Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/133

 George William Curtis "5 his public lectures, which, till the time of his death some forty years later, were so beneficially to affect the national life. Prior to i860 Curtis was almost exclusively a man of let- ters; and had not civic duties spoken to him with peremptory voice, his early work bids us believe that he would have rounded out his career with many volumes of the most graciously conceived and gracefully expressed essays and fiction. But with his entrance, during Lincoln's first candidacy, into the field of politics, his literary activities were made -largely sub- servient to his civic endeavours and aspirations. First one of the pillars of the Republican party, and later chairman of the Independent Republicans who rebelled against the nomination of Blaine; the chief exponent and the most influential advocate of Civil Service reform; the kindly but firm leader in every forward moving social cause, Curtis, during the latter half of his life, gave up the chance that was his to achieve prepon- derant literary fame, winning, instead, his high title in the citizenship of his country. What he said of Lowell may even more cordially be said of him — that he had the "grace, charm, and courtesy of established social order, blending with the masculine force and the creative energy of the Puritan spirit." The intimacy between Curtis, Lowell, and Norton, so fully revealed in the letters of the three, embodies one of the rarest and most fragrant episodes of friendship among American men of letters. Each influenced the others, strength- ening that faith in one's self which, among civilized men, is the elementary religion. Each of these three was true to the con- viction that acts which primarily serve ambition are seldom in accordance with the ambition to serve. Yet Curtis, for all his unfearing rectitude, felt most keenly that only those who are virtuous have the right to judge severely; but a part of their virtue consists in the frequent kindly abnegation of this right. In his essays and addresses on Burns, on Bryant, on Sum- ner, on Wendell Phillips, Curtis combines the qualities of the scholar, the lover of romance, and the radical reformer; while in his attitude towards nature, as apart from his interpretation and exposition of the deeds of individuals, he shows a kinship with Thoreau in his rarest moods. Lowell would have spumed the thought that Thoreau was our most nobly imaginative nature writer (to whom Emerson owed a debt that has not yet