Born at Providence, R. I., Feb. 24, 1824: died on Staten Island, N. Y., Aug. 31, 1892. A noted American journalist, orator, publicist, and author. He lived in the community at Brook Farm, remaining there 18 months; traveled abroad 1846–50; on his return in the latter year became connected with the New York “Tribune;” was connected with “Putnam’s Monthly” 1852–57; and became editor of the “Easy Chair” (“Harper’s Magazine”) in 1854, and in 1863 of “Harper’s Weekly” (founded 1857). He was an influential advocate of civil-service reform. In 1871 he was appointed by Grant, one of the commissioners to draw up rules for the regulation of the civil-service, but resigned on account of differences with the President. He was president of the New York State Civil Service League in 1880, and of the National Civil Service Reform League from its foundation until his death. He wrote “Nile Notes of a Howadji” (1851), “Howadji in Syria” (1852), “Lotus-Eating” (1852), “Potiphar Papers” (1853), “Prue and I” (1856), “Trumps” (1862), “From the Easy Chair” (1891), “Washington Irving” (1891).

Personal

  In 1856, he took a very active part in the “Fremont campaign,” speaking constantly, through the summer, with great effect. Those who had the good fortune to hear any of these addresses will not soon forget them, uniting as they did the soundest argument to a chaste and brilliant oratory.

  Mr. Curtis is as agreeable in private as he is pleasing in public. He is natural, gentle, manly, refined, simple and unpretending, and quiet. I liked him very much. There is a certain lacadaisicalness in his published portrait which is not seen in his face.

  Mr. Curtis long since gained national reputation as a lecturer. His first venture in that line was “Contemporary Art in Europe,” in 1851; then he fairly got under way with “The Age of Steam,” and soon became one of that remarkable group, including Starr King, Phillips and Beecher, who built up the lyceum into an important institution, and went all over the country lecturing. Mr. Curtis gave lectures every winter until 1872. I remember his saying, some time before that, “I have to write and deliver at least one sermon a year;” and indeed they were sermons, of the most eloquent kind, rife with noble incitements to duty, patriotism, lofty thought, ideal conduct…. Twenty years a lecturer, without rest; twenty-one years a political editor; thirty-two years the suave and genial occupant of the “Easy Chair;” always steadfast to the highest, and ignoring unworthy slurs;—may we not say reasonably that he has “staying power?” One source of it is to be found in the serene cheer of his family life in that Staten Island cottage to which he clings so closely.

  At supper it was whispered that G. W. C. would sing at the Eyrie, one of the new houses, upon which several young men volunteered to assist with the dishes. My services were also cordially accepted…. And now we ascended the winding, moon-lit path to the Eyrie, where G. W. C. was already singing. We went up the steps of the building cautiously, lest a note of the melody which floated through the open French windows should be lost to us. Entering the pretty large parlor, we found not only the chairs and sofas occupied, but the floor well covered with seated listeners. I did not at first recognize the operatic air, so admirably modified and retarded as it was, and its former rapid words replaced by a sad and touching theme, which called for noble endurance in one borne down by suffering. The accompaniment consisted of simple chords and arpeggios, a very plain and sufficient background. G. W. C., though not yet twenty—not nineteen, if I remember rightly,—had a grave and mature appearance. He was full of poetic sensibility, and his pure, rich voice had that sympathetic quality that penetrates to the heart…. G. W. C. was not ever guilty of singing a comic song. It would indeed have been most inappropriate to our intensely earnest mood. Often his brother would join him in a duet with his agreeable tenor. Low praises and half-spoken thanks were murmured as the grave and gracious young friend, at the expiration of an hour, swung around on the piano-stool and attempted to make his exit.

  That which always struck me as his strongest mental characteristic was his common sense. His judgment was almost unerring, and his tact was marvelous. His mind seemed never closed to a new suggestion. If it had force, he recognized it immediately; if not, he put it aside with such gentle but conclusive refutation that its author was almost glad not to have it accepted. High as was the standard of his own thinking and living, he was of all men the least censorious. Easily superior in mental gifts and accomplishments in that personal attractiveness which is the genius of character, he never showed that he was conscious of it. His associates in the League felt that he was the natural leader; but among them, while most effectively leading, he seemed to be only the most hearty and generous of comrades.

  The art in which Curtis excelled all his contemporaries of the last thirty years was the art of oratory. Many other authors wrote better in verse, and some others wrote as well in prose. Hawthorne, Motley, Lowell, Whipple, Giles, Mitchell, Warner, and Stedman were masters of style. But in the felicity of speech Curtis was supreme above all other men of his generation. My reference is from the period from 1860 to 1890. Oratory as it existed in America in the previous epoch has no living representative. Curtis was the last orator of the great school of Everett, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips. His model—in so far as he had a model—was Sumner, and the style of Sumner was based on Burke. But Curtis had heard more magical voices than those—for he had heard Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate; and although he was averse to their politics, he could profit by their example.

  A few feared lest the adulations heaped upon him should seduce him from the student’s smoky lamp to Paphian bowers lit by gilded chandeliers and eyes more bright than jewels; but they knew little of his native good sense, his strong self-respect and his broad sympathies, which would have saved him at any time from scorching his wings in any false glare, however flattering or seductive. He got out of society, as out of everything else, whatever he thought to be good, and the rest he let go to the ash-barrel…. A harder-working literary man I never knew; he was incessantly busy; a constant, careful, and wide reader; yet never missing a great meeting or a great address or a grand night at the theatre. From our little conclaves at No. 10 Park Place, where, I fear, we remorselessly slaughtered the hopes of many a bright spirit (chiefly female), he was seldom absent, and when he came he took his full share of the routine—unless Irving, Bryant, Lowell, Thackeray, or Longfellow sauntered in, and “that day we worked no more.”

  In him, as Jacobi or Novalis said of Luther, body and soul were not divided. The whole man was made at one cast. The graces of his person corresponded to the graces of his mind; the beauty of his character found a fitting symbol in the beauty of his face, the expressive mouth, the eyes that grew less mournful as he found his proper place among the helpers of his kind. But if we could forget these things, we could not forget the tenderness with which he used to go away from us, or let us go from him: “Good-bye!” and then again, and with a lingering emphasis that made the word as kind as a caress, “Good-bye!” We seem to hear it now from far away.

  Adjoining is the old “wash-room,” where some who have since become famous in literature or politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead with a heavy wooden pestle; and just without is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles A. Dana (who certainly was the most popular member of the community), and the genial Curtis were sometimes seen hanging the moist garments upon the lines, a truly edifying spectacle for gods and men. It was from Curtis’s pockets that the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during the evening dances.

  He was not the greatest of those who, in this New World, have used the platform as a vantage-ground of leadership. He had not the organ-tones of Webster, nor the incisive style and matchless vocal skill of Phillips, nor the compass of Beecher; but in that fine harmony of theme, treatment, style, and personality which make the speech literature, he surpassed them all. Less effective for the moment than Phillips, his art has a finer fibre and a more enduring charm. When he spoke, it seemed as if one were present at the creation of a piece of literature. He saw his theme in such large relations, he touched it with a hand so true and so delicate, he phrased his thought with such lucid and winning refinement and skill, his bearing, enunciation, voice, and gesture were so harmonious, that what he said and his manner of saying it seemed all of a piece, and the product was a beautiful bit of art,—something incapable of entire preservation, and yet possessing the quality of the things that endure. The enchantments of speech were his beyond any man of his generation, and he gave them a grace of manner which deepened and expanded their charm.

  The two years spent at Brook Farm formed an important episode in the life of George William Curtis. It is evident that he did not surrender himself to the associationist idea, even when he was a boarder at Brook Farm and a member of its school. He loved the men and women who were at the head of the community; he found the life attractive and genial, the atmosphere was conducive to his intellectual and spiritual development; but he did not surrender himself to the idea that the world can be reformed in that manner. In a degree he was a curious looker-on; and in a still larger way he was a sympathetic, but not convinced, friend and well-wisher. If not a member, he retained throughout life his interest in this experiment, and remembered with delight the years he spent there. He more than once spoke in enthusiastic terms of Brook Farm, and gave its theories and its practice a sympathetic interpretation. In one of his “Easy Chair” essays of 1869 he described the best side of its life.

  George William Curtis has filled, as no other American man of letters of this generation, the ideal of clear intellect, pure taste, moral purpose, chivalry of feeling, and personal refinement and grace. The grace and culture he possessed were as natural as his courtesy and his faith in mankind. They were ingrained as part of his being, wrought into every strain and making the strands of his every-day life. From the moment of his entrance into public life as a speaker, now nearly fifty years ago, he entirely satisfied the higher conception of purity, dignity, and sweetness. He was a lecturer of beautiful presence and was superbly artificial, yet this artificiality was natural. His hair and beard were a beautiful silver-gray, his face was pale, his manner studied, his voice cultivated. It was as enjoyable to hear him as to listen to an opera, and was a lesson in grand manners and elocution. His voice, like his manners and appearance on the platform, was ideal—clear, bell-like, silvery. He could be heard in the largest of halls without apparently any special effort. It was a delight to listen; every syllable was distinct, yet there was no strain. The enunciation was perfect. The matter of his speeches was like the sound, perfect in sense, clear in meaning, as graceful as the speaking, and always carrying the sense of conviction to the hearers.

Editor

  They handle [“Easy Chair”] with admirable taste and breeding, topics of society, literature, and the every-day popular life, with an unfailing honor for elegance, good manners, and hearty sense. There is nowhere else in our journalism so much truth so amiably yet so clearly spoken, and one does not mind that these papers are a little mannered, they are essentially so well-mannered. It is that part of morality to be distinguished as civilization or civility in its wide significance which Mr. Curtis chiefly teaches from his Easy-Chair; and he does it with an art that never lapses or fatigues. There must be not only brains and heart in those little papers, but a constant charm of style which shall take the reader in spite of the narrowness of their limitations.

  He won, and has kept the enthusiastic personal support and admiration of his audience, as no other editor has succeeded in doing, with the single exception of Horace Greeley. The relations between Mr. Curtis and his readers are, in fact, almost personal in their nature, and he has never seriously entertained proposals, however brilliant and tempting, that would interrupt those relations. Thus, although he could serve as a Regent of the University, and as non-resident Professor at Cornell University for four years, he declined, in 1869, upon the death of Mr. Henry J. Raymond, who had previously asked him to become assistant editor, an invitation to the chief editorship of the New York “Times.”

  How many thousands gladly recall what a privilege and delight it has been for many years to have this commentator visit them every month, to tell them what to admire and what to impugn, and to inspire them as they sat in their own easy-chairs with kindlier feelings towards their fellows, to dissipate the blues of business or public affairs, and to send them to bed with buoyant hopes for the morrow!… You may say, perhaps, that any editor of a periodical can play this showman’s part. Oh, yes; but not with the inexhaustible variety of matter, the inimitable grace of manner, of Curtis. His superiority was shown when, called away altogether, the whole literary world asked, “And who can take his place?” and the whole literary world answered, “No one.” Well might that world feel kindly towards him, for in all those forty years he had made and left no rankling wound.

  He brought to the discussion of the public affairs of the hour a wealth of knowledge, historical, contemporary, practical, and a thoroughness of reflection, which are unusual even with writers of the most deliberate and elaborate kind. One has but to read his orations to find the evidence of these qualities, and of the skill with which he could marshal a long array of facts in support of a logical conclusion. In “Harper’s Weekly” he gave us the fruit of these capacities, but rarely any sign of them in exercise. The simplest-minded reader could feel the force of his reasoning; only the more highly trained could understand from what deep and widely-fed sources that force was supplied.

  From his Easy Chair in “Harper’s Magazine,” for thirty-five years, he preached social and political righteousness, with a genial grace, a sparkle of wit, and a wide-ranging culture, which raise many of these utterances almost to the level of permanent literature.

Howadji Papers, 1851–52

  In the evening no visitors, and we sailed up the “palmy Nile,” with the poetic Howadji, in the Ibis. A fascinating book. He has caught the true spirit of the East, and there is a golden glow on his pages, as if he dipped his pencil in the sun.

  Mr. Curtis was twenty-seven when he published the “Nile Notes,” and the book was doubtless the fruit of yet earlier years. It suggests this in style and manner; in its redundant hues and tones, in its wonderful use of words, which so often degenerates into play with words. It is prose measured so deliberately that you continually feel its pulsation, and often find it too much for the nerves of middle life. The prodigious excess of alliteration is perhaps not so much to blame, for that is the instinct of our tongue; still its absence is to be noted with relief in the author’s very next book, “Howadji in Syria,” where the whole atmosphere seems cooler and sharper. The feeling is much the same, but the soul of youth has wreaked itself upon the mystic grandeur and melancholy of Egypt, and has finally indulged that riot of expression which leaves a gifted man’s thought clearer for a whole lifetime.

  Curtis seems to me to have been, in an important sense, born an orator. Even the words of these first pages read as if they had been thought aloud, as if their cadence had been realized to the ear in the sound of his own rare voice. Often they come to the mind like the singing of the solitary and unconscious singer. His passionate and constant delight in music shaped his phrases and marshaled his sentences. There are plentiful instances of excess in this indulgence in the oriental books, before his taste had been trained and his judgment enlightened, but the excess is incidental—accidental even—and the sense remains to the reader of a pure, sincere and constant joy in the music of his own expression.

  Delicate humor, quaint fancy, and rare refinement breathe from every page. These rare qualities, mingled with his description and adventures, combine to make the “Howadji” volumes the most charming of their kind in our literature.

Potiphar Papers, 1853

  They should never have been united under one name, for they do not form a whole. There is sometimes infirmity as well as sketchiness of handling in the same paper; though this does not make such bad effect as the fact that some of the people not only change their aspects but their characters in the different papers, while they keep their names. In one, Paul Potiphar is said to have a library of book-backs; in another we are asked to believe that he reads and enjoys Thackeray. Moreover, there is on the part of the author too much attitude, too much self-defence, too much consciousness; and a man who has very good eyes of his own will insist, at times, upon looking at New York society through Mr. Thackeray’s spectacles, and talking of Major Dobbin, and Becky Sharpe, and the Pendennises. It is only the spectacles, however; neither the voice nor the manner is Thackeray’s, while the feeling is quite different from his.

  They had great vogue, and greatly helped the young magazine, while they brought to their writer much notoriety and some fame. As was natural they made “hard feelings” among those who were, or thought they were, satirized in these pages; but on thy whole they were greatly enjoyed, and their healthy purpose was recognized. Taken up now after forty years, a reader must be well through middle age to recognize their substantial basis of fact, and, so far as they survive, it is as satire on the one hand and a picture of the author’s mind on the other, rather than as a description of society. Yet a description of society they really were, with a sadly substantial basis of fact. Mr. Curtis’s own letters and those of his contemporaries, and the recollections of men who moved in the same circles, are not lacking in evidence that the brush was not very heavily overloaded.

Prue and I, 1856

  “Putnam’s Monthly” was established in the same year, and Mr. Curtis was one of the original editors. For this magazine he wrote a number of sketches and essays, some of which were afterwards published with the title “Prue and I.” In this work Mr. Curtis is seen at his best, in our judgment. A pretty rill of a story runs through it like a musical little brook through a romantic valley. The pervading sentiment is tender and pure. The lovely young matron, “Prue,” is the sharer in the thoughts and the reminiscences of the story-teller, as well as in his affection and measureless content. The style is as unpretentious and as lovely as the story. If it were more musical its melody would glide into verse. The sketches are full of the best fruits of reading and travel, and preserve for us those picturesque associations of the old world for which we look in the note-books of tourists in vain.

  More truly of the Irving type, with a Brook Farm fervor added, was the distinguished editor, lecturer, and patriot, George William Curtis. That shining soul, “loyal to whatever is generous and humane, full of sweet hope, and faith, and devotion,” is radiant still in the jewel lights of “Prue and I.”

  “Prue and I” was a series of papers written, as Curtis’s letters show, in odd moments and with great rapidity, to meet the exigencies of the magazine. But the papers survive as an example of the pure literary work of the author. The opulence and extravagance of the “Howadji” books disappear; but the rich imagination, and sportive fancy, the warm and life giving sentiment, the broad philosophy, are expressed in a style of singular beauty, flexibility, and strength.

General

  It is no purpose of ours to fix Mr. Curtis’s rank in our literature, and we do not mean to measure his powers or his performance in classing him with Irving and Longfellow in literary refinement of tone, and a predominant grace of execution. He is bound to both by many ties of mental sympathy; though not right New-Englander nor right New-Yorker, he has the spirit of either civilization in him, like his native city of Providence. He has for the Old World the New-World love of both Irving and Longfellow, but he enjoys it more critically than either, and will commonly be found making a lesson of it, one way or other. He has not Irving’s archaic spirit; and his writings, though they have dealt so much with the to-day which has now become yesterday, have a greater affinity with Longfellow’s. In most things, however, and in essentials, he is alone; and he has so characteristic a vein that it could hardly ever be taken for another’s, or not known for his. In all his books he is utterly free from provincialism and vulgarity of thought or feeling: he has neither American nor European narrowness. He has none of the frenzied or bad intention which is so common in our present literary art, and which comes chiefly from ignorance of life and the world. The effects he seeks are to be achieved only through his reader’s refinement or innate fineness.

  I might call him the Bayard of our political struggles, the Sydney of our literature, so much has his most disinterested and gracious nature been employed in his public and literary work, so courageous his action, so stainless his record. Called from epicurean experience of a social favorite and of a literary gourmand, his daintiness has become delicacy, his sensuousness moral suavity. If, fresh from the enervating Orient, he wrote with the tepid lassitude of a fibreless and springless nature, and, so to speak, spilt his mind in memories of the exhausted East, at twenty-eight he wrote the “Potiphar Papers.” His mind had regained its tone; fibre, purpose, and skill were in his work. At twenty-six a sensuous sentimentalist, at twenty-eight a social satirist, then a moralist. To-day a journalist, that is to say preacher, politician, and essayist, but in each character alike serene and thoughtful. At first he was superfine; superfine in his reading, superfine in his expression, superfine in his experience. But he seems to have been touched by the serious and penetrating genius of Thackeray. The phrase-maker formed under Emerson and English poetry disappeared; in place of that exquisite writer, a clear-eyed, delicate, and decided man looked and reflected upon the comedy of actual life, instead of brooding over nature and recalling the felicities of poets. His literary work in this new phase was admirably done; with good sense, with humor, with dramatic life.

  His tone is not only manly, but gentlemanly; his persuasiveness is an important element of his influence; and no reformer has equalled him in the art of insinuating sound principles into prejudiced intellects by putting them in the guise of pleasantries. He can on occasion send forth sentences of ringing invective; but in the Easy Chair he generally prefers the attitude of urbanity which the title of his department suggests. His style, in addition to its other merits, is rhythmical; so that his thoughts slide, as it were, into the reader’s mind in a strain of music. Not the least remarkable of his characteristics is the undiminished vigor and elasticity of his intelligence, in spite of the incessant draughts he has for years been making upon it.

  Broader than Dr. Holland in his range, less devoted to the work of lay-preaching, and of higher literary ability than either Holland or Mitchell, is George William Curtis. In him, more than in any American writer of his time, is represented, mutatis mutandis, the temper of Addison and Irving as well as some of their methods. Addison has not been repeated, nor have his times; but if Addison had been a modern American, perhaps he might, like Curtis, have written for many a year graceful and finished little essays for the closing pages of successive numbers of Harper’s Magazine, or more frequent editorials for a weekly newspaper…. But for Curtis the essayist one may make high claims, with confidence. If, as I have intimated, he is not, more than any living writer, the successor or representative of the spirit of Addison, Lamb, Irving, I know not whose name could more fitly be mentioned. He resembles Addison rather than Lamb or Irving. If his humor, wisdom, broad culture, catholic temper, and attractive style are not well known to future readers, it will be due to the changed place of the periodical press in the last part of the nineteenth century, as compared with its place seventy-five or a hundred and seventy-five years ago.

  When we review such a career as that which in all that was earthly has just closed, the considerate ask: “What has he left?” It is a question not difficult to answer; the readiest reply is that he has made the world better for having been a part of its experience; he put more into the common stock of our truest wealth than he took out of it; he made that rarest of all gifts to his time, the gift of a noble nature nobly dedicated to the highest tasks. When there shall be gathered into more accessible form the political wisdom which he had for forty years contributed to a better knowledge of the people, and that store of gentle satire and sweet persuasion, which he spoke as he sat in the Easy Chair, shall have become a part of our literature, then we will find ourselves wondering at the fertility of resource, the lightness of a strong touch, the varied culture which our friend possessed.

  He is the direct descendant of Addison, whose style is overrated, of Steele, whose morality is humorous, of Goldsmith, whose writing was angelic, and of Irving, whose taste was pretty. Mr. Curtis recalls all of these, yet he is like none of them. Humorous as they are and charming, he is somewhat sturdier, of a more robust fibre, with a stronger respect for plain living and high thinking, with a firmer grasp on the duties of life.

  It is no disparagement of his contemporaries to say that, of living American men of letters, Mr. George William Curtis stands easily at the head. There are few, if any, English writers on either side of the Atlantic who, in the regions of pure literature, are entitled to rank with him…. A man of letters, the master of a style second only to Hawthorne, a scholar and thinker. He has been before the public as a writer of books for more than forty years; and, although we suppose he is not without honour now among his countrymen, yet Mr. Charles F. Richardson, who undertook to produce a history of American literature up to date, hardly names him, while in an American “Synopsis,” where the merit of authors is distinguished by style of type, Mr. Curtis ranks in the same class as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Whipple.

  When his prototype, Sir Philip Sidney, on that fatal September morning, three hundred and seven years ago, set forth for the field of battle at Zutphen, he met a fellow-soldier riding in light armor, and thereupon he cast away a portion of his own mail—and in so doing, as the event proved, he cast away his life—in order that he might be no better protected than his friend. In like manner Curtis would have no advantage for himself, nor even the semblance of advantage, that was not shared by others. He could not—with his superlative moral fervor—dedicate himself exclusively to letters, while there was so much wrong in the world that clamored for him to do his part in setting it right. He believed that his direct, practical labor was essential and would avail, and he was eager to bestow it. Men of strong imagination begin life with illimitable ideals, with vast illusions, with ardent and generous faith. They are invariably disappointed, and they are usually embittered. Curtis was controlled less by his imagination than by his moral sense. He had ideals, but they were based on reason. However much he may have loved to muse and dream, he saw the world as a fact and not as a fancy. He was often saddened by the spectacle of human littleness, but, broadly and generally, he was not disappointed in mankind, and he never became embittered.

  It is a charming book [“Lotus Eating”]; so charming that to stay at home and read it would perhaps give more pleasure than those famous places now afford. Doctor Channing thought it not presumptuous to hope that something corresponding to our earthly joys of air and light would be permitted us in another life and in this particular Curtis must have sympathized with him. He had the art of husbanding these joys and of so making his words express them that those days of long ago still shed their beauty on our hearts. In these studies there was a good deal of comparative scenery, the writer was so drenched in mists of Alpine heights and falling water, and in the associations of an older civilization. The “emotion recollected in tranquility” was often keener than any which the immediate object could excite. But more important than the description of each lovely scene was the eye for social manners and the stroke that gave their hollowness and insincerity, their meanness and vulgarity, a shameful perpetuity upon the vivid page…. The scholar, the writer, the humorist, the orator, the patriot, the reformer, the man, “whose every word and thought was a good deed.”

  Curtis represents, no doubt, what may prove to be a transitory phase of American literature. Even now, in the latest as well as in the earliest essays in this delightful volume, there is a flavour as of something that is passing away. The leisureliness, the dignity, the marked and sometimes almost elaborate courtesy of manner, the style in which the absence of all impatience is only one mark of its invariable distinction—are those of to-day? The style flows on with the smoothness of the Concord River itself, but without its shallows or sluggishness. There are flowers upon its surface, and it mirrors the heavens above.

  The kind of training which Curtis secured at Brook Farm and Concord better fitted him for such a career as his than he could have obtained at any college of his day. It brought him into actual contact with life, made him self-reliant, and increased his knowledge of men and the world. It brought him into sympathy with some of the ablest men of our century, so that he learned of them what no book could give. He received from them the enthusiasms which youth needs, and which are the manure of all its after-crop of ideas and achievements. He fertilized his mind at the very sources of culture; and the whole of his mind, instead of some part of it, was affected by the process of enrichment. He became strong in body, mind, conscience, imagination, by his first-hand study of life and men, by his open-air sympathy with nature, and by his daily intercourse with men of toil and of affairs. His whole after-career found its incentive and its meaning in these years of unique preparation.