness and redundancy, and managed to be constantly and happily illustrative. And his work moreover strikes us as the better done, from the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing memoir a good deal more than for the other. If these two things be the conscience of the writer and the career of his hero, it is not difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has found himself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led, for nearly eighty years, a life in which the sequence of events had little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves. There is something we miss very much as we turn these pages-something that has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal record-something that may be most definitely indicated under the name of colour. We lay down the book with a singular impression of paleness-an impression that comes partly from the tone of the biographer, and partly

1 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson; by James Elliot Cabot. Two volumes: London,

1887.

from the moral complexion of his subject, but mainly from the vacancy of the page itself. That of Emerson's personal history is condensed into the single word Concord, and all the condensation in the world will not make it look rich. It presents a most unbroken surface. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Discourses in America, contests Emerson's complete right to the title of a man of letters; yet letters surely were the very texture of his history. Passions, alternations, affairs, adventures, had absolutely no part in it. It stretched itself out in enviable quiet a quiet in which we hear the jotting of the pencil in the note-book. It is the very life for literature (I mean for one's own, not that of another): fifty years of residence in the home of one's forefathers, pervaded by reading, by walking in the woods, and the daily addition of

sentence to sentence.

If the interest of Mr. Cabot's pencilled portrait is incontestable, and yet does not spring from variety, it owes nothing either to a source from which it might have borrowed much, and which it is impossible not to regret a little that he has so completely neglected: I mean a greater reference to the social conditions in which Emerson moved, the company he lived in, the moral air he breathed. If his biographer had allowed himself a little more of the ironic touch, had put himself, once in a way, under the protection of Sainte-Beuve, and had attempted something of a general picture, we should have felt that he only went with the occasion. I may overestimate the latent treasures of the field, but it seems to me there was distinctly an opportunity-an opporportunity to make up moreover, in some degree, for the white tint of

Emerson's career considered simply in itself. We know a man imperfectly until we know his society, and we but half know a society until we know its manners. This is especially true of a man of letters, for manners lie very close to literature. From those of the New England world in which Emerson's character formed itself, Mr. Cabot almost averts his lantern, though we feel sure that there would have been delightful glimpses to be had and that he would have been in a position-that is, that he has all the knowledge that would enable him. -to help us to them. It is as if he could not trust himself, knowing the subject only too well. This adds to the effect of extreme discretion that we find in his volumes, but it is the cause of our not finding certain things, certain figures and scenes, evoked. What is evoked is Emerson's pure spirit, by a copious, sifted series of citations and comments. But we must read as much as possible between the lines, and the picture of the transcendental time (to mention simply one corner) has yet to be painted-the lines have yet to be bitten in. Meanwhile we are held and charmed by the image of Emerson's mind, and the extreme appeal which his physiognomy makes to our powers of discrimination. It is so fair, so uniform and impersonal, that its features are simply fine shades, the gradations of tone of a surface whose proper quality was of the smoothest and on which nothing was reflected with violence. It is a pleasure of the critical sense to find, with Mr. Cabot's extremely intelligent help, a notation for such delicacies.

We seem to see the circumstances of our author's origin, immediate and remote, in a kind of high, vertical moral light, the brightness of a society at once very simple and very responsible. The rare singleness that was in his nature (so that he was all the warning moral voice, without distraction or counter-solicitation), was also in the stock he sprang from, clerical for generations, on both sides,

and clerical in the Puritan sense. His ancestors had lived long (for nearly two centuries) in the same corner of New England, and during that period had preached and studied and prayed and practised. It is impossible to imagine a spirit better prepared in advance to be exactly what it was-better educated for its office in its far-away unconscious beginnings. There is an inner satisfaction in seeing so straight, although so patient, a connection between the stem and the flower, and such a proof that when life wishes to produce something exquisite in quality she takes her measures many years in advance. A conscience like Emerson's could not have been turned off, as it were, from one generation to another a succession of attempts, a long process of refining, was required. His perfection, in his own line, comes largely from the non-interruption of the process.

As most of us are made up of illassorted pieces, his reader (and Mr. Cabot's) envies him this transmitted unity, in which there was no mutual hustling or crowding of elements. must have been a kind of luxury to be that is to feel-so homogeneous, and it helps to account for his serenity, his power of acceptance, and that absence of personal passion which makes his private correspondence read like a series of beautiful circulars or expanded cards pour prendre congé. He had the equanimity of a result: Nature had taken care of him, and he had only to speak. He accepted him-. self as he accepted others, accepted everything; and his absence of eagerness, or in other words, his modesty, was that of a man with whom it is not a question of success, who has nothing invested or at stake. The investment, the stake, was that of the race, of all the past Emersons and Bulkeleys and Waldos. There is much that makes us smile, to-day, in the commotion produced by his secession from the mild Unitarian pulpit: we wonder at a condition of opinion in

which any utterance of his should appear to be wanting in superior piety -in the essence of good instruction. All that is changed: the great difference has become the infinitely small, and we admire a state of society in which scandal and schism took on no darker hue; but there is even yet a sort of drollery in the spectacle of a body of people among whom the author of The American Scholar and of the Address of 1838 at the Harvard Divinity College passed for profane, and who failed to see that he only gave his plea for the spiritual life the advantage of a brilliant expression. They were so provincial as to think that brilliancy came ill-recommended, and they were shocked at his ceasing to care for the prayer and the sermon. They might have perceived that he was the prayer and the sermon not in the least a secularizer, but, in his own subtle, insinuating way, a sanctifier.

Of the three periods into which his life divides itself, the first was (as in the case of most men) that of movement, experiment and selection—that of effort, too, and painful probation. Emerson had his message, but he was a good while looking for his formthe form which, as he himself would have said, he never completely found, and of which it was rather characteristic of him that his later years (with their growing refusal to give him the word), wishing to attack him in his most vulnerable point where his tenure was least complete, had in some degree the effect of despoiling him. It all sounds rather bare and stern, Mr. Cabot's account of his youth and early manhood, and we get an impression of a terrible paucity of alternatives. If he would be neither a farmer nor a trader he could "teach school;" that was the main resource, and a part of the general educative process, of the young New Englander who proposed to devote himself to the things of the mind. There was an advantage in the nudity, however, which was that, in Emerson's case at

least, the things of the mind did get themselves admirably well considered. If it be his great distinction and his special sign that he had a more vivid conception of the moral life than any one else, it is probably not fanciful to say that he owed it in part to the limited way in which he saw our capacity for living illustrated. The plain God-fearing, practical society which surrounded him was not fertile in variations: it had great intelligence and energy, but it moved altogether in the straightforward direction. On three occasions later-three journeys to Europe-he was introduced to a more complicated world; but his spirit, his moral taste, as it were, abode always within the undecorated walls of his youth. There he could dwell with that ripe unconsciousness of evil which is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him. His early writings are full of quaint animadversion upon the vices of the place and time, but there is something charmingly vague, light and general in the arraignment. Almost the worst he can say is that these vices are negative and that his fellow-townsmen are not heroic. We feel that his first impressions were gathered in a community from which misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort, were equally absent. What the life of New England fifty years ago offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of achromatic picture, without particular intensifications. It was from this table of the usual, the merely typical, joys and sorrows, that he proceeded to generalise a fact that accounts in some degree for a certain inadequacy and thinness in his enumerations. But it helps to account also for his direct, intimate vision of the soul itself—not in its emotions, its contortions and perversions, but in its passive, exposed, yet healthy form. He knows the nature of man and the long tradition of its dangers; but we feel that whereas he can put his finger on the remedies, lying for the most part, as