Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[209] his criticism called “Longfellow and his art,” Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might well have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, “He was first of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather than in their essence” (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he says that Longfellow “brought to his work in the college no special love of teaching,” but “a deep love of literature and that unacademic attitude toward his work which was a liberalizing power” (page 66). He touches equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow's temperament, so difficult to delineate, when he says of him: “He gave of himself freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate” (page 68). These admirable statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr. Scudder's work.

So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best chapters of “Men and letters,” but his one adequate and complete work as a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume entitled “Childhood in literature and art” (1894). This book was based on a course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is probably that by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up to the time of his excellent biography of Lowell.