Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/132

"4 Later Essayists how graciously the two great streams in our essay literature — the Puritan stream softened by the elemental thought of the brotherhood of man, with Channing as its fountainhead, and the genial flow of benign art, with Irving as its fountain- head — have their confluence in Curtis! "Honor," he writes, "is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is the quality which cannot be insulted"; thus expressing the thought which underlay the memorable phrase of a later essajdst, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. One recalls in this connection another of Curtis's sentences: " Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds and noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind. The literary career of Curtis falls into two parts. Bom in Providence, he went, as a boy, to New York, where, for a short while, he held a clerkship. His first direct connection with other men of letters came with his sojourn in 1842 at Brook Farm ; and this was followed by travels in Europe and in Egypt and Syria. The result was a series of delightful books, based on letters that he had sent to the New York Tribune; and in them we find Curtis giving full and original vent to his nimble fancy and his graceful descriptive powers. The Nile Notes of a Howadji (1856), The Howadji in Syria (1852), and Lotus Eaters (1852) are thus delectable resting places for the literary student who seeks to cover the territory of our travel literature. In Potiphar Papers (1853), Curtis resorted to our chief city, con- tinuing the Salmagundi tradition of local satire, not without immediate evidence of the influence of Thackeray; chastizing with somewhat gentle blows of the moralist's whip the more obvious faults of a community too much given to ostentation ; and pointing with no very stem finger at the social excres- cences of his (and other) times. But a more individual flavour comes to the front in Prue and I (1856), one of the most charm- ing of American books, wherein the poor man endowed with the gift of imagination is shown to be a far richer and infinitely more sympathetic figure than the millionaire whose festivities he contemplates with the eye of a philosopher whom love has blessed. About this same period, Curtis began those papers which made the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's Monthly a national, as well as a literary, institution; and he began, also,