CHARLES ELIOT NORTON ONE of the mottoes prefixed to the second volume of these letters 1 is a sentence from Sainte-Beuve, which would read in English something like this: "The illustrious writers, the great poets, scarcely exist without having about them other men, themselves essential rather than secondary, great in their incompleteness, the equals in the inner life of thought with those whom they love, whom they serve, and who are kings by right of art." The words could not be more fitting if they had been written with Norton in mind, so perfectly do they express his relation to the artists of his generation. We think of him first, perhaps, as the friend of Ruskin and Carlyle, of Longfellow and Lowell, and of the other writers who were giving lustre to the Victorian and - may we say? Cantabrigian age, and we recall the epitaph he once playfully suggested for himself: "He had good friends, whom he loved"; but we do his memory wrong if we regard him as a mere parasite or shadow, of those greater reputations. He was more than friend and audience; he was counsellor and, at times, judge. One of the few notes 1 Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. With Biographical Comment, by his daughter Sara Norton and M. A. De CHARLES ELIOT NORTON ONE of the mottoes prefixed to the second volume of these letters 1 is a sentence from Sainte-Beuve, which would read in English something like this: "The illustrious writers, the great poets, scarcely exist without having about them other men, themselves essential rather than secondary, great in their incompleteness, the equals in the inner life of thought with those whom they love, whom they serve, and who are kings by right of art." The words could not be more fitting if they had been written with Norton in mind, so perfectly do they express his relation to the artists of his generation. We think of him first, perhaps, as the friend of Ruskin and Carlyle, of Longfellow and Lowell, and of the other writers who were giving lustre to the Victorian and may we say? Cantabrigian age, and we recall the epitaph he once playfully suggested for himself: "He had good friends, whom he loved"; but we do his memory wrong if we regard him as a mere parasite or shadow, of those greater reputations. He was more than friend and audience; he was counsellor and, at times, judge. One of the few notes 1 Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. With Biographical Comment, by his daughter Sara Norton and M. A. De of personal resentment in his correspondence is a protest against a passage in Ruskin's Præterita which had represented him as seeking unasked the society of the more famous man. Ruskin, indeed, meant to cast no slur, and in the same book adds the most generous praise of his "first tutor": Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance - though the younger of the two and always admitting my full power in its own kind. Something of that "rectorial power" he had with whomsoever he lived, whether individual or community, and from it came his honour and a measure, too, of bitter reproach. His letters, as they are now published in selection, have other claims to attention, but their greatest value is in the clear revelation of the man himself to those who knew him not at all or, like the writer of this essay, knew him but slightly, and of the source of the authority which made him among his more productive contemporaries an égal au dedans. The opportunity to set forth the nature of that power brings a peculiar pleasure, not without a sense also of humility, to the present editor of the journal which Norton helped to found and into which so much of his character entered.1 |