while fighting battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds. After an hour pleasantly passed in this way I set out on horseback, accompanied by my staff and a small escort, for Burkesville Junction, up to which point the railroad had by this time been repaired.

[From Personal Memoirs, vol. ii, chapter 67. Reprinted by permission of The Century Company.]

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

[George William Curtis was born in Providence, R.I., Feb. 24, 1824. He was sent to school at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, but had afterwards no academic training. In 1839 his family removed to New York, where he lived till 1842. He early satisfied a wish he had for a simple, useful life by working on a farm in New England, and he was for some time a member of the famous Brook Farm Community. In 1846 he went abroad, and travelled in Europe and the East for three or four years, returning home in 1850. Two years later he became the editor of Putnam's Magazine, and on giving up that periodical he took the department of the Easy Chair in Harper's Monthly, which he continued to write till the time of his death. He entered public life in 1855, and became known throughout the country as a political writer and speaker; he was already active and popular as a lecturer. He refused several places of honor abroad, but accepted from Grant the appointment of Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, which owed to him its first efficiency in the course of political reform. Up to the time of Blaine's nomination for the presidency he was a republican; but after that, though he supported Garfield, he was independent of party ties. He died at West New Brighton, Staten Island, Aug. 31, 1892.

The following are the names and dates of Curtis's principal works: Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), The Howadji in Syria (1852), The Potiphar Papers (1853), Prue and I (1856), Trumps (1861), Eulogy on Wendell Phillips (1884), three series of essays From the Easy Chair (1892, 1893, 1894), and James Russell Lowell (1892). His Orations and Addresses, edited by Charles Eliot Norton, appeared in 1893-94. His biography has been written by Edward Cary (1895).]

WHEN time shall have got him in the right perspective, few of our writers will show as distinct and continuous a purpose, as direct a growth from a very definite impulse, as George William Curtis. The impulse seemed to exhaust itself at a certain moment of his career, but perhaps it was only included and carried forward in the larger and stronger impulse which made the witness of the effect forget the aesthetic quality in the ethical tendency. His intellectual life was really of a singular unity. The moral force which

ultimately prevailed was always present in the earlier charm; and the grace which his strenuousness kept to the end was as inalienably his. He was both artist and moralist from the beginning to the end of his work. He could not help trying for literary beauty in his political writings, in his appeal to the civic sense of his countrymen; he could not forbear to remind himself and his reader of higher things when he seemed rapt in the joy of art.

He was of Massachusetts stock, but it was not for nothing that he was born in Rhode Island. He embodied in literature that transition from New England to New York which his state represents in our civilization. The influences that shaped his mind and character, that kindled his sympathies and inspired his ideals, were New England influences; the circumstances which attracted his energies and formed his opportunities were New York circumstances. He began to write when what has been called, for want of some closer phrase, the Knickerbocker school had shrunken through the waning activity of Irving and the evanescence of Poe to little more than the tradition which it remains, and when the great Boston group of poets and thinkers was in its glory, when Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Parkman, and Phillips were establishing such claim as we had to literary standing before the world. Yet he did not write like the Bostonians, in spite of his inherent and instinctive ethicism. He was not Puritanic, either in revolt or in acquiescence; he was not provincial in the good way or in the bad way, in the way of Athens, and Florence, and Paris, as the Bostonians sometimes were, or in the way of Little Peddlington, as they sometimes were. He was like the finest and greatest of them in their enlargement to the measure of humanity, though he was not liberated from what is poor and selfish and personal by anything cosmopolitan in his environment, but by his disgust with its social meanness and narrowness. What "our best society" in New York was in 1858, the best society in 1898 can perhaps hardly imagine; but the most interesting fact of that period was the evolution of a great public spirit from conditions fatal to poorer natures.

A great public spirit was what Curtis was at first tentatively and falteringly, and then more and more voluntarily and fully. After he once came to his civic consciousness, he could not con

tent himself with sterile satire of New York society, with breaking butterflies or even more vicious insects upon wheels; he must do something, become something; he must live a protest against triviality and vulgarity, and he chose to do this on the American scale. It was not till he had written The Potiphar Papers that he dedicated himself to humanity in the anti-slavery reform, and thereafter to the purification of our practical politics. But he had the root of the matter always in him: it germinated far back in his past, when as a young man he joined the Brook Farm Community and dreamed, in the sweat of his brow and the work of his hands, of the day when economic equality and the social justice which nothing less implies, should rule among men. There are no miracles in character, and what took the literary world with surprise and sorrow when Curtis left the study for the stump was the simplest possible effect of growth, an effect wholly to be expected and hardly to have been avoided.

His two books of Eastern travel, Nile Notes of a Howadji, and The Howadji in Syria, followed each other in 1851 and 1852, and first sounded the American note which has since been heard in so many agreeable books of travel. They were joyous dances of tints and lights, in great part; they were even more choreographic than musical, though they were written from an ear that sympathetically sought the concord of sweet sounds, and with a skill that almost cloyingly reported it. They give a picture of the pleasing lands of "drowsihed" through which they lead by color rather than by drawing, but the picture is not less true, for all that, and it is not less a work of art because it is at times so purely decorative. Long before impressionism had a name, Curtis's studies of travel were impressionistic; and one is sensible of something like this, not only in the Howadji pages, but in the more conscious effort, Lotus-Eating, a Summer Book, which treated of American watering-places, and tried to divine the poetry of our summer idling.

This appeared in 1852, and was followed in 1854 by The Potiphar Papers, which satirized the vices and follies of the selfcalled best society of New York. The lash was laid on with rather a heavy hand, which was artistically a mistake and morally useless, since it could not penetrate the thick skin it scourged;

but probably the fact was not caricatured in the satire. The next book was that group of tender and winning studies in the ideal, Prue and I, from which a characteristic passage follows. They were reprinted in 1856 from Putnam's Magazine, which Curtis edited, and in which they had won lasting favor. They form undoubtedly his most popular book; with many of his own generation it is not too much to say that they were beloved. They expressed something better than a mood; they were conceived in a love of beauty and expressed in a love of humanity; they are very sentimental, but they are never insincere; the worst that can be said of them is that they are weakened by the tendency to allegory which was always the danger of the author's imagination, but this was their condition. His last fiction was Trumps, a novel, published in 1861, which promptly, and it appears finally, failed of a public.

After that Curtis wrote the graceful and gracious, humanizing, civilizing papers of the Easy Chair in Harper's Monthly. He had already made his mark as an orator on the anti-slavery side of politics; he touched widely on various topics in these pages for ten or twelve years; he took an active part in all patriotic interests as long as he lived; the Civil Service Reform he may be said almost to have created.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS