Partial Portraits

Partial Portraits

The following attempts at literary portraiture originally appeared, with three exceptions, in American periodicalsThe Atlantic Monthly, The Century, and Harpers Weekly. The paper on Emerson was contributed to Macmillans Magazine, that on The Art of Fiction to Longmans and that on M. Guy de Maupassant to The Fortnightly Review. The reminiscences of Turgnieff were written immediately after his death, the article on Anthony Trollope on the same occasion, before the publication of his interesting Autobiography, and the appreciation of Alphonse Daudet before that of his three latest novels. The date affixed to the sketch of Robert Louis Stevenson is that of composition. 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[1] intelligently and carefully composed. These two volumes are a model of responsible editingI 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{2} 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 pagessomething that has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal recordsomething that may be most definitely indicated under the name of colour. We lay down the book with a singular impression of palenessan impression that comes partly from the tone of the biographer and partly from the moral complexion of his subject, but mainly from the vacancy of the page itself. That of Emersons 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 continuous surface. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Discourses in America, contests Emersons 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 quieta quiet in which we hear the jotting of the pencil in the note-book. It is the very life for literature (I mean for ones own, not that of another): fifty years of residence in the home of ones forefathers, pervaded by reading, by walking in the woods and the daily addition of sentence to sentence.{3} ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 58471
Author: James, Henry
Release Date: Dec 14, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English