From The Saturday Review.
SIMPLICITY.

unaffected; and we like it because, if he chose to be pretentious, we could only say he THERE is no gift of expression that tells had more right to be so than his neighbors; more than simplicity in its right place. A but the truth is, these people have not really simple style of talking or writing is an engine the temptations to pretence that others, their of power in good hands, enabling them to inferiors, have. The world allows them so undertake tasks forbidden to the world at distinguished a place that there is no need large. It even fits a man for talking or for them to struggle and use effort in order writing about himself, which only persons to seem something higher and more important endowed with the art of being plain, trans- than they are. It needs a reliance on self to parent, and natural ought ever to attempt. be perfectly simple in treating of self; and Simplicity, as we would view it here, is by no this reliance, as a conscious quality, it is means a merely moral or negative quality. scarcely modest to bring forward unless the It is so in some cases; but it is then only noticed world has given its sanction to the selfor appreciated for its suggestiveness. Chil- estimate. When the Duke of Wellington dren do not admire each other's simplicity; said publicly, "I should be ashamed to show but we admire it in them, because what is my face in the streets "under such and such uttered without thought or intention in the circumstances, the simple phrase, occurring child is full of meaning to us. It was more in an important debate, had a noble effect; than a simple, it was probably a stupid, little but there were not many men in whom it girl that kept reiterating "We are seven; "would have been becoming to bring forward but the words suggested deep meanings to the poet. The weeping child apologizing at sight of the unfolding handkerchief, "My tears are clean," meant no more than the literal sense of his words; but to the hearer they brought thoughts of guileless innocence and of other tears that do leave a stain. After childhood no one can retain a simplicity worthy of admiration without some intellectual power. The unconscious simplicity of a child, when childhood is past, is disagreeable and painful, and is never recognized without a shade of pity or contempt. Manly simplicity is intelligent, and knows what it is about. And though, to win our respect, it must of course be real, it may and often is only one side of a many sided-character; that is, the quality may attach to part, and not to the whole, of a man's nature.

The charm of full-grown simplicity always gains by, and we believe even requires, contrast. We must be a little surprised at a man's being simple before we can value the quality in him. Thus the style and manners of royal personages are generally simple, and there are doubtless plenty of reasons to make this probable, and a thing to expect; but persons dazzled by the pomp and circumstance of greatness are delighted with this simplicity, which they confound with humility, because it seems to them a striking contrast with state and splendor. So with the aristocracy of intellect and genius. It appears a fine thing for a great author or thinker to be artless and

self in this artless way in the House of Lords. There is no greater testimony to the weight of a name which once made itself known and felt than the manner of speaking of self in Dr. Newman's " Apologia." Nothing can be more engaging than the simplicity of tone; the touches of personal feeling and recollection, of likes and dislikes, and of self-defence are given in language the most artless and natural; but the tone would have been inadmissible if. the writer had not had a right to rely on his past influence, and on the interest that still attaches to his name. Nobody can write in this way who does not feel that what he says will be well received; that people will care to hear things personal to himself told in the plainest way because it is himself. Very few men could venture to write their lives, even though in self-defence, in this fashion. Indeed, if it comes to a venture, it is all over with him. Simplicity of the great sort is serenely confident.

All simplicity, however paradoxical it may sound, ought to conceal something,—rank, or achievement, or high purpose, or extensive knowledge, or covert meaning, or a strength of modest purity, or an incorruptible honesty, or a power of self-command; or, in a child, innocence. In mature life it must be backed by some inner sense of worth, or at least by a self-respect founded on just grounds, though, perhaps, never consciously dwelt upon. It should have some touch of the heroic. It is impossible for some people to be simple.

They are not great enough; they are born way, the poor are driven to feeble hyperbole,
with that foppery which Dr. Johnson called
the bad stamina of the mind, which, like a
bad constitution, can never be rectified,
"once a coxcomb, always a coxcomb." In-
deed, people who are not coxcombs often dare
not be simple, because they would feel naked
and insignificant; their thoughts must be
dressed up to be fit to be seen; in fact, they
would not know how to set about it, and
could not be simple if they would. Few per-
sons, perhaps, realize the difficulty of mere
simplicity of expression. We own it is not
difficult to say, “That is a door; this is my
desk;" but once pass the region of plain
statement of what our senses tell us, and the
difficulty begins which most people never get
over. Scarcely any conversation is simple.
Half the hyperbole of language is no delib-
erate effort of fancy, and much less is it in-
tentional exaggeration. It is because it is
impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the
exact truth and describe a thing just as it
appeared to them,-to express degrees of fecl-
ing, to observe measures and proportions, to
tell a thing as it happened, and define a sen-
sation as it was felt. They cannot represent
themselves just as sick or sorry — pleased,
annoyed, or impressed-as they really were.
Which of us really manages to do this?
Men rely on the universal license necessary
where accuracy is unattainable, and would
feel ashamed to go against the popular phra-
seology in search of a more formal truth; and
wisely, too; for with the run of people it
would be a fastidiouness more nice than wise.
Violent efforts to be simple would quench
the imagination without attaining to effec-
tive truth. The poor have little of the sim-
plicity attributed to them in books. They
have too great a sense of their own insignifi-
cance to presume so far.

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helplessly reiterated, without a notion that
it is hyperbole. Thus an old woman wants
to say that she has lost her appetite, and
tries her hand at expressing her loss.
"One
bit of cake is oceans-oceans it is-oceans.
This seems to her nearer the truth, as her
hearer will receive it, than the simple an-
nouncement that, whereas once she ate her
plain food with a relish, now delicacies can-
not tempt her; and probably she is right.
Again, uneducated people of a different class
never dream of being simple. They talk in
great stilted phrases from a mixture of affec-
tation and modesty; simple statement does
scem so very bare and unpresentable as
they would manage it. Hence the style of
guide-books and penny-a-liners; they must
be gorgeous and poetical, or they would fear
to collapse into mere inanity. Strong lan-
guage acts as the irons which hold rickety
limbs straight. The Cockney dialect is, for
somewhat the same reason, the reverse of
simple. Everything is done by implication
and allusion; nothing is direct. You re-
quire a key of interpretation, and in this
elaborateness lies the point. A man loses
his personality, and becomes vaguely "a
party.” He does not stand high in his
profession; but he is A 1. He is not on the
point of ruin; but it is U. P. with him.
The person who addresses his friend is not
simply " I," " myself," but he conveys the
idea mysteriously, as "yours truly." Sim-
plicity is open to all the world; but this rec-
ondite speech needs a clew and an accom-
plice. Vulgarity, as a term of reproach, is
never simple. Indeed, it often makes such
large demands on the fancy that we only
distinguish it from poetry by its different ac-
tion on the nerves. Intricacy, allusion, and
pretence are of its very essence.

Self-instructed persons are rarely simple;
nor are those to whom knowledge has not
come naturally and by ordinary methods.

A rustic has felt indisposed and very uncomfortable in the night; how can he or she expect to rouse sympathy for so very commonplace an occurrence? And yet it is pleas- Hence, the terrifying phraseology so comant to be pitied when we are ill. Therefore mon in modern science, and the incursion of he says, I thought I should have died in new words into our periodical literature; the night." He says this, not because he hence, too, in old times, the inflation and efreally thought so, or really wants you to fect of would-be learned, "superior" women. think so, but because it is the only form Really superior perhaps they were; but they he knows likely to make an adequate im- had not yet come to the power of taking a pression on his hearer. He must know how simple view of their attainments. When to analyze sensations before he can tell the good woman in a party of blue-stockthe simple truth about them. In the same ings whispered to a new-comer,

Nothing

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with an amusement which he intended his reader to share. When it comes to any boast of sharpness or penetration, then the simple style is indispensable. We see it in perfection in Goldsmith, but perhaps a little passage from Gray will be a less familiar instance of what we mean. He writes to a friend :

It is a bad sign when there is too great a demand for simplicity,―a token of a growing luxury and idleness overtopping themselves. Thus it was when Metestasio wrote. Such was the age that gave birth to Dresden-china shepherdesses and maudlin pastorals. Molière takes this tendency in hand when the inanities of Mascarille and Trissotin excite an enthusiasm in his Précieuses. That song which Magdelon would rather have written than un poeme épique, and which the author dwelle on as façon de parler naturelle, expressed innocemment sans malice comme un pauvre mouton, is only too like the effusions of a dozen authors whose works find place in our Collected Poets, and whose simplicity is divorced at the same time from purity and sense. There was a whole generation of idyls after the pattern of

but conversation is spoke here," she was awed, not so much by the thought, as by the fine language in which it was wrapped. Nobody is frightened at thought if put into plain terms; we may almost say that nobody feels it to be above him. No one can be simple who knows a little of everything, and nothing thoroughly; nor one who thinks it necessary to be always laying down his prin"In my way I saw Winchester Cathedral ciple of action. There are people of this again with pleasure, and supped with Dr. class who cannot for the life of them give a Balguy, who, I perceive, means to govern the simple answer, but follow the method of the Chapter. They give £200 a year to the poor Eastern traveller, who, being asked his name of the city. His present scheme is to take by an Arab sheik, began his reply with a away this; for it is only an encouragement to laziness. But what do they mean to do history of the creation of the world. Sim- with it? That I omitted to inquire because plicity, in mature action, is knowing what I thought I knew." you have to do, and doing it; and, in words, it is knowing what to say, and saying it. Half the eloquence of the world is founded on the reverse precept. The simplicity which gets a man a reputation as a writer is not only saying what he has to say in direct terms, but in the best chosen and the fewest, and withal conveying more than meets the eye, as seeing into the heart of things. Take, for instance, that story told by Addison of the Puritanical Head, who, when a youth presented himself for matriculation, examined him, not in his learning, but upon the state of his soul, and whether he was prepared for death. "The boy, who had been bred by honest parents, was frighted out of his wits at the solemnity of the proceeding, and by the last dreadful interrogatory, so that, upon making his escape from that house of mourning, he could never be brought a second time to the examination, as not being able to get through the terrors of it.” Nothing but a seeming artlessness of phrase, akin to the simplicity of these honest folks, could have told such a story well. It is through the same admirable adaptation of style to subject that his Sir Roger de Coverley is what he is. Our older writers sometimes were most felicitous in this vein. We remember a passage in Fuller, where he makes us his confidant in the matter of a personal habit displeasing to him,—a way he had, when sitting down to read his Bible, of turning over the leaf to see if the chapter were long or short, and finding himself not unwilling that it should be short. None but a master of style could touch upon such a trick with sufficient gravity for decorum, but not too much for the occasion, or combine an honest shame

"A party told me t'other day
That knew my Colin well,

That he should say, that come next May,
But what-I cannot tell!"

and all of it in the tone of the "dear sim-
plicity" of the waiting-maid in "The Rivals."

Simplicity, again, made a great start with Wordsworth. With him it was founded on a deep philosophy, and was the most cherished feature of his genius. He despised every reader who could not or would not see the profound meaning that lurked in “Peter Bell," where simplicity surely borders on affectation. But though the world made a stand here, he taught men to see depths of thought behind many another childlike effusion. Since the ladies came forward and filled the world with their views of life, we think we observe that simplicity, as an object and ideal, has waned and gone out of fashion

again. Like the Germans, "they are pro- | striking characteristics, in communicating founder than we," and probe too deep into even with the ghost of their former self. motives for any man's simplicity to stand the Hawthorne, with all his shyness and tenderordeal, much less any woman's. Again, they ness, and literary reticence, shows very disare too "rich" and full to overflowing for tinct traces also of understanding well the their own style to be marked by it, while cold, curious, and shrewd spirit which besets they inculcate too much self-study for us to the Yankees even more than other commerbe able to get up any illusions. We cannot cial peoples. His heroes have usually not a think of the fairest and the most innocent little of this hardness in them. Coverdale, as being for instance, in the "Blithedale Romance,' confesses that "that cold tendency between instinct and intellect which made me pry And simpler than the infancy of truth," with a speculative interest into people's pasas we might in revelling in the romances of sions and impulses appeared to have gone far the last generation. All their virtues are towards unhumanizing my heart." Holconscious, all their heroines see right through grave, in the "House of the Seven Gables," themselves, and us too; and simplicity, is one of the same class of shrewd, cold, curiwhether divine or twaddling, waits for a new ous heroes. Indeed, there are few of the development, except where, in some wholly unexpected quarter, it slyly peeps out upon us, takes us by surprise, and once again delights us with the irresistible charm.

"True as truth's simplicity,

From The Spectator.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

tales without a character of this type. But though Hawthorne had a deep sympathy with the practical as well as the literary genius of New England, it is always in a farremoved and ghostly kind of way, as though he were stricken by some spell which halfparalyzed him from communicating with the life around him, as though he saw it only by a reflected light. His spirit haunted rather THE ghostly genius of Hawthorne is a than ruled his body; his body hampered his great loss to the American people. He has spirit. Yet his external career was not only been called a mystic, which he was not, and not romantic, but identified with all the dulla psychological dreamer, which he was in est routine of commercial duties. That a very slight degree. He was really the ghost man who consciously telegraphed, as it were, of New England,-we do not mean the with the world, transmitting meagre messa"spirit," nor the "phantom," but the ghost ges through his material organization, should in the older sense in which that term is used have been first a custom-house officer in as the thin, rarefied essense which is to be Massachusetts, and then the consul in Livfound somewhere behind the physical organ-erpool, brings out into the strongest possible ization, embodied, indeed, and not by any relief the curiously representative character means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly in which he stood to New England as its littabernacle, but yet only half embodied in it, erary or intellectual ghost. There is nothing endowed with a certain painful sense of the more ghostly in his writings than his account, gulf between his nature and its organization, in his recent book, of the consulship in Livalways recognizing the gulf, always trying to erpool,-how he began by trying to commu'bridge it over, and always more or less un-nicate frankly with his fellow-countrymen, successful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly spiritual writings; for there is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly writings. He was, to our minds, a sort of sign to New England of the divorce that has been going on there (and not less perhaps in old England) between its people's spiritual and earthly nature, and of the impotence which they will soon feel, if they are to be absorbed more and more in that shrewd, hard earthly sense which is one of their most

how he found the task more and more difficult, and gradually drew back into the twilight of his reserve, how he shrewdly and somewhat coldly watched" the dim shadows as they go and come," speculated idly on their fate, and all the time discharged the regular routine of consular business, witnessing the usual depositions, giving captains to captainless crews, affording costive advice or assistance to Yankees when in need of a friend, listening to them when they

were only anxious to offer, not ask, assistance, and generally observing them from that distant and speculative outpost whence all common things looked strange.

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conception to make it clearly conceivable to the mind of his readers. He had a clear conception of his own design, and a conception, too, of the world for which he Ilawthorne, who was a delicate critic of was writing, and was ever afraid of not conhimself, was well aware of the shadowy veying his own conception, but some other character of his own genius, though not distinct from it and inconsistent with it, to aware that precisely here lay its curious and the world, if he expressed it in his own way. thrilling power. In the preface to "Twice- He felt that he could not reproduce in others told Tales" he tells us frankly, “The book, his own idea, but should only succeed in if you would see anything in it, requires to spoiling the effect he had already, by great be read in the clear brown twilight atmos- labor, produced. He had manifested himphere in which it was written; if opened in self partially; but the next stroke, if he the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly made it at all, would spoil everything, mislike a volume of blank pages." And then translate him, and reverse the impression he he adds, coming still nearer to the mark, hoped to produce. It was the timidity of They are not the talk of a secluded man an artist who felt that he had, as it were, to with his own mind and heart, but his attempts, translate all his symbols from a language he and very imperfectly successful ones, to open knew thoroughly into one he knew less peran intercourse with the world." That is, he fectly, but still so perfectly as to be nervously thinks, the secret of his weakness; but it is sensible to the slightest fault. It was a proalso the secret of his power. He carries cess like that which the wild artist Blake with him always the air of trying to mani- describes as his conversation with the ghost fest himself; and the words come faintly, of Voltaire, though without its certainty of not like whispers so much as like sounds success. When the shrewd English barrister lost in the distance they have traversed. A asked whether Voltaire spoke in English, common reader of Mr. Hawthorne would Blake replied, "The impression on my mind say that he took a pleasure in mystifying his was English of course; but I have no doubt readers, or weaving cobweb threads, not to that he touched the keys French." Hawbind their curiosity, but to startle and chill thorne's communication with others was a them, so gravely does he tell you in many continual process of this kind. The keys of of his tales that he could not quite make out his genius were touched distinctly; but there the details of a fictitious conversation, and was a liability to failure in rendering these that he can only at best hint its purport. touches into the common tongue so that For instance, in "Transformation," he says others would understand them. And someof his heroine and her temper, " Owing to times, like a ghost that moves its lips but this moral estrangement, this chill remote- cannot be heard, he simply acquiesced in the ness of their position, there have come to us incapacity, only using expressive gestures but a few vague whisperings of what passed and vague beckonings to indicate generally a in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the subject for awe or fear. From a similar sinister personage who had dogged her foot-cause Hawthorne was continually expressing steps ever since her visit to the catacomb. his regret that his native country has as yet In weaving these mystic utterances into a no Past, and he seems always to have been continuous scene, we undertake a task resem- endeavoring to supply the want by peopling bling in its perplexity that of gathering up his pictures of life with shadowy presences, and piecing together the fragments of a let- which give them some of the eerie effect of ter which has been torn and scattered to the a haunted house or a medieval castle. We winds. Many words of deep significance- doubt much, however, whether it was really many sentences, and these probably the most a Past after which he yearned. When he important ones-have flown too far on the laid his scene in Italy, or wrote about Engwinged breeze 'to be recovered." This is a land he certainly made little or no use of favorite device of Mr. Hawthorne's, and their Past in his art, and, we imagine, that does not, we think, proceed from the wish all he really craved for was that interposing to mystify, so much as from the refusal of film of thought between himself and the his own imagination so to modify his own scene or characters he was delineating,