LETTERS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.* THE editors of C. E.
Norton's letters have shown a wise self-restraint. Hia career furnished no materials for a biography except what were to be found in his correspondence, and they bare refrained from writing one. What they have given us is a selection from his letters, with the occasional interposition of a few pages of connecting narrative. Among his closest inti- mates were Clough, Carlyle, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, and as he had ample time to spend in writing to them, it was only to be expected that these volumes would possess very great interest—interest not only literary and artistic, but political, and also, in a special and limited sense, religious. The most valuable thing in the book is his account of his friendship with Carlyle, which began in 1869, when Norton was spending the first of five consecutive years in Europe. • In a letter to Miss Cleveland Norton describes his first walk with him and gives Carlyle's account of the com- position of his Frederick the Great. "It was good bard drudgery —siftin' mostly a monstrous accumulation o' lies—and o' all the nations the German lies with most scrupulosity and detaiL . . . I sometimes thought I'd give it all up, but by dint o' regular work and exercise at last got through with it. On careful calculation I found that I had ridden not less than thirty thousand miles during the campaigns o Friedrich. I had a good horse—the most intelligent brute I ever knew, save a Scotch colly—and I named him Fritz, and he and I learned to know every lane and by-road round London." The winter of 1872.73 Norton spent in London and saw more of Carlyle. Once they "got talking of the French and their literature." Of Victor Hugo Carlyle said: "A man of genius, but of the genius of the bottomless pit, . . . Such work as his proceeds from the Devil and leads straight to the mouth of Hell." Carlyle was very fond of Norton's children, especially of Sara, the editor of the letters. When they were taken to wish him good-bye and he had made her a parting gift, "little Margaret, with a strong sense of individual rights and interests, longed for a present also, and, going quite fearlessly up to the old man, began to feel in the capacious pockets of his great coat." As the wearer did not seem to notice her, her father called her away, but at Norton's next visit 0arlyle said to him: " Poor little dear, she thought • Letters of Chart... Eliot Norton. With lihigtophioid Comment by his Daughter. Sara Norton, and M. A. De Wolfe Bows. 2 vole. London:
Constable and Co. (.21e. net.] •, . • •
I was very unmindful of her the other day, and came feelin' in my pockets for the gift I ought to have brought her. And so I have put up a little packet for her." Like most of Carlyle's friends, Norton was indignant with Fronde's treatment of his papers and his niemery. "I have never read a book that gave me more pain, or that seemed to me more artfully malignant. . . . To attempt to pervert the image and to degrade the character of a man like Mr. Carlyle is, to do an injury to mankind."
From the creed of his Puritan forefathers Norton had wandered very far, but something of the Puritan temper long remained with him. "No one," writes his brother-in-law, "can understand his life who does not remember that the authority of the Puritan Church was in his blood." He was at Rome for the first time in 1856, when it was still in its main features the Rome of the -Renaissance, and even then Norton was keenly interested in art and archaeology. But his first comment is : "I want to see another revolution, and Rome may be battered down and depopulated if in that way we can get rid of these churches and these priests. I think I could roast a Franciscan with pleasure, and it would need only a tolerable opportunity to make me stab a Cardinal in the dark." At that time he had not quite reached those heights of contented purblind agnosticism which he eventually attained. He writes to Goldwin Smith in' 1906: " I am a more complete agnostic than you, and I have less fear than you of the result on conduct of the weakening of belief in the divine origin and authority of Christianity. The motives for good conduct and for refraining from ill presented by Christianity seem to me of an essentially selfish order "—a remark which shows that be knew little of human nature, and still less of true Christianity. At this period, however, he was more charitable towards Roman Catholicism than at the earlier time. "If Rome," be writes, " were but a trifle more enlightened, and, instead of opposing, would support and strengthen the. American Catholic inter- pretation of Romanism, the Catholic Church in this country would rapidly gain in spiritual power, and would render an enormous service in standing against the anarchic irreligion of the unchurched multitude." And in another letter he mentions as one of the "greatest services" of the Roman Church in the United States " the control it has exercised over the Irish immigrant. The Irish, both men and women, have become inmates of our houses to a degree of intimacy which would have been absolutely impossible if it had not been for their pecuniary honesty and chastity. Theae two virtues have been largely maintained by the influence of the priest through the confessional."
Norton played at times a considerable, though not a very conspicuous, part in American politics. He was largely instrumental in starting the Nation, and he " brought to the undertaking something which. Godkin himself recognized as unique." What this contribution was is not precisely stated; possibly it was his strong and consistent appreciation of Godkin's exceptional qualities. "The services that he has rendered to the country," writes Norton on receiving the news of, his death, "are greater than the people generally will recognize. All the strongest evil forces of the time have been against his efforts. . . . No man has opposed a more vigorous and effective resistance to those forces ; but they were too strong to be overcome." Still, Norton found comfort in the fact that many.of Godkin's " most bitter enemies in the-Press were more or less consciously, even at the time they were attacking him, exhibiting the good effect which his work had had on them." Norton demurred to Lowell's view that the people were learning more and more " how to be worthy of these powers." " I have as strong a conviction as you that • democracy ' will work, but it may work ignobly, ignorantly, brutally; here at least it does not look as if the better elements of social life, of human nature, were growing ands flourishing in proportion to the baser." Be finds an element of comfort, however, in evolution. " Yon expect less of men when you look at them not as a little lower than the angels, bat as a little higher than the anthropoid apes." But 'Norton and those who thought with him had helped to create the state of things they lamented, by allowing the South to be recon, structed after the war on lines and by methods which showed democracy at its worst, or rather put a bastard relation in place of the true democracy. Norton lived to see. and oppose a repetition of the same error in the case of Cuba.
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