Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/135

Charles Eliot Norton "7 Norton's interests, and form a distinguished contribution in those particular fields of literature and art. ^ It is, however, to his letters, published after his death, that we must have recourse for fuller appreciation of his place in the annals of our literary culture. The revelation is a fine one. We behold a being of simple and unswerving rectitude, with a capacity for noble friendships, and with a rare power for instilling enthusiasm. Not only to the large group of students who came, at an im- pressionable age, under the influence of the Professor of the Fine Arts at Harvard University, but also to men like Ruskin, LoweU, Howells, and other intellectual leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, the clear-visioned Norton spoke heartening words. In a letter, in 1874, 'to Carlyle, Norton wrote of his aim to give the students some definite notions of the Pine Arts as a mode in which men in past times have expressed their thoughts, faiths, sentiments, and desires; to show the political, moral, and social conditions which have determined the foftns of the Arts, and to qtiicken so far as may be, in the youth of a land barren of visible memorials of former times, the sense of connection with the past and gratitude for the effort and labours of other nations and former generations. This was Norton's gift to America: an accentuation of the con- tinuity and permanence of the ideal aspects of the race life. Culture, with both its esthetic and moral implications, was the inheritance of this New Englander, in whose idealism was inwoven that Brahminical strain which, while it strengthens, at times compresses; and so we find him, in his letters as in his life, a standard-bearer of cultivation who yet lacked the buoy- ant enthusiasm of American democracy. His early letters never overflow with the spirits of youth ; the missives of middle life contain frequent sentences reflecting upon the unsatis- factoriness of American society; and this morally Hebraic descendant of ultra-religious Puritan forbears, sounds, in his later letters, a note of impatient agnosticism. But withal, how fine a quality flavours his correspondence, his comments on Whitman, Sumner, Lincoln, Wendell Philhps, and other subjects of his pen ! Norton stands among American essayists and lecturers as the most un3aelding critic of vulgarity in the 'See also Book III, Chap. xxv.