Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

Hill, and he had ample cause to do so. The property was what we call a small park and homestead, with fine timber plantations and shrubberies, standing on a modest hill within an hour's drive of Boston. The house is a roomy half-timber erection of the old-world New England type, with verandahs and outdoor shelters about it, having pleasant woodland views, and standing in its own plantations and lawns, entirely shut off from the wilderness of new villas and tram-car avenues which crowd the suburbs of Boston. It looks, what it is, a relic of Old Massachusetts, swept round but not engulfed in the torrent of the modern industrial progress which, in a hundred years, has hemmed it in and partially snatched it away. To compare a small and simple thing with a great and magnificent thing, Shady Hill in its old woodland recess stands as Holland House still stands, like an oasis of antique repose in the roaring labyrinth of modern Kensington. There seemed to me, coming fresh from New York and Chicago, a graceful pathos about Shady Hill, a bit of Puritan New England which had stood unchanged for a hundred years, that was in curious harmony with the nature and life of its venerable owner.

There Norton showed a true New England hospitality to one whom he had known as a tiro in politics and letters forty years ago, one who had known something of his great English and also of his American friends. I met under his roof not a few leaders of Boston literature and science, as well as professors and students of Harvard College. We had at dinner Mr. J. Ford Rhodes, the learned and indefatigable historian of the United States since the Civil War, now a standard work in his own country and in ours. We had Colonel Charles F. Adams, son of the late Minister, and since President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Professor Lawrence Lowell, the learned author of The Government of England,' and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes. And with these came eminent Harvard men; though unfortunately, during the period of my two visits to Cambridge, the President, Dr. Eliot, a cousin of Norton's, was away in the south. At a reception in the evening Norton collected a large and distinguished company from Cambridge, Harvard and Boston. To every English student who had the good fortune to be known to him, Norton threw his home as if it were a sort of literary embassy for a foreigner on a tour.

open

This reception and an introduction to so many eminent men in America remains one of the pleasantest memories of my life.

But there was nothing exceptional in this, nor did I suppose that I personally deserved such a welcome; for I am well aware that many an English visitor to Boston has had a similar experience, and it was one that Norton was always ready to extend to every Englishman, who he thought would really value such a kind of hospitality. To any traveller from home, indeed from Europe, who had any serious place in literature or in science, to be received by Eliot Norton was to have a passport into the best academic world of the United States.

Among the other pleasures of a visit to Shady Hill was to be shown by Norton through his collection of books, drawings, autographs, and photographs. His library, valued as we were publicly told at 4000l., was especially interesting from its variety and the origin of many of its volumes and treasures. As the intimate friend and to a great extent the colleague of such men as Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Curtis, Lowell, in America, of Darwin, FitzGerald, Carlyle, Clough, Ruskin, in England, as literary executor of Lowell and of Ruskin, Norton had necessarily amassed an almost unique collection of volumes, manuscripts, notes, and autographs. These, together with his inexhaustible reminiscences of such men as Darwin, Carlyle, Ruskin and Stephen, made a quiet evening with him over his fireside in the library a thing not to be forgotten. If his home was a kind of literary consulate, his library was a kind of literary museum.

More important, perhaps, than his library treasures, with its portraits, curios, views, and manuscripts, were the invaluable estimates of men and things in America which he would offer to the new-comer. For my part, I arrived in the United States having a few American friends, but with a moderate understanding of parties, movements, politicians and authorities. Norton was ready to explain, estimate, and criticise them all. Of course I knew that he was an old stalwart of the anti-slavery, anti-aggression, peace, and industrial reform parties. And it was not for me, an independent foreign observer, to pledge myself to either side in questions of purely domestic concern in the States. But as being an earnest opponent of the war against the South African Republics, of all forms of Imperial extension, as an old defender of the emancipation of labour without Socialism, I found myself in principle heartily with Norton.

I began my Life of Ruskin' in the year of my American visit ; and, as one who had already written several studies on Ruskin,

whom I had visited at Brantwood shortly before his death, I found with Norton inexhaustible topics of common interest. I need not go into the well-known story of Norton's intimacy with Ruskin, extending over forty-six years. He was eminently aware of the weaker side of Ruskin's intellect and of his character, and perhaps Norton was the one man who ever could have corrected Ruskin's vagaries and given solidity to his effervescent imagination. It would have been well if Norton had been not only Ruskin's transatlantic correspondent and literary executor, but his elder brother, his tutor, and counsellor through life.

As to Carlyle of course, Norton, who was a whole generation younger, and had never known the Prophet of Chelsea until he was an old man with his life-work completed, could only receive and not give, much less guide. But he did excellent service in making Carlyle understood and accepted in America, in spite of the monstrous heresies of the 'Hero-King,' the millions, mostly fools,' and pro-slavery doctrines. When Froude's volumes of Carlyle's 6 Reminiscences' and the 'Life' had done much to shake faith in Carlyle's good faith and good feeling, Norton went far to restore the credit of Carlyle by reprinting a correct version of the 'Letters,' which Froude had so strangely distorted and misunderstood. In the Nineteenth Century,' April 1889, I wrote a short review of the new version of the 'Letters.' The extraordinary discrepancies between Carlyle's authentic writings as shown by Norton and the garbled form in which Froude had presented them to the world almost amounts to one of the curiosities of modern literature. When Norton published the genuine Letters,' it was seen that Froude's version alters the punctuation, words, and phrases; drops out whole sentences, paragraphs and pages; rewrites passages in other words, and tacks together bits of passages into new sentences.' Norton continued to defend Carlyle's character by means of documents and information supplied by Carlyle's niece. Instead of the famous saying of Carlyle's mother that he was ill to live with, it turned out that what the old lady said was that he was hard to deal with. We all knew that.

Norton's friendship for Leslie Stephen was quite a memorable. example of what a literary intimacy may be, and may do, between men for long periods separated by 4000 miles. It began in Boston in 1863, and only ended forty years afterwards with Stephen's death, in 1904. Stephen's letters to Norton are set out in full in many a fascinating page of Professor Maitland's 'Life.' The

whole series tells us almost as much of Norton as of Stephen; and until we have Norton's letters before us, we in England can get no better glimpse into Norton's mind, interests, and nature than in the letters addressed to him by his English friend. The two, with all their points of difference, and these were many, were well matched. Both were essentially critical by temperament. Both, by slow and severe thought, had freed themselves, like Carlyle, from the strict Puritanism in which they had been born and reared. They had come out of Houndsditch,' as Carlyle said in his violent way; but both would be loth to use any such phrase of contempt. For, unlike Sartor, Stephen and Norton were intensely full of sympathy, and, as all fine critics do, they both saw much to respect in the men and the ideas with which they had parted. Norton, like his English friend, had an ardent confidence in Progress as an end and in the future of the People in their respective countries. And if Norton had no such immense literary activity as Stephen, and no such extended influence over the field of letters and the whole academic world, Norton had a passionate love of art, of poetry, of medieval devotion and charm which was almost a closed book to Stephen.

To bring to an end these brief reminiscences, if we tried to sum up in a phrase Norton's special gift, it lay, I think, in his power of discriminating sympathy. Norton's genius was at once critical and yet appreciative, incisive and enthusiastic. To combine both temperaments in equal force is rare. Many men are keen judges, able to probe errors and defects. Not a few are ardent lovers of causes and ideas. But sympathy is too often ready to cover failings, as criticism is too prone to exaggerate them. Norton was not easily satisfied, and he was far from being a friend of everyone who pleased him, or a believer in every cause wherein he saw faith and hope. The sensitive nature of Ruskin exactly described the incalculable benefit he derived from intimacy with Norton. Ruskin wrote to me his infinitely varied and loving praise became a constant motive to exertion and aid in effort; yet he never allowed in me the slightest violation of the laws either of good writing or social prudence without instant blame or warning.'

Many a man can say how Norton's loving and yet discriminating praise became to him a motive to action and aid in effort. When he saw real ground to encourage a political worker or a literary movement, his sympathetic cheer acted as an inspiration. For my own part, I remember how, about the time of the first Trades Union

Commission in 1867, when a few of us were struggling against general and bitter opposition to have the claims of Labour fairly heard, it was Norton's sympathy in letters to me which made me feel that our cause was not hopeless, that we were not facing obloquy in vain. And in many a battle on behalf of justice, peace, and free thought, it was Norton's clear voice of Onward that made us work, trust, and hope.

« ZurückWeiter »