4
PARTISAN REVIEW
resist the impulse to remove references to Lincoln as "old Abe" from
William James's early letters of the war-time, it contains pages on
Lincoln's death of a touching appreciation and pride. "It was vain
to say," he writes of Andrew Johnson, of whom he says that the
American people felt him unworthy to represent them, "that we had
deliberately invoked the 'common' in authority and must drink the
brine we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor com-
posed symbol, could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln's
mold-smashing mask to any. mere matter-of-course type of propriety;
but his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type-as if by
the very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out
only less than what made in it for splendid final stamp; in other
words for commanding Style." And of the day when the news reached
Boston: "I was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These
would have been the hours of the streets if none others had been-
when the huge general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder
and people's eyes met people's eyes without the vulgarity of speech.
Even this was, all so strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy
has but to be of a pure enough strain and a high enough connection
to sow with its dark hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense
of what had occurred was of a sadness too noble not somehow to
inspire, and it was truly in the air that, whatever we had as a nation
produced or failed to produce, we could at least gather round this
perfection of classic woe."
In
The American Scene,
he writes of Concord: "We may smile
a little as we 'drag in' Weimar, but I confess myself, for my part,
much more sati<;fiedthan not by our happy equivalent, 'in American
money,' for Goethe and Schiller. The money is a potful in the second
case as in the first, and if Goethe, in the one, represents the gold and
Schiller the silver, I find (and quite putting aside any bimetallic pre-
judice) the same good relation in the other between Emerson and
Thoreau. I open Emerson for the same benefit for which I open
Goethe, the sense of moving in large intellectual space and that of
the gush, here and there, out of the rock, of the crystalline cupful, in
wisdom and poetry, in
Wahrheit
and
Dichtung;
and whatever I open
Thoreau for (I needn't take space here for the good reasons) I open
him oftener than I open Schiller." Edith Wharton says that he used
to read Walt Whitman aloud "in a mood of subdued ecstasy" and
with tremendous effect on his hearers.
Henry James's career had been affected by the shift in the na-
tional point of view which occurred after the Civil War. It is being
shown by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his cultural history of New Eng-
land how the Bostonian of the first part of the century was inspired-
I
