CONFESSIONS OF ABOOK-LOVER

BY

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN

[Illustration]

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATIONINTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 

IN MEMORY OF

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

A MAN OF ACTIONIN LOVE WITH BOOKS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

 I. MY BOYHOOD READING 1 Early Recollections. The Bible. Essays and Essayists. 

 II. POETS AND POETRY 76 France--Of Maurice de Guérin. Dante. English and American Verse. 

III. CERTAIN NOVELISTS 134

 IV. LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS 156

 V. BOOKS AT RANDOM 205

CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER

CHAPTER I

MY BOYHOOD READING

_Early Recollections_

To get the best out of books, I am convinced that you must begin to lovethese perennial friends very early in life. It is the only way to knowall their "curves, " all those little shadows of expression and smalllights. There is a glamour which you never _see_ if you begin to readwith a serious intention late in life, when questions of technique andgrammar and mere words begin to seem too important. 

Then you have become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper'sverbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romancebeneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimableflavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose afriend--if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for eventhe memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever havedone anything that will make the book you love less precious to you. 

The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, ofmiscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame deSévigné that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but Madame deSévigné may have meant books written in a bad style, or feeble books, and not books bad in the moral sense. However, I must confess that whenI was young, I read several books which I was told afterward were verybad indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody told me! Theyouthful mind must possess something of the quality attributed to aduck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau" wassnatched suddenly away from me by a careful mother just as I had begunto think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and almost asqueer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had been allowedto finish the book, it would have become by some mental chemical processa very edifying criticism of life. 

"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a piousaunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown ofRugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little byLittle, " for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rathershocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted tomy aunt's pronouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' adangerous book, " by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book Ihad ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when Godwasn't looking. " She sent me home. 

At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winterSunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerelyattached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion thatnobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. TheCenturion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such agood soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy, " flashes across mymental vision every day of my life. 

In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, andcarefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew inadvance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of myacquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the InternationalSunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geographyof Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, thewhole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly humaninterest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand, sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimesbecause my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatevermay be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the NewTestament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuitionnot yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. Inmy own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish betweentruth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often verydifficult for an imaginative child. 

This kind of reading implies leisure and the absence of distraction. Unhappily, much leisure does not seem to be left for the modern child. The unhappy creature is even told that there will be "something inHeaven for children to do!" As to distractions, the modern child issurrounded by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions ofthe present system of instruction not to leave to a child any moments ofleisure for the indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering theexample of my childhood for imitation by the modern parents. 

Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in thosedays, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on longafternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in"The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that thebeauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time tovisualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, thata sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was notnecessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was onlynecessary for her to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them, "My Wallace!" to know that she was the loveliest person in all Scotland. But "The Scottish Chiefs" required the leisure of long holidayafternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that Ihad to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It wasworth the trouble, however. 

Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother'sknee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she neverread children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthfulmisunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she neverconsidered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. Atfirst, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivuletsof melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. Thereis nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when theheavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardlessof what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--afterthe manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she wavedher wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make nonoise. 

In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians, " then running in_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "RichardIII. " and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "ValentineVox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have beenlistening to "Alice in Wonderland. " But when I came, in turn, to "Alicein Wonderland, " I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with theadventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbocarrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's descriptionof the great fight in "Ivanhoe, " to have lived through the tournament ofAshby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queercreatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice. 

There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we hadaccess. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver'sTravels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were notso treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up toChestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy thelatest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--theshop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It maybe asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "littleEm'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mindwas awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned asmuch by the force of the style, by the suggestions of an unknown terror, as by any facts which a child could grasp. 

It was a curious thing that my mother, who had remarkably good taste inliterature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admiredQueen Victoria. She never read "East Lynne" aloud, because, I gathered, she considered it "improper"; and Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret"came under the same ban, though I heard it talked of frequently. It wasdifficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was"proper" and what was "not proper. " Shakespeare she seemed to regard aseminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when shecame to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that Inever rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot orThackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible differencewhich my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him aboveMrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray. 

_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, forinstance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--GeneralStrothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane ofmy existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. " It seemed tome as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me asthat other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledgethat all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a daywith powdered charcoal!

After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultoryreading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that noemancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimescame to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known GeorgeWarrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of GeorgeWashington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down thestairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightfulbook--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford, " sucking their orangesin the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little talesabout over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have theordinary common sense of geese!

Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On oneunhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from myentranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper, " and to thisday I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeplyinterested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come asin the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-schoolbooks, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday Schoolopposite our house. They seemed to me to be stupid beyond all words. There was not one really good fight in them all, and after an honestvillain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumeswere very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared tothem. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hatereligion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that Ihad Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They wereequally dull; and other "Lives, " highly recommended, were quite asuninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They weregenerally translated from the French, without vitality and without anyregard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting downone Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima. " As itconcerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might bein it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off theear of a High Priest's servant as was done in the New Testament. But no, I was shocked to read in the very beginning, that

 so pure was the little Saint, even in her infancy, that when her uncle, who was her godfather, kissed her after her baptism, a rosy glow, a real blush of shame, overspread her countenance. 

In that book I read no more that day!

But I discovered a volume I have never forgotten, which probably after"The Young Marooners, " had the greatest influence on me for a shortperiod. This was "Fabiola, " by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff init; it made me feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills;and it taught a lot about the archæology of Rome, for it was part ofthat excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very greatbook. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days ofPompeii, " I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola, " butin some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by WashingtonIrving's "Tales of the Alhambra. " _Conspuez les livres des poupées!_What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, couldawaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailingclouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes thepomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates alove for Spain and a romance of old Spain which can never die. 

After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was given "Les Enfants desBois, " by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was ahorrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laboriousresearch in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures ofthese infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but Iknow that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctivemood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a Frenchromance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin. " It was of thingsthat happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, withan occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that thegentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. Igave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there havebeen lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think werewritten by an author named Léon Gozlan. 

About this time, the book auction became a fashion in Philadelphia. Ifyour people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to apublication called the _Cosmopolitan Art Magazine_, and you received asteel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleighvery much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet andvery well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington atLexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequentedthe book auctions. My father had a great respect for what he called"classical literature. " He considered Cowper's "The Task" immenselyclassical; it was beautifully bound, and he never read it. One day hesecured a lovely edition of the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore. " It hadbeen a subject of much competition at the auction, and was cherishedaccordingly. The binding was tooled. It was put on the centre table andadored as a work of art. Here was richness!

Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed at present as belonging tothose old and faded gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake, " byLady Blessington, once flourished; but if I could only recall thepleasure I had in the reading of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophetof Korhasson, " I think I should be very happy. And the notes to "LallaRookh" and to Moore's prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"was not much of a novel, but the notes were full of amazing Egyptianmysteries, which seemed quite as splendid as the machinery in the"Arabian Nights. " The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled of roses, and Iremember as a labour of love copying out all the allusions to roses inthese notes with the intention of writing about them when I grew up. Mymother objected to the translations from Anacreon; she said they were"improper"; but my father said that he had been assured on competentauthority that they were "classic, " and of course that settled it. Therewas no story in them, and they seemed to me to be stupid. 

Just about this time, one of the book auctions yielded up a copy of the"Complete Works of Miss Mitford. " You perhaps can imagine how a cityboy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on thearid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village. " It became anincentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes andsomething resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "OurVillage" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the littleworld in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to read her tragedy, "The TwoFoscari. " A tragedy had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the atticfor some offense against the conventionalities demanded of aPhiladelphia child, with no book but Miss Mitford's, I spent my timelooking up all the references to roses in her tragedies. These Icombined with the knowledge acquired from Tom Moore, and made notes fora paper to be printed in some great periodical in the future. Why roses?Why Miss Mitford and roses? Why Tom Moore and roses? I do not know, but, when I was sixteen years of age, I printed the paper in _Appleton'sJournal_, where it may still be found. My parents, who did not look onmy literary attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with favour, suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as I had no time to look up themeaning of the word in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck meas one of those evidences of misunderstanding which every honest artistmust be content to accept. 

My mother, evidently fearing the influence of "classical" literature, gave me one day "The Parent's Assistant, " by Miss Edgeworth. I thinkthat it was in this book that I discovered "Rosamond; or The Purple Jar"and the story of the good boy or girl who never cut the bit of stringthat tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself to the imitation ofthis economic child, and was very highly praised for getting the bestout of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very toughknot. 

It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series ofBeadle's "Dime Novels. " I looked on them as delectable but inferior. There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; butif you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, whichconcealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were verylikely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole, "because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account ofa real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in theabdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very"indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutelyforbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was amoral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to dowith leaper, the effect was not very convincing. 

Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all theyoungsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but Ihappened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot, " whereEdward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart fromleaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everythingof Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well. " That never seemed worthy ofthe great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" wererather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have beenwritten by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of SirWalter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "NicholasNickleby. "

"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winterafternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectablecity boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected towork. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was akitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There itwas easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "NicholasNickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, whichgenerally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If younever read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possiblyknow the flavour of Dickens. You can't laugh now as you laughed then. Oh, the delight of Mr. Crummles's description of his wife's dignifiedmanner of standing with her head on a spear!

The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It wasnecessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike, they became great bores. But what young reader of Dickens can forget thehostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little MissKenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one growsolder, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but thinkof the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was itCortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "NicholasNickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of TwoCities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enoughfor my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. Mylater impressions of Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions. 

One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as Iremember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair. " My mother seized it andread it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for goodnovels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, tookagain to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin andAmelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't thinkthat the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I wasdelighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot ofstupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of thestory that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no motherto guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on theforehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I wasunhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the bookwith those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "Thatis what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believethat Becky Sharp was a bad person at all. 

For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby, " to "DavidCopperfield. " I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way thatI could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later--it was on one Juneafternoon I think--when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemedto me that for a while all delight in life had ended. 

One of those experts in psychology who are always seeking questionssometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influencedme, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our"Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottledcardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, whenI was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual. " Mymother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southerntendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party, and admired Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the famousVallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion ofAmerican statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of avery different type. 

Julius Cæsar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I hadnot then read Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar. " It seemed to me that Brutuswas a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not preventme from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of theten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, noadult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was aconvention that tales should not be told out of school. One of thepleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the littleboys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almostsuffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It wasnot only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I hadbeen presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden bladescovered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bullywanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but itoccurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" thenight before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and whenhe threw the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill him at once, by an upward thrust of the knife. 

This struck me as a good deed entirely worthy of Brutus. Of course, Iknew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making alast dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On themorning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to thesmall boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were aboutto be bereaved, and predicted a coming holiday. I was looked on asrather "crazy, " but I reflected that I would soon be considered heroic, and my friends gladly accepted the gifts. 

The fatal afternoon came. I displayed the penknife. The chase began. Thebully and his chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The moment hadcome; I thrust the knife upward; the big boy uttered a howl, and ran, still howling. I looked for blood, but there was none visible; I came tothe conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. Ispent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which wereincomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, in the"Lives. "

The next morning I went to school with lessons unstudied and awaitedevents. The mother of the bully appeared, and entered into an excitedcolloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. I announced to theboy next to me, "My time has come. " I was called up to the awful desk. "Is he dead?" I asked. "Did he bleed internally?" "You little wretch, "the mother of the tyrant said, "you cut such fearful holes in my son'scoat, that he is afraid to come to school to-day!" Then I said, regretfully, "Oh, I hoped that I had killed him. " There was a sensation;my character was blackened. I was set down as a victim of totaldepravity; I endured it all, but I knew in my heart that it was"Plutarch. " This is the effect that "Plutarch" had on the mind of a goodChristian child. 

The effects of "Plutarch" on my character were never discovered at home, and as I grew older and learned one or two wrestling tricks, the bullylet me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, which had leaked out, gave me such a reputation that I became a dictator myself, and madeterms for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which were sometimesrather despotic. 

It was also during these days that I remember carrying confusion intothe family when a patronizing, intellectual lady called and said, "Ihope that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo books?" "No, " Ianswered quickly and indiscreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen, ' byWilkie Collins. " I did not think much of Wilkie Collins until I read"The Moonstone. " It seemed that "The New Magdalen" had been purchasedinadvertently by my father, in a packet of "classics. "

My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he readthe evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a longhorsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from thenovels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the NewYork _Ledger_ by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of thetimes of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely andaristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after herconversion, disapproved of the New York _Ledger_. In fact, there werefamilies in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! Inour house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical, which, with many volumes of Godey's _Lady's Book_, were packed in theattic. 

It happened that a young man, in whom my father had a great interest, was threatened with tuberculosis. An awful rumour was set abroad that hewas about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the backnumbers of the New York _Ledger_ containing a long serial story by Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the FrenchRevolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with adescription of a dance in an old château, when the Marquise, who wasfloating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kidglove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where theblood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find thenovel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my fathersent the numbers of the New York _Ledger_ to the apparently dying man. "It's a horrible thing, " my mother said, "to think of any Christianperson reading the New York _Ledger_ at the point of death. " The youngman, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed hisrecovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories. 

There were certain other serial stories I was ordered to read; they werestories of the Irish Brigade in France. My mother, I remember, disapproved of them because Madame de Pompadour was frequentlymentioned, and she thought that my father regarded the lady in questiontoo tolerantly. These romances were, I think, written by a certain MylesO'Reilly who was in some way connected with the army. This procedure ofreading aloud was not always agreeable, as my father frequently went tosleep in the middle of a passage and forgot what I had already read. Theconsequence was that I was obliged to begin the same old story overagain on the following evening. 

It happened that my father was one of the directors of a local library, and in it I found Bates's volume on the Amazon--I forget the exact titleof the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived in Para; I tried tomanufacture an imitation of the Urari poison with a view toexterminating rats in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived andhad my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced, at intervals, athrilling novel, with the glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as abackground. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I had ever read. Heheld possession of my imagination, until he was forced out by a Mr. Jerningham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany. Saint Malobecame the only town for me; I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; andthe Stuarts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of Sir WalterScott, were displaced by the Vendéans. 

Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me toparse Kane's "Arctic Voyages. " I found the volumes cold and repellent. They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even theadventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me to overcome. 

About this time, my mother began to feel that I needed to read somethingmore gentle, which would root me more effectively in my religion. Shebegan, I think, with Cardinal Newman's "Callista" in which there was athrilling chapter called "The Possession of Juba. " It seemed to me oneof the most stirring things I had ever read. Then I was presented withMrs. Sadlier's "The Blakes and the Flanagans, " which struck me as a verydelightful satire, and with a really interesting novel of New Yorkcalled "Rosemary, " by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a terriblyblood-curdling story of the Carbonari in Italy, called "Lionello. " Afterthis I was wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh; "Natalie, "and "Bessie, " and "Seven Years, " I think were the principals. My fatherdeclined to read them; he thought they were too sentimental, but as theauthor had an Irish name he was inclined to regard them with tolerance. He thought I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom and Jerry; orThe Adventures of Corinthian Bob, " by Pierce Egan. My mother objected tothis, and substituted "Lady Violet; or the Wonder of Kingswood Chace, "by the younger Pierce Egan, which she considered more moral. 

My father was very generous at Christmas, and I bought a large volume ofFroissart for two dollars and a half at an old book stand on FifthStreet, near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world during theChristmas holidays. After breakfast, I saturated myself with thedelightful battles in that precious book. 

My principal duty was to look after the front pavement. In the springand summer, it was carefully washed twice a week and reddened with somekind of paint, which always accompanied a box of fine white sand for thescouring of the marble steps; but in the winter, this respectablesidewalk had to be kept free from snow and ice. 

Hitherto my battle with the elements had been rather a diversion. Besides, I was in competition with the other small boys in the block--orin the "square, " as we Philadelphians called it. Now it became irksome;I neglected to dig the ice from between the bricks; I skimped mycleaning of the gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums. " The boy next doorbecame a mirror of virtue; he was quoted to me as one whose pavement wasa model to all the neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the Mayorpassing down our street, had stopped and admired the working of hiscivic spirit, while the result of my efforts was passed by with evidentcontempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart to my heart. Who wouldcondescend to wield a broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward often cents in cash, when he could throw javelins and break lances withthe knights of the divine Froissart? The end of my freedom came afterthis. The terrible incident of the Mayor's contempt, invented, Ibelieve, by the boy next door, induced my mother to believe that I wasnot only losing my morals, but becoming too much of a book-worm. Formany long weeks I was deprived of any amusing book except "RobinsonCrusoe. " After this interval, vacation came; I seemed to have grownolder, and books were never quite the same again. 

In the vacation, however, when the days were very long and there was agreat deal of leisure, I found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales"and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault, and I was even then verymuch struck by the difference. Of course I read Grimm from cover tocover, and went back again over the pages, hoping that I had neglectedsomething. The homeliness of the stories touched me; it seemed to methat you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany. MadamePerrault was more delicate; her fairy tales were pictures of no lifethat ever existed, and there was a great dissimilarity between her"Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of "Aschenputtel. " As I remember, thehaughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among theashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seemsmaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault'sslipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in_her_ fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are nosuch gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During thisvacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun, " the little Irish fairywith the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies inShakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream, " and, leaving out Ariel, Ithink I liked him best of all. 

That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" inthe attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. Nodoubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour ofscrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have neverdiscovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you werevery young, you will never know the meaning of that light which neverwas on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to theNightingale. " The love interest did not count much. In my youthfulexperience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to beexpected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the trooperscoming into the open space in the Forest of Arden and hear their songs, making the leaves of the trees quiver before they appeared. And Puck!and Caliban! When I was young I was always very sorry for Caliban, and, being very religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might have donesomething for his soul. 

There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace beto his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who werepersons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of oneopinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After theepisode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong. " Ipreferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positivedevotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discoveredsomewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, afat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio. " Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against thestories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and hedisliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mereprejudice. 

The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likesto read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myselfone afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon, and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale notso edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seizedthe book at once. My father was informed of what had occurred. He waslittle alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change thewhole course of this boy's reading. " "We shall have to change the boyfirst, " my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At theproper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. Thebook was presented to him for destruction. 

"It's a bad book, " the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk aboutany of these stories to the other boys in school?"

"Oh, no, " I said; "if I did, they would say much worse things, and Iwould probably have to tell them in confession. Besides, " I added, "allthe people in the Boccaccio book were good Catholics, I suppose, as theywere Italians, and I think, after all, when they caught the plague, theydied good deaths. "

The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and gave me his blessing anddismissed me. And my mother seemed to think that I was sufficientlyexorcised. 

After this the books I read were more carefully considered. I was giventhe "Tales of Canon Schmidt"--dear little stories of German children inthe Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, which went very wellwith another volume I found at this time called "Jack Halifax, " not"John Halifax, Gentleman, " which my mother had already read to me--but acurious little tome long out of print. And then there sailed upon myvision a long procession of the works of the Flemish novelist, HendrikConscience, whose "Lion of Flanders" opened a new world of romance, andthere were "Wooden Clara, " and other pieces which made one feel as ifone lived in Flanders. 

Just about this time I read in Littell's _Living Age_ a novel called"The Amber Witch, " and some of Fritz Reuter's Low German stories; butthese were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier. " This may not have beenmuch of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "TheVirginians" or "Esmond. " They were what my father called"classics"--things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" wasquite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionaryhistory, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. Irecall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using herthumb to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This isall that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neitherHenry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemedto have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier. "

After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through abook, given to me by my mother, about _la Vendée_. It was a dull book, but nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim the heroism of Henride la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists, and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned thecompliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayettea great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. And the beautiful MarieAntoinette!

When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed, as the resultof my reading, a great belief in all lost causes. I had becomeexceedingly devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor hadsent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn, " perhaps as anantidote to the lingering effects of "Boccaccio. " I was rather troubledto find so many "swear words" in it, but I made all the allowances thata real lover of literature is often compelled to make!

_The Bible_

The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, asa moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimablevalue. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read itconstantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version andthe King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learnedto recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King Jamesversion--which I always read when I went to one of my cousins--I foundthe sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time Iwas limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as itwas considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testamentunexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raisedfor some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a greatdeal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and histories of theOld Testament. I soon discovered that it was impossible to understandthe allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible. What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had neverknown the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field, permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume ifone knew nothing about the Song of Solomon. 

Putting aside the question as to whether young readers should be letloose in the Old Testament or not, or whether modern ideas of purity arejustified in including ignorance as the supremest virtue, he who doesnot make himself familiar with Biblical ideas and phraseology findshimself in after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. It usedto be said of the typical English gentleman that all he needed to knowwas to ride after the hounds and to construe Horace. This is not soabsurd, after all, as it appears to be to most moderns. To construeHorace, of course, meant that he should have at least a speakingacquaintance with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature, and thisknowledge gave him a grip on the universal speech of all cultivatedpeople. However useless his allusions to Chloë and to Mæcenas were inthe business of practical life, he was at least able to understand whatthey meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the Latins stamped himas speaking the speech of a gentleman. 

Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is fitted with allusions thatclarify and illuminate the ordinary speech. He may not have anytechnical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may be so great as todebar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; buthis reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, acolour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in ameasure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make lifeendurable. 

Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. Even the poets often nowassume that Clytie is a name that requires an explanation and thatDaphne and her flight through the laurel do not bring up immediatememories of Syrinx and the reeds. The Dictionary of Lamprière is coveredwith dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid without an answeringglance of comprehension from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;it is only that, in the modern system, the old mythology is not takenvery seriously. 

Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be a necessary part of agentleman's education, there is no class of allusions from which we candraw to lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we turn to theBible. This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders itrather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our youngpeople, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in arather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, aBiblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, whenhe is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almostsure to speak of Jonah and the whale!

It is disappointing to notice this gradual change that has taken placein the attitude of the younger generation toward the Sacred Book. TheSunday Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies of importanceand to overload the memories of their little disciples with a multitudeof texts, or to over-explain every allusion in the terms of physicalgeography, etc. , may in a measure be responsible for this, but theycannot be entirely responsible. One must admit that diversities ofinterpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a religious point of viewwill always be an obstacle to their use in schools where the children ofJews, of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian denominationsassemble. But there is always the home, where the first impetus to asatisfactory knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. The decayof the practice of reading aloud in our homes is very evident in thelack of real culture--or, rather, rudiments of real culture--in ourchildren. But there is no use in declaiming against this. Other times, other manners; accusatory declamation is simply a luxury of Old Age!

Personally, my desultory reading of the Old and the New Testaments gaveme a background against which I could see the trend of the books Idevoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them;besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for aboy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standardby which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expressionof life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamationsfull of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love, in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simplestories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, whichhas not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of excitingadventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. Itis very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, andI soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letterwriters, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Cæsar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. Theymay not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because oftheir humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the moreyou read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more humanhe becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takesit out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his missionhas always been a great delight to me!

Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phasesof his history--a history that even then seemed to be so very modern, and to a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real. It seemedonly natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination fromGod. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is amiracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of amiracle than the conversion of this fierce Jew, who was a Roman citizen. He seemed so very noble and yet so very humble. He could command andplead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generallyright. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who couldspeak to the Greeks in their own language. 

Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple ofHuxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Biblewhich was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and withthe belief that, if he could break the close exclusiveness of the Jews, and take in the Gentiles, if he could throw off, not contemptuously, many of the rigid ceremonies of his people, Christianity, in the moderntime, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretationof the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith whichSt. Paul preached. 

Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delightthe letters of Madame de Sévigné, I put her second as a writer ofletters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to hissons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to DeadAuthors, " and a very great letter I found in an English translation ofBalzac's "Le Lys dans la Vallée. "

It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category withthese mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very oftenreasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than takemoney from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while heworked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was verygrateful to Phœbe for remembering that he was a hungry man and inneed of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengersAquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking themfrom Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able tomake their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had notinterfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked"Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesuswere as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleasedthat his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. Ialways felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus wouldgive him a better chance of supporting himself. 

That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries in his youth, one easilyguessed. It was plain, too, that he had had the best possibleinstructors, and I liked to believe, when I was young, that his muscleshad been well trained in the sports of gentlemen of his class. Altogether, so graphic were his descriptions and so potent hispersonality that, while Julius Cæsar and Brutus receded, he filled theforeground, and all the more because at this time I picked up an Englishtranslation of Suetonius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as Ihad not yet discovered that Suetonius was a "yellow" gossip, my idols, some of the Roman heroes, received a great shock. 

The constant reading of St. Paul led me to the Acts of the Apostles, andI found St. Luke very good reading, though I often wished that, as Iunderstood he had some reputation as an artist, he had adorned hiswritings with illustrations. 

It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote inEnglish, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different fromone another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great partof my time in classes where Nepos and Cæsar were translated by my dearyoung friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator, I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of thetranslators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had nointerest whatever in the translations which we made daily for theimpatient ears of our instructors!

One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because he was such a goodfighter. When he said he fought with beasts, I was quite sure that thesebeasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons who persecuted andcontradicted him. No obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too, although he called things by their right names and his denunciationswere so vivid and mouthfilling that you knew his enemies must have beenafraid to open their lips while he was near them, whatever they mighthave said behind his back. 

My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at schoolwhen discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended toconversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it cameto my turn I answered "St. Paul. " As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexanderthe Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I waslooked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, andhe asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, comingsuddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought withbeasts. " This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dearcomrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer forit as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, theydiscovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next compositionday, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "beingfilled with all iniquity, " and other evil things which brought down ahorrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to suchplain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I wasonly quoting St. Paul to the Romans. 

Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. Be that as it may, Iregarded him as a very good friend indeed, for some of his "language, "quoted in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on one'senemies than any swear word that could be invented. I am not excusing myattitude toward the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected myyouthful mind. There was something extremely romantic in the veryphrase, "the tumult of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to mean awhole chapter of a novel in itself. 

And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have asympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, onits way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiablebarbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help likingthe Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was aJew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him ofchastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given himby Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fineseemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! Herendered unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. And one could easilyimagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered intothe hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city!And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, throughthe nobility of a Roman law:

 For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not to signify the things laid to his charge, and Agrippa's answer, after Paul's apologia:

 In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian!

But the story did not end then. I rehearsed over and over again what theKing Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautifulBernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finallythey did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity andexquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paulwent to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the veryfineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment. "This man, " I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set atliberty, if he had not appealed to Cæsar. "

It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet Micheas, who hadpreviously struck me as of no importance at all, and I read:

 And Thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among the thousands of Juda; out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be the ruler in Israel; and his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity. 

And back again to St. Matthew--

 But they said to him: In Bethlehem of Juda; For so it is written by the prophet; And thou, Bethlehem, the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda; for out of thee shall come forth the captain, who shall rule my people Israel. 

These exercises in completing the prophecies of the Old Testament withthe fulfilments of the New were interesting, and I found great pleasurein them. And this led me to a greater appreciation of the Old Testament, against which I had been once rather prejudiced. One day, I was led, bysome reference or other in another book, to read the twenty-third psalmof David, in the King James version. It struck me as much more simpleand appealing than the version in the Douai Bible, which begins in Latin"_Dominus regit me_. " It runs:

 The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing. 

 2 He hath set me in a place of pasture. 

 He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment:

 3 He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths of justice, for his own name's sake. 

 4 For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I fear no evils, for thou art with me. 

 Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. 

 5 Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that afflict me. 

 Thou hast anointed my head with oil: and my chalice which inebriateth me how goodly is it. 

 And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life. 

 And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, unto length of days. 

In the Douai version this psalm was called the twenty-second. 

Without any special guidance--I think most of my teachers would havelooked on as dangerous any attempt to ally English literature with theBible--I soon discovered that nearly everything I read owed something tothe Bible. At first, the comparison of the twenty-third psalm in theKing James version enraptured me so much that I began to find fault withthe Latinized phrases of the Vulgate in English. It was the fashion inthe early seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in thelittle group at school interested in English literature. Street cars atthis time were comparatively new in Philadelphia, and I think we reachedthe last extremity of Saxonism in speech when we spoke of them as "folkwains. " The tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred the Bookof Job and the story of Ruth in the Latinized version, because the wordswere more mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to translateeverything into a bald "early English medium", which for a time I hadbeen trying to do. It was Keats's lovely phrase "amid the alien corn"which sent me back to "Ruth"; and a quotation in Quackenbos's"Rhetoric"--"Can'st thou hook the Leviathan" which made me revel in"Job. "

Something Meg Merrilies said bore me on toward the roaring storm ofIsaiah. The Latinized medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; andthen, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes in the Douai versionthan in the King James. In both versions, some passages were so obscurethat I often wondered how anybody could get any meaning out of them. Iwas often astonished to find in English novels that the old people inthe cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great length, out ofwhich I could make nothing, so I limited myself to the Douai version, which I found more illuminating. 

Whether my system of reading is to be commended or not to young persons, I am not prepared to say, but for me it made the Bible a really livebook. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at the same time--if anybody hadasked me whether, being marooned on an island, I should have mostpreferred the Bible in my loneliness, I should promptly have answered"No. " At this age "Nicholas Nickleby" or "Midsummer Night's Dream, " or"The Tempest, " or "As You Like it, " or Macaulay's "Lays of AncientRome, " would have suited me better, provided, of course, that I couldhave chosen only one book. 

It was borne in on me many times that no author could improve on thephrasing of the Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James versionsthere are passages which, leaving aside all question of doctrine, it issacrilege to try to improve. The French translation of the Bible is, aseverybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that may account for the factthat, while regarded as a precious depository of doctrine, it is not ahousehold book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations of ClementMarot--called hymns--naturally bored a people who, in their hearts, believe that God listens more amiably to petitions uttered in thelanguage of the Academy! In their novels, dealing with the beginnings ofChristianity--and there are many such novels in French unknown in othercountries--it is hard for a French author not to be rhetorical, in themanner of the writer of "Ben Hur" when the death of Christ is described. No human author could improve on the words of the Vulgate, or the wordsof the King James version. What young heart can ponder over these words, without a thrill, St. John XIX (Douai version: 1609; Rheims; 1582):

 When Jesus therefore had seen his Mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his Mother: Woman, behold thy son. 

 After that, he saith to the disciple, Behold thy mother. And from that day the disciple took her to his own. 

 Afterwards, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said: I thirst. 

 Now there was a vessel set there full of vinegar, and they, putting a sponge full of vinegar about hyssop, put it to his mouth. 

 And Jesus therefore when he had taken the vinegar, said, it is consummated, and bowing his head, gave up the ghost. 

When Marie Corelli became a popular author, there were personsexisting--happily, they have all gone to the great beyond--who thoughtthat the "talented" author could have done better!

_Essays and Essayists_

I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerousreading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptistfriends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading ofEmerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parishnever denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offeredhis compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to theseobjections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading ofmy boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parentsand guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain booksmade on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so inwords, the books I liked were always nearer to my heart than to my mind. I owe a great debt to Emerson. 

It was on a hot afternoon during the summer vacation that, near sundown, sitting on the warm marble steps of our house, I dipped into an earlyedition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts andto do good things, to lift myself above the petty things of the earth, and to feel that to be an American was to be at once proud and humble. Emerson's abrupt sentences, like a number of brilliants set closetogether, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did notget so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked thelessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when hementioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I wasamiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege ofstudying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on thesubject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and, from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found outhis mistake. 

Perhaps I might have been better engaged in reading the more practicalbooks offered to boys in our own time, if we had had them. There weresome books then on scientific subjects, reduced to the comprehension ofthe young; but not so many as there are now. One of my unclesrecommended the works of Samuel Smiles--"Self-Help" I think was hisfavourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed to me. My small allowance, paid weekly, could not have been affected by "Thrift", and when my unclequoted passages from this tiresome book I astounded him by replying, ina phrase I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, that if I had aquarter to spend instead of twelve cents, I would give half of it for ahyacinth! My miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed, and thatEmerson had doubtless found it in that dangerous book, the Koran. 

I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays ofEmerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be reallyAmerican; in the second, and largely because of their quality, theyoffered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which hadsucceeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money andluxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, wheresimple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and movedaway into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumourthat some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagantexpenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendinglystopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of ourold-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. Forthe first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as theprincipal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons wereclassed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferousatmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As tohis philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than thereligious opinions of Julius Cæsar, whose "Commentaries" I was obligedto read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay. 

By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. The inflation of his styledid not deter me from thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis. " Thaton "Cagliostro, " however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimatelyto the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto, "Tread the lilies under foot. " I was for the Bourbons! The FrenchRevolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (inPhiladelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had livedthrough the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probablythe same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whoseconnections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk toFabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list ofthe condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substitutingin their place others that did not happen to belong to Celts!

In spite of the Little Catechism and the uplifting influence of Emerson, I looked on this probably mythical gentleman as one of the glories ofour family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up anddown Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief, bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believedthat he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. And Marie Antoinette. We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in ourneighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devouredevery line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. Itseemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out ofmy life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescuedMarie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemedimpossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friendswho went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie deBuxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whoseletters lie before me as I write. 

In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean PaulRichter, of whose writings I remember only one line, I love God and little children, I did not get very far into his "French Revolution. " It seemed then anunreal and lurid book. 

Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I hadfrom the Mechanics' Institute, of which my father was a committeeman, delighted me beyond words. I liked Emerson's essay on "Friendship"better than his, but for wit, quick repartee, general cheerfulness, hereminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott'sCatherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was anunbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; heseemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humourwhich I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day Icannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire withoutbelieving that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. Somuch for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, longthoughts of which Longfellow sings. 

Who is more amusingly cheerful than Montaigne, who more amusingly wise, who so well bred and attractive, who knew the world better and took itonly as the world? Give me the old volume of Montaigne and a loaf ofbread--no Victrola singing to me in the wilderness!--a thermos bottle, and one or two other things, and I can still spend the day in any wildplace! I did not, of course, know, in those early days, what in hisflavour attracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the very flavourand essence of Old France. Carlyle's impressions of historical personsinterested me, but Montaigne was the most actual of living persons whospoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly his. To be sure, I readhim in Florio's translation. 

I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modernwriter, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy whocontributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazinecalled the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. AndBismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that hewrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were sointeresting and apparently so true that they really became part of mylife. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of allmodern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, Ishould have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici leSabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared toan "Ave Verum, " by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip'sChurch at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth. Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series ofsketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, likeother masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them likethose beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion andpurple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when takenout of the water. This applies to some books that one reads withpleasure in early days, and wonders, later, how they were endured!

There were not so many outdoor books in the late '60's as there are now. We were all sent to Thoreau's "Walden" and Dana's "Two Years Before theMast. " "Walden" I learned to like, but I much preferred FenimoreCooper's description of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book of a manplaying at out-of-doors, imagining his wildness, and never really likingto be too far from the town. Singularly enough, it was not until Idiscovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that I began to see that naturehad beauties in all weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that naturealone never appealed to me. A landscape without human beings seemeddeadly dull; and I did not understand until I grew much older that I hadreally believed that good art was an improvement on nature. 

I have not the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see theworks of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novelsrecently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity andwhat one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as tothe relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp. " I recallvividly the words of the beginning of the preface to the first edition:

 It is known to all who are acquainted with the present condition of the fine arts in England that landscape-painters rely less on memory and invention than formerly, and that their work from nature is much more laborious than it used to be. 

I had seen so many pictures that seemed to be "made up" in the artist'sstudio and I knew so well from my experience in the drawing classes atschool, how nature was neglected for artificial models, that I hailedthese words with great joy. 

Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for theCentennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes thebeginning of the æsthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It mayseem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts inGodey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and anoccasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of thechromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly everyself-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, verygood casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. Myfather greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had beencelebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it asalmost "improper. "

Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia, wanted not exactlysomething better, but something more vivid. There were few sports; longwalks and a little cricket supplied the place of the coming baseball andtennis. 

In his "Steeplejack, " James Huneker speaks of his weekly walks with Mr. Edward Roth, the head of a military school and the author of "ChristusJudex. " I, too, looked on these walks with an occasional row on theSchuylkill with him as the best part of my education. But this waslater. All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, was to walk andtalk and read. 

The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. Thebeginning of "A Painter's Camp" was most attractive to my thirsty soul. Mr. Hamerton says:

 I had a wild walk yesterday. I have a notion of encamping on the Boulsworth moors to study heather; and heartily tired of being caged up here in my library, with nothing to see but wet garden-walks and dripping yew trees, and a sundial whereon no shadow had fallen the livelong day, I determined, in spite of the rain to be off to the moors to choose a site for my encampment. Not very far from this house still dwells an old servant of my uncle's with whom I am on the friendliest terms. So I called upon this neighbour on my way and asked him if he would take a walk with me to the hills. Jamie stared a little and remarked that "it ur feefi weet" but accompanied me nevertheless, and a very pleasant walk we had of it. 

Hamerton opened his book in Jane Eyre's country; our family had latelyread "Jane Eyre. " This added interest to the volume, and there came thedetails of the invention of the new hut, intended to be a shelteragainst all weathers, so that the artist might study nature on intimateterms. He made it in order to paint the heather at close range. Now, this was a revelation! It had never hitherto occurred to me that theheather changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our pet place ofbeauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or river if you like, was not the sameevery day in the year except when the ice bound it! This may seem arather stupid state of mind; but it is the stupidity that is verycommon. I could understand how interesting it would be to be insnow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton thus described hishut:

 It consists entirely of panels, of which the largest are two feet six inches square: these panels can be carried separately on packhorses, or even on men's backs, and then united together by iron bolts into a strong little building. Four of the largest panels serve as windows, being each of them filled with a large pane of excellent plate-glass. When erected, the walls present a perfectly smooth surface outside, and a panelled interior; the floor being formed in exactly the same manner, with the panelled or coffered side turned towards the earth, and the smooth surface uppermost. By this arrangement all the wall-bolts are inside, and those of the floor underneath it, which protects them not only from the weather but from theft, an iron bolt being a great temptation to country people on account of its convenience and utility. The walls are bolted to the floor, which gives great strength to the whole structure, and the panels are carefully ordered, like the stones in a well-built wall, so that the joints of the lower course of panels do not fall below those of the upper. The roof is arched and provides a current of fresh air, by placing ventilators at each end of the arch, which insures a current without inconvenience to the occupant. 

The chapters on "Concerning Moonlight in Old Castles, " "The Coming ofthe Clouds, " and the little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset, Sept. 23, 1860, " enchanted me. It had not before struck me that LochAwe was different on September 23, 1860, from what it was at othertimes, or--to carry the idea further--that the imperial Delaware hadchanged since that momentous time when George Washington crossed it, orthe Schuylkill since Tom Moore looked upon it. 

To quote further:

 The mountain is green-grey, colder and greener towards the summit. All details of field and wood are dimly visible. Two islands nearer me are distinct against the hill, but their foliage seems black, and no details are visible in them. The sky is all clouded over. From the horizon to the zenith it is one veil of formless vapour. 

And:

 There is one streak of dead calm, which reflects the green mountain perfectly from edge to edge of it. There is another calm shaped like a great river, which is all green, touched with crimson. Besides these there are delicate half calms, just dulled over with faint breathings of the evening air; these, for the most part being violet (from the sky), except at a distance, where they take a deep crimson; and there is one piece of crimson calm near me set between a faint violet breeze and a calm of a different violet. There are one or two breezes sufficiently strong to cause ripple, and these rippled spaces take the dull grey slate of the upper sky. 

 Realise this picture as well as you may be able, and then put in the final touch. Between the dull calms and the glassy calms there are drawn thin threads of division burning with scarlet fire. 

 This fire is of course got from the lower sky. I know whence it comes, but how or why it lies in those thin scarlet threads there where it is most wanted, and not elsewhere, I cannot satisfactorily explain. 

Then there was a delightful and illuminating chapter called "A Stream atRest. " Hamerton, who is probably now very much out of fashion, taught methe necessity of beauty in life; and, as an accessory to Emerson, thephilosophy of enjoying the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who, I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; and I still think thatthere can be no better introduction to a consideration of the relationof art to nature than "A Painter's Camp. " It was "A Painter's Camp"which led me to "The Intellectual Life. " There is a particular passagein Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" that emphasized the needof beauty. 

 The cathedral is all poetry; I mean that every part of it affects our emotional nature either by its own grandeur or beauty, or by its allusion to histories of bright virtue or brave fortitude. And this emotional result is independent of belief in the historical truth of these great legends: it would be stronger, no doubt, if we believed them, but we are still capable of feeling their solemn poetry and large significance as we feel the poetry and significance of "Sir Galahad" or "The Idylls of the King. "

 Some persons are so constituted that it is necessary to their happiness to live near some noble work of art or nature. A mountain is satisfactory to them because it is great and ever new, presenting itself every hour under aspects so unforeseen that one can gaze at it for years with unflagging interest. To some minds, to mine amongst others, human life is scarcely supportable far from some stately and magnificent object, worthy of endless study and admiration. But what of life in the plains? Truly, most plains are dreary enough, but still they may have fine trees, or a cathedral. And in the cathedral, here, I find no despicable compensation for the loss of dear old Ben Cruacha. 

There are some humorous and perhaps even comic passages in "TheIntellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic, as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. Forinstance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty wasunfavourable to the intellectual life! It was enlightening to know thereason why a man should wear evening dress after six o'clock, and whythe sporting of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of theIntellectual! Besides, it affects the character!

And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain DistinguishedPainter was Half-educated, " was a useful antidote to youthfulself-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated in the chapters on"Women and Marriage, " "To a Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage, "but I thought the author very wise indeed, and found many other pageswhich were intensely stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if theylike; I owe a great deal to him; and, though I might be induced to throw"The Intellectual Life" to the Young Wolves of the Beginning of thisCentury, I shall always insist that "A Painter's Camp" ought to beincluded in every list of books. 

It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following of Christ, " and sheinterested me in Saint Teresa, that illustrious woman so well compoundedof mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, I could find no good"Life. " But Thomas à Kempis was a revelation! He fitted into nearlyevery crisis of the soul, but all his words are not for every-day life. He seems to demand too much of us poor folk of the world. Later, I cameto understand that the counsel of perfection which Christ gave to therich young man was not intended for the whole world, and many finepassages in À Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than my own. 

Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. Ifound him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with À Kempis. Hisphilosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of avery high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of myEnglish friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and hesaid, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or evenphilosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like theworks of Marcus Aurelius!"

It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off littleplots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the artof miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is avery fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a bookitself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has alwaysseemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived byRuskin if he had not heard well an echo of "The Following of Christ. "There was a time when the lovers of Ruskin who wanted to read "TheStones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged toform clubs, and to divide the expense, if they were of moderate means, in order to get what was good out of him. But somehow or other, probablybecause it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find acopy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found onemost unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discoveredthe copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just halfof my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. Imust have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for Ihad many things to buy with the other two and one half dollars!

Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to fill that "long-feltwant" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. Nodoubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he mighthave been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature andart; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a statelytread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside. 

By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once madeapple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the doubleand the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the realviolet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than abunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark greenribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had theeffect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclinedto admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that wasartificial, or distorted from beauty or simplicity. 

Circumstances have a great deal to do with our affection for books. Propinquity, they say, leads very frequently to marriage, and if a bookhappens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is agreat temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that Ithink that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book mustbe judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me toacquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art andlife. One would steel oneself against the fallacy that art, true art, might exist only for art's sake, when one had read "Sesame and Lilies"and "The Stones of Venice. " Those wise men who make literary"selections" for the young have done well to include in their volumesthat graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of theCathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to beingprose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will findsome epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines andpigments before he began to paint with the pen. 

Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life whichwe, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very littleby intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse forthose vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures whichshock the old who have forgotten what it is to be young. 

CHAPTER II

POETS AND POETRY

_France--Of Maurice de Guérin_

In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. Thesewere generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans duringthe Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter daysof the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much moreinterested in France than in any other part of the world. There wereletters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eugénie and hercoterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip aboutliterary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of VictorHugo, had been a constant subject of conversations. 

One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the MercantileLibrary--now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced insize, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as toits shelves--had an excellent collection of volumes in French. 

How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of thatlibrary! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of ErnestHello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guidedby the critics of the period. I found Amédée Achard as interesting asOctave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even"La Petite Fadette, " although the critics were constantly recommendingher for her "vitality. " I found Madame de Gérardin's "La Femme quiDéteste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have notseen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemedto me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interestand the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays byOctave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune HommePauvre, " which divided my admiration with the management of "AdrienneLecouvreur, " by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seiglière, " by JulesSandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique oftheir predecessors. 

At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte deChambord--Henry V. , as a few of us preferred to call him. And thisreminds me of my partisanship in things English--if I may turn for themoment from things French--and of a little incident not without humour. I was ardently devoted to the cause of the Stuarts, and was for a timeattached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in Englandinvariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, toindicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small andfrugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host--hewas an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant--insisted on wavinghis glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we weredrinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water--whoever he mightbe--and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutalHanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, mightbe still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of MaryStuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary ofScotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!

Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people werenot above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption, " who becomessuddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover issuddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhatcorrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially soadmirably correct. 

Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idledream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a manseriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest itexcited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more thanRenan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he hadattacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs deParis" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. Idid often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could haveacquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that ifhis wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate torecognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--stillit was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quotingthese trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question werementioned with rapt admiration. 

But to come to the poets!

It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuvethat I discovered Maurice de Guérin. He almost drove my beloved Keatsfrom my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Guérin on the groundof his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson onaccount of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, Ilooked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan'snegation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the CatholicChurch had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure tofind myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the OldTestament at times. 

Keats and Maurice de Guérin will be always associated in my mind. Idiscovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by aneminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worthconsidering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual valuewhatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up theintellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and naturalselection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was thenall the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Guérin. 

I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sisterEugénie. The "Journal" ought never to be allowed to go out of fashion, and probably it is only out of fashion in those circles which Mr. Mencken so scorns, that devote themselves to imitations of MarieBashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of thecalm life of Eugénie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order tounderstand the allusions, to plunge again into the journals, letters, and poems of Maurice de Guérin. Thus it happened that I had fallen upon"Le Centaure" first. It is very short, as everybody knows. It was to methe most appealing poem I had ever read. 

Keats's Greece seems somehow to be a Greece too full of modern colour, too unclassical. This was a mistake, of course, due to the fact that allmy Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; andall my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did notoccur to me then--at least I did not know it--that the great Greekstatues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues thatglowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure"seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated withhuman emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of theopening? Says the Centaur:

 I received my birth in the fastnesses of these mountains. As the stream of this valley of which the primitive drops run from the rocks which weep in a deep grotto, the first moment of my life fell among the darkness of a secluded place in which the silence was not troubled. When our mothers come near the time of their deliverance, they flee towards the caverns, and in the depth of the most remote, in the darkest of shadows, their children are born without a moan and the fruits of their womb are as silent as themselves. Their strong milk enables us to overcome without weakness or a doubtful struggle the first difficulties of life; however, we go out from our caves later than you from your cradles. It is understood among us that we must hide and envelope the first moments of existence as days filled by the gods. My growth followed its course almost among the shadows where I was born. The depth of my living place was so lost in the shadow of the mountain that I would not have known where the opening was if rushing sometimes into this opening the winds had not passed about me certain movements suddenly and refreshing breezes. Sometimes, too, my mother came back carrying the perfume of the valleys, or dripping with the waves of the water she frequented. Now these returns of hers gave me no knowledge of the valleys or the stream, but their suggestions disquieted my spirit, and I paced agitatedly in my shades. 

After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the writings of Eugénie deGuérin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sistertogether. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicateand sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Mauriceloved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I readthe Journals of the De Guérins, I had leisure. A period of ill healthstopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days thatcould easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early springdays, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with thesetwo who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they oughtto be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned forquoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showingthe impression that Maurice de Guérin made. It was a great surprise tofind part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of WaltWhitman, who very rarely quoted any verse. 

 The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair Unseen by others; to him maidenhair And waxen lilacs, and those birds that rise A-sudden from tall reeds at slight surprise, Brought charmèd thoughts; and in earth everywhere He, like sad Jacques, found a music rare As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise. A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he: He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed, Till earth and heaven met within his breast; As if Theocritus in Sicily Had come upon the Figure crucified And lost his gods in deep, Christ given rest. 

I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which Hamerton had corroborated, in Eugénie de Guérin's little sketches of outdoor scenery--sketcheswhich always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take anypleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to beable to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved byhuman figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Rothcame in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments withother clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who lovedletters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny. 

As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of theworld as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; butpictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eugénie de Guérin had aliving charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper onMaurice de Guérin, and I did not know that any appreciation of hissister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or twowritten by some third-rate person who objected to her piety assentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That herpiety should be sentimental, if Eugénie's sentiment can be characterizedby that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was evident thatany one who read French literature at all must be aware that there werehundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the average"Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend. 

The beloved home of Eugénie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was evenmore circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugénie, beingless "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a moresensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes tosentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades underthe shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism, " is as sentimental as the mostsentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscapecharm of Eugénie de Guérin, and yet the picture in this case is not alandscape, but the interior of a room:

 I was admiring just now a little landscape, presented by my room, as it was being illuminated with the rising sun. How pretty it was! Never did I see a more beautiful effect of light on the paper, thrown through painted trees. It was diaphanous, transparent. It was almost wasted on my eyes; it ought to have been seen by a painter. And yet does not God create the beautiful for everybody? All our birds were singing this morning while I was at my prayers. This accompaniment pleases me, though it distracts me a little. I stop to listen; then I begin again, thinking that the birds and I are alike singing a hymn to God, and that, perhaps, those little creatures sing better than I. But the charm of prayer, the charm of communion with God, they cannot enjoy that; one must have a soul to feel it. This happiness that the birds have not is mine. It is sorrow. How little time is needed for that. The joy comes from the sun, the mild air, the song of birds, all delights to me; as well as from a letter of Mimi's (who is now at Gaillac), in which she tells me of Madame Vialar, who has seen thee, and of other cheerful things. 

And again:

 However, I had a delightful waking this morning. As I was opening my eyes a lovely moon faced my window, and shone into my bed, so brightly that at first I thought it was a lamp suspended to my shutter. It was very sweet and pretty to look at this white light, and so I contemplated, admired, watched it till it hid itself behind the shutter to peep out again, and then conceal itself like a child playing at hide-and-seek. 

Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite beauties in alittle space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take shortoutlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him inthis; but Eugénie de Guérin exemplifies its value much more than anyother modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to findjoy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losingthis faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried torecover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violentamusements. 

The devotion of Eugénie de Guérin to her brother resembles that ofMadame de Sévigné for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was GeorgeSand who discovered the genius of that brother, though hercharacterization of the qualities of his genius did not please theChristian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix DeGuérin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the readingof Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now probablyforgotten, and to go back to Keats. 

After Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greekthan I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guérin, and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions oflife; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!

My dear friend, Edward Roth--whom James Huneker celebrates in his"Steeplejack"--named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser istoo hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full ofa sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd forthe French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists. When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It wasnot necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word. The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verballaboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him tostudy carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or CoventryPatmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannothave suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erectedafter his best verse had been written. 

Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in hisreligious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director, Père de Lamennais--the "M. Féli" of the little paradise of la Chénie. Tothe delight of some of the more independent and emancipated of theliterary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice wasbecoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried tomake for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almostequally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain, although it did notchange her love or make a rift in her belief in him. 

De Guérin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singingpoets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that thegreat Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual. Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to aconversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimatetalk. " Eugénie complains that "it sings too much and does not talkenough. " However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to whichMatthew Arnold's seems almost "common, " is that preceding Trébutien's"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guérin. " It would be follyfor me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with theatmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the firstdelight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters ofEugénie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our timefeel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the mostbeautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arisefrom a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to readthis page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not soimitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers inthe gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre. Tennyson, like De Guérin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirersof Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered thesecret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. BothMaurice de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics incommon, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical, the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan saidhis despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture isthis!--Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame de Sévigné, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are allrelated. 

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that wasnot related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is truethat in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can onlytake much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authorswho alone make life both cheerful and endurable. 

The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "thedead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, whilethey may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favouriteprocess of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Rothhonestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallenin order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of thisteaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, andobstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the RomanEmpire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, andto be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had livedand died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr. Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to makethe Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that theRoman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admittedwere full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in theglow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!

The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hardwork, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guérin's "Centaure, " to readjoyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. Whilebrowsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels ofTourguéneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I foundTheocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think hasnow become the beneficent "Everyman's Library. " I revelled! The Mimes ofHerondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in thesepoems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among thehard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman fromOxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that, when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which hehad composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, inmerciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilianpoets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, andpartly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund ClarenceStedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":

 Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds, O Galatea, swan-nymph of the sea! Vain is my longing, worthless are my words; Why do you come in night's sweet dreams to me, And when I wake, swift leave me, as in fear The lambkin hastens when a wolf is near?

 Why did my mother on a dark-bright day Bring you, for hyacinths, a-near my cave? I was the guide, and through the tangled way I thoughtless led you; I am now your slave. Peace left my soul when you knocked at my heart-- Come, Galatea, never to depart!

 Though I am dark and ugly to the sight-- A Cyclops I, and stronger there are few-- Of you I dream through all the quick-paced night, And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you, And four young bears: O rise from grots below, Soft love and peace with me forever know!

 Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled, Swam in the sea and saw you singing there: I gave you lilies and your grotto filled With the sweet odours of all flowers rare; I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand, And reddest poppies from my richest land. 

 Oh, brave the restless billows of your world: They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove, And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove In vine-crowned Ætna, of pure-running rills! O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills!

 Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds, O Galatea, listen to my prayer: Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds; Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep, For you alone can bring her from the deep. 

 And Galatea, in her cool, green waves, Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells, And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves And to the wind his love-lorn story tells: For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long Forget, as poets do, his pain in song. 

No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted inEnglish prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusanin life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs andswains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in thisdelicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which adegenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as anextenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protestedagainst them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call ofthe cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not allsilent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and theSicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes. 

But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Guérin lead us!Here is another link--José de Herédia, and his jewelled and chiselledsonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combinesthe essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn. "

 _Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre même s'use. Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_

 _Et seul le dur métal que l'amour fit docile Garde encore en sa fleur, aux médailles d'argent, L'immortelle beauté des vierges de Sicile. "_

A translation of which reads:

 Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays; A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades; But the hard metal guards through all the days, Silver grown docile unto love's own use, The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids. 

I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had heknown Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares hisrural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusanpoets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than ofVirgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in hissublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of theheart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one readsTheocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is tooparaphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends_enragé_ of the "Classics, " honestly despise me for making thisconfession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, withouteven using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begina course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushedthyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dottedprairie. 

_Dante_

A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He mayfind them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader isdead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famoustournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman heonce seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between twoconflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country, " I am told. "A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art ofreading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more. " Onthe other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolousbooks which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in thewindows of Mr. Child's restaurants. "

Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, thewinter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's"Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially incountry places, does not function violently in the winter time. Manyjourneys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West havetaught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever. Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probablylearning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top ofthis mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess goodbooks, and who return each year to the loves of their youth. 

The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieriproves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are moretalked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when theenthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached itsheight, there were found many people in our country who were quitecapable of asking why Dante should be read. 

Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for, perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimedtranslations of the "Divine Comedy, " my love for Dante has been a slowgrowth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. Thereare few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations ofthe educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of awall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante inorder to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence whichone never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is notnecessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritualenlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures ofthe erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his threevaluable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notesoccasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, whichcontains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation intoEnglish on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured ofLongfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rimetranslations must be one half, at least, the author and the other halfthe translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic_tours de force_. 

In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy, "

 _Nessun maggior dolors, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria;_

Gollancz says:

 Although these words are translated literally from Boëthius, and although we know that Dante had made a special study of Boëthius, yet we cannot well identify the _dottore_ with this philosopher: for how can we be expected to assume that Francesca was acquainted with these two facts? The reference is probably to Virgil, and to his position in Limbo. 

Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two years after Virgil's deathand drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by nomeans certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon thegreen enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which wasthe vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosensouls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the BeatificVision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinismin Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found partsof Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked onas a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than anysermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the ChurchTriumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy thatall children unbaptized by material water are doomed:

 _Dunque, senza merce di lor costume, locati son per gradi differenti, sol differendo nel primiero acume. _

 _Bastava si nei secoli recenti con l'innocenza, per aver salute, solamente la fede dei parenti;_

 _poiche le prime etadi fur compiute, convenne ai maschi all' innocenti penne, per circoncidere, acquistar virtute. _

 _Ma poichee il tempo della grazia venne, senza battesmo perfetto di Cristo, tale innocenza laggiu si ritenne. _

And then remembering the innocence of the little children Dante turns tothat face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary theMother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strictCalvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew theirOld Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among themerciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, andof the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, orsought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness inthis world. 

And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant, among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved andopens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of theVoltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in Hell!And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that thisEmperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by theway, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time, is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents ofConstantine's donation were mediæval forgeries. Dante believed, however, that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, beingof the spirit, could not accept temporal power. This he asserts in his"De Monarchia, " which was for a time on the "Index. " Times have changed, and "De Monarchia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are no longer in the"Index, " though Balzac and Dumas, in French, are. But many of theFaithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as inthe case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science, " this the method of theSacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book, suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! Somay "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as comingunder the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?

Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nordoes it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. Thereis in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the poet's faith--

 _Così spirò di quell' amore acceso; indi soggiunse: "Assai bene è trascorsa d'esta moneta già la lega e il peso; ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa. " ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda, che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa. "_

 _Appresso usci della luce profonda, che li splendeva; "Questa cara gioia, sopra la quale ogni virtù si fonda, onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia dello Spirito Santo, ch' è diffusa in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia, _

 _È sillogismo, che la mia ha conchiusa acutamente si, che in verso d' ella ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa. "_

If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to other books, so much thebetter. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best inmodern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies addedthe Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--themusical comparison fails. "If thou should'st never see my face again, pray for my soul, " is King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of PopeGregory that saved Trajan. 

When we come to the "Purgatorio, " like the "Paradiso" too neglected, wefind much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. Forinstance, there is the case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti. Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his address is hardly tactful. He is evidently surprised to find that Nino is not in Hell, When he came near to me I said to him; gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well that I have seen thee here and not in Hell. 

Nino begs that his innocent daughter, Giovanna, may be asked by Dante, on his return to earth, to pray for him. He is not pleased that hiswidow should desire to marry

 the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield. 

He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as she has discarded her"white wimples, " which, if she marries this inferior person, she maylong for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soulin Purgatory, that through her one may mightily well

 know how short a time love may last in woman, if the eye and the touch do not keep it alive. 

One must admit that there is an element of humour--not for thevictim--in the "Inferno, " when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. Into Hellthree and a half years before he died! Nicholas III. , whom Dante thoughtguilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and hesays, _E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta la riverenza delle somme chiavi, che tu tenesti nella vita lieta l' userei parole ancor più gravi--_

But for consolation, there is no great poem so good as the "Paradiso. "

_English and American Verse_

Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled the youths of hisgeneration were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken. " Itis difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no greatreigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who arehailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whateverthe old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interestin poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and hisportrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott, "with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplaceinto something very beautiful, was new. 

We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennysonwhile we were not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures whichhe labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival. " Theywere too much like what the English people at that time insisted thatthe Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in oureyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer. " But the lyricism ofTennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It isthe desire for "independence, " the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate andscientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent aMovement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. Theresult of the education given me by books was to convince me that theman of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literaryexpression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old isof all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new becausethey are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean, let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir ArthurQuiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading. " He is writing of the Bible, which is never old:

 I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well, and what then? He will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul--great Saul--by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:

 "All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. "

 Or consider--to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous procession--consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: how first she is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how, loving him, she saves his life, letting him down from the window and dressing up an image on the bed in his place; how, later, she is handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her back, and she goes:

 "And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned. "

 Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone to weep in his bed:

 "And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal, Saul's daughter"--

 Mark the three words--

 "Michal, Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. "

Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidlybecoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs. Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what theymight conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with theemotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the daybefore yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated thisinto the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carvedjewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and chokedthe reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any"newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer, " could he have made it moresplendid and appealing?

The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in lifeitself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossettiwere new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the firstrequisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beautyis beyond the touch of time. The women in François Villon's "Ballade ofDead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. Thisbeauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in _vers libre_;its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that itwas of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give itthat essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, andperhaps eternal. 

Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other wayis like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on adamp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask howsinging effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of thesincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions, and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, toproduce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to theintolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young inage, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audaciousdiscoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce deLeón; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violentlyattacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerousrevolutionists. 

The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have ahigh place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect earfor the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to theuse of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, butthey are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, shehas the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various andeven splendid. But there are others!

It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to readCoventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House"which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as theproverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "TheUnknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys, " and then his "Night andSleep, " one of the most musical poems in our language. 

 How strange at night the bay Of dogs, how wild the note Of cocks that scream for day, In homesteads far remote; How strange and wild to hear The old and crumbling tower, Amid the darkness, suddenly Take tongue and speak the hour!

Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime, it is plain--as the form of poetry appeals to the ear--that the rime isa gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of eachstanza. The real musical charm of the poem--only one stanza, of four, is given here--lies in the management of the rhythm. 

 We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the common eight-syllable quatrain, says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law, "

 a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity of movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable verse as acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being catalectic on at least one syllable, implying a final pause of corresponding duration. 

Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" ismerely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which wouldbe as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accentthrough this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are ofrhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use ofsibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merelyaccessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in

 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. 

There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired ofacademic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became theslave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any realsuccess in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to thehearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyricalpoets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms. 

The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, andeven in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and SarahBernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, Itried to get to the root of the matter by reading ThomasCampion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs, masks, etc. , edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. Infact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his useof what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle'sTeutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "GoodGray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked onrhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, ahurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on theaction of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement ofthe thought. 

But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail toperceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly thatpoetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity thatsome of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from theoutworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advancedCubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualizationcompensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It isunfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom haveneither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, norher naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means thethrowing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is foundedon carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents. 

It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of EnglishVerse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By thetime he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse atall! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and theodes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of EnglishPoesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ hasfreedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudiedcharm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings, without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in theopera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfectexpression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of theintangible "something, " expressed artistically, why not take Benet's"Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it isnot _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist. 

Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in versewhich include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as animitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to havebeen established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whoseindecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practicalrepudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--thatis, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New Yorkof his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attackedestablished religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_on that eminently important body. 

The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the timethat I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted thecurious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I acceptedthe musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know thatWagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that"Lohengrin, " for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were notdetached and made into arias. What could be expected of young personsbrought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?

And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that WaltWhitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness hadbeen deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clotheideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of theyoung at that time thought that he had as much right to do this asBrowning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern usmuch. There was always a little coterie of students at the University ofPennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influenceof Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliantMexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; DanielDawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was adevout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions, carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said, Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitatehim. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was noteasy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from thedictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enrapturedwith Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such apoor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for somenoble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams orpassing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than theexistence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of thegargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and veryimproper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimescarved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals. We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance. There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, thoughthey might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, therewas no point whatever in putting them into print. But the greatpassages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are afew--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed. 

Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one couldmeet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his hauntsin Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for usrepresent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and thePreraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite anotherthing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was amarked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites. 

Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man hada depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse afterverse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that abreath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept acrossthe conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. Iwonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, orWalter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, oreven Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard thechoruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? Andthere was William Morris and "The Earthly Paradise!"

The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of"new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginningto revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the dailylives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that theOld hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they reallywant! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And theyoung woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette inprivate now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at acigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no moreadvanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any moreastonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discoveredSwinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness oftheir aftermath, the æsthetic poets, really got more colour andamazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youthof to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blasé and cynicaland bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were toomany amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now. 

Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lightsand his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. InEngland he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent thanWalt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for theEnglish--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England theywanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them. 

I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of RobertUnderwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" cannever be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cultfor the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasingamount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, andcloser knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or soobviously accented as the so-called "regular verse. " Richard Aldington's"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also anImagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is nocadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyfultrifle!

 There was nothing to see, Nothing to do, Nothing to play with, Except that in an empty room upstairs There was a large tin box Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta, Of the Declaration of Independence, And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada; There were also several packets of stamps, Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots, Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak, Indians and Men-of-war From the United States, And the green and red portraits Of King Francobollo Of Italy. 

 I don't believe in God I do believe in avenging gods Who plague us for sins we never sinned But who avenge us. That's why I'll never have a child, Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours, Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall. 

Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only sometimes musical, but hehammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans, Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjoaccompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all theNew. 

When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefullyexamined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue andexplanations, one turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la Mare. Come, now! Listen to this:

 When slim Sophia mounts her horse And paces down the avenue, It seems an inward melody She paces to. 

 Each narrow hoof is lifted high Beneath the dark enclustering pines, A silver ray within his bit And bridle shines. 

 His eye burns deep, his tail is arched, And streams upon the shadowy air, The daylight sleeks his jetty flanks, His mistress' hair. 

 Her habit flows in darkness down, Upon the stirrup rests her foot, Her brow is lifted, as if earth She heeded not. 

 'Tis silent in the avenue, The sombre pines are mute of song, The blue is dark, there moves no breeze The boughs among. 

 When slim Sophia mounts her horse And paces down the avenue, It seems an inward melody She paces to. 

It is difficult for the simple minded to understand why Walter de laMare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed asan Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always tosay exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and hiscadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value ofmodern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write aboutan old-fashioned aëroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it thecentre of something interesting. 

The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clearand never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is thevery essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for theprinciple of liberty. But why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical, if it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in terms that appealto the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessaryto fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of strawin order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if thepoet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a goodexample of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because itis lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does notignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern theexpression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" iscertainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne singsof the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!

José de Herédia, in "Les Trophées, " is both an Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without hercontortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of theprofessional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small andangry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality. There are others, however, who may not be imitators of Robert Frost, butwho seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl, " which is looked on to-day asan example of Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. Eliot's"Cousin Nancy":

 Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them, Rode across the hills and broke them-- The barren New England hills-- Riding to hounds Over the cow-pasture. 

 Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked And danced all the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it, But they knew that it was modern. 

 Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law. 

The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of charactermight be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency toornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all, when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, theSymbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours ofFrancis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouseunprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or aseries of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heavenof Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven, " byFrancis Thompson, to Richard Aldington. 

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, andit has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the criticis to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet inrelation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how Icould condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning andSwinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern Englishpoets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring. "And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demodé_because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediævalknights cut out of pasteboard. 

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" thisstatement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--bymodern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear thetest of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are asdifferent as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are fromthose in Shakespeare's "Hamlet. " But I may enjoy the smoothness of the"Idylls of the King, " their bursts of exquisite lyricism, theircadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read SirThomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning andSwinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and AlfredKreymborg and others new--_chacun à son goût_--I feel that by comparisonwith Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor becausethey seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians. 

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape theshadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knewneither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection. Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful, sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek thanShakespeare, in "Julius Cæsar, " could be a real Roman. Nor couldTennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites bereally out of their time, for they could not understand the essentiallyreligious qualities of the times into which they tried to projectthemselves. 

If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritushe imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies ofthe originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again frompainting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics ofthe future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will givethem their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read theItalian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in hispoems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all hisefforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicismwhich made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the CatholicChurch in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganismstruggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted intoChristianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form. 

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on astatuette of Leda and the Swan or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as ashower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothingblasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth ofa God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfullybeautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meaningsimpossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he isunsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret thepast, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart andwrite, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels thatvery often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound ofthe pulsations of the hearts of others. 

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimesshocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did notbelieve that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. Accordingto a common belief, the two could not exist together among the convertedJews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism andChristianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of themanifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate anillusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry. 

Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I lovein spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to beunited with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope. They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without thatecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all themystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory. 

Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, butin different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and thesearch, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had thesplendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almostfierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse ofSaint John and the poems of Saint Teresa and of Saint John of the Cross, which we find in Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern poetspale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as acorpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven, " with its gloriouscolour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be apale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson. 

To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, thisseems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianitydid not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible thatthe prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack ofgaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion whenPan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greekswere gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophersrepresent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of theirlives. 

The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens fromdespondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Romecame to believe so little in life that only the proletariat hadchildren, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting anygod that pleased them did not add to the joy of life. The poet, then, who misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who does not desire to beunited to an absolute Perfection, who is sad by profession, cannot be, according to my canons, a true poet. I speak, not as a critic, but as aman who loves only the poetry that appeals to him. 

CHAPTER III

CERTAIN NOVELISTS

My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens was an evolution rather than adiscovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby, " thebook became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimesfelt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not knowhim!

Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and thatchuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad, " where the unhappy Italian guideintroduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joysindeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind ofhumour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities ofArtemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs. Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages, my pleasure in theworks of Mark Twain faded more and more as I came to the age of reason, which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was hard to laugh at Mark after atime. Compared to him, the "Pickwick Papers" had an infinite variety. There were other things in Dickens which were finer than anything in"Pickwick, " but the humour of Pickwick had a softness about it, a humaninterest, a lack of coarseness, which placed it immeasurably above thatof Mark Twain. 

The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities. " And thegreatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc. " But Dickensredeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper anddeeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all oddsapparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and Iknow persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they couldin my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as amasterpiece. 

It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests hisnarrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack ofknowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for anappearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual. That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kindfriend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many otherauthors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easilyunderstood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain. 

Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very differentcauses. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of anunderstanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of aspirituality without which no great work can be effective. It wasbecause Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of hisstudy of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from thepoint of view of style, except "Barnaby Rudge, " that he ever wrote, probably due to the fact that, treading as he did on ground that was newto him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel isnevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with aFrance that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as themauve tints through which certain artists see their figures andlandscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but alack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of agreat power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without thattraining which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sourcesof French history. 

In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the power to reach thesources; it was an inability to understand the character of the womanwhom he reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and an invincibleignorance of the character of her time. Mark Twain was modern; butmodern in the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry Finn" and theother young Americans--whom our youth are expected to like, if not toimitate--are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those libraries whorecommend typical books to eager juvenile readers. But let that pass forthe moment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any man or woman ofrefinement who will hold a brief in defense of the vulgarity of "AConnecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. "

It may be said that the average reader of Mark Twain's books--that is, the average American reader--for Mark Twain is read the worldover--cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The average Americanreads Mark Twain only to be amused, or to recall the adventures of atime not far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, whether mycompatriots are in the habit of looking into books for a philosophy ornot, or of considering the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, itdoes not follow that it is to their credit if they neglect an analysiswhich cultivated readers in other countries seldom omit. 

If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaietywhich Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; butas this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions, I may be frank in the full understanding that the average Americanreader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he hasbecome an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come atime when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on allself-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof ofculture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers'sstatuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do notthink that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or ofRigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been morepessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words ofAutolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"

"You who admire Don Quixote, " said an infuriated Mark Twainite, "shouldnot talk of coarseness. There are pages in that romance of Cervanteswhich I would not allow my son or daughter to read. "

One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side toshow what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantesis, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were nothis. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not meaninnocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admitthat the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was noconspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness, however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. NeitherCervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent. 

To them, even the ordinary things of life have a certain sacerdotalquality; but Mark Twain abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhorsa vacuum. To say that he has affected the American spirit or theAmerican heart would be to go too far--for Americans are irreverent onlyon the surface. It seems to me that they are the most reverent people inthe world toward those essential qualities which make up the spiritualparts of life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is just at presentthe one author to whom all Europe and all outlanders point as the greattypical American writer!

That a delightful kind of American humour may exist withoutexaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, manyjoyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, thatare joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charmand innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of theAmerican youth, none so far has equalled Booth Tarkington's "Penrod, "or, what is better, "Seventeen. "

Now nobody has yet done anything so delightful, so mirth provoking, sopathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen. " In my youth I was deprived of theknowledge of this book, for when I swam into the tide of literature, Booth Tarkington was in that world from which Wordsworth's boy came, bringing rainbows, which moved to all the music of the spheres. It wasduring the late war that "Seventeen" was cast on the coasts of Denmark, at a time when American books scarcely reached those coasts at all. St. Julian, the patron of merry travellers, must have guided it through themaze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrivedjust when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was theonly real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine asthe sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed fromthe earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not beforgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived. 

Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had inthe past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one ofthe most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" wasone of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a betternovel of American life than "The Turmoil, " unless it is Judge Grant's"Unleavened Bread. "

But the best novels of American life seem to be written in order to beforgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except theprofessional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or thatsuccession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled aspictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses hertalent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longermemories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of usremember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phœbe Junior"--finds a slowlydecreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten, "Les Rois en Exilé" and "Jack" are still parts of current Frenchliterature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past asto be unread. 

To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perenniallybloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" seriesis found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollobooks to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracywhich the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes adapted tothe subway is supposed to indicate, is a real menace when one discoversthat "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!

We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity, but it is my belief thatSodom and Gomorrah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of thattime had made it possible to keep books like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" ingeneral circulation!

It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as long as English men andwomen of the upper and middle classes continued to exist, he might go onwriting novels with ever-increasing zest. And the same thing might besaid of Booth Tarkington in relation to his unique chronicles ofyouth--that is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal Soul. Histypes are American, but there are Americas and Americas. Usage permitsus to use a term for our part of the continent to which our Canadian andSouth and Central Americans and Mexicans might reasonably object; butwhile the young Americans of Booth Tarkington are typically American, they personally could belong only to the Middle West. The hero of"Seventeen" would not be the same boy if he had been born inPhiladelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances would have made himdifferent. The consciousness of class distinction would have made himold before his time; and though he might be just as amusing--he wouldnot have been amusing quite in the same way. 

And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. Tarkington's imaginativesynthesis. He is individual and of his own soil; he knows very well thatit is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to invent; he has only toperceive with those rare gifts of perception which he possesses. It allseems so easy until you try to do it yourself!

The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageantof the "Table Round, " is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; butno child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child hassuffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainablehardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something orother prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parentsare bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibresof his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrodhas gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be sounreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real asthose parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens ispathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybodyadmits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully triesto be pathetic. 

One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful situations whichseem to ripple from the pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best beingthe scene between the hero and his mother when that _esprit terrible_, his sister, seems to stand between him and the lady of his thoughts. And"Penrod" is full of them. The description of that young gallant'sentrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's best. Penrod is expected tofind, according to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for thecotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young lady unengaged, whowas Miss Rennsdale, aged eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes hiscall. 

 A decorous maid conducted the long-belated applicant to her where she sat upon a sofa beside a nursery governess. The decorous maid announced him composedly as he made his entrance. 

 "Mr. Penrod Schofield!"

 Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs. 

 "Oh!" she wailed. "I just knew it would be him!"

 The decorous maid's composure vanished at once--likewise her decorum. She clapped her hand over her mouth and fled, uttering sounds. The governess, however, set herself to comfort her heartbroken charge, and presently succeeded in restoring Miss Rennsdale to a semblance of that poise with which a lady receives callers and accepts invitations to dance cotillons. But she continued to sob at intervals. 

 Feeling himself at perhaps a disadvantage, Penrod made offer of his hand for the morrow with a little embarrassment. Following the form prescribed by Professor Bartet, he advanced several paces toward the stricken lady and bowed formally. 

 "I hope, " he said by rote, "you're well, and your parents also in good health. May I have the pleasure of dancing the cotillon as your partner t'-morrow afternoon?"

 The wet eyes of Miss Rennsdale searched his countenance without pleasure, and a shudder wrung her small shoulders; but the governess whispered to her instructively, and she made a great effort. 

 "I thu-thank you fu-for your polite invu-invu-invutation; and I ac----" Thus far she progressed when emotion overcame her again. She beat frantically upon the sofa with fists and heels. "Oh, I did want it to be Georgie Bassett!"

 "No, no, no!" said the governess, and whispered urgently, whereupon Miss Rennsdale was able to complete her acceptance. 

 "And I ac-accept wu-with pu-pleasure!" she moaned, and immediately, uttering a loud yell, flung herself face downward upon the sofa, clutching her governess convulsively. 

 Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again. 

 "I thank you for your polite acceptance, " he murmured hurriedly; "and I trust--I trust--I forget. Oh, yes--I trust we shall have a most enjoyable occasion. Pray present my compliments to your parents; and I must now wish you a very good afternoon. "

 Concluding these courtly demonstrations with another bow he withdrew in fair order, though thrown into partial confusion in the hall by a final wail from his crushed hostess:

 "Oh! Why couldn't it be anybody but him!"

Dickens would not have done the scene quite this way; he could not haveso conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkingtongets it just right. He has created boy characters which will livebecause they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after MarkTwain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, " is Dickens's "Child'sHistory of England. " The two books have various gross faults in commonand these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chestertonsays that one of Dickens's is due to

 the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances to which it was applied. It is not that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved; it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a life-boat to a house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all. 

It seems to me that if all the works of Dickens were lost we might dovery well with the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby. " To these, one is tempted to add "Our Mutual Friend. "

When I was young enough to assist at meetings of Literary Societies, where papers on Dickens were read, I was invariably informed that"Charles Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman. " There was noreason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of thepapers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, everdefined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers thatfor a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by thefact that he owned land, had not even a remote connection with "trade"or that he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford or Cambridge, themore modern definition would have been very different from what theEnglish of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, whena levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class inEngland, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meantby this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could defineexactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet inPennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled bythrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes himoften to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England withoutanalyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixotewas a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And, if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Wellergentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application ofCardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and SamWeller. Why not?

There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes, which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticismsof the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out, though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lowerclasses of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because theyare satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Wellerrepresents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When oneexamines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw alady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in theEnglish sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that allconventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to bea cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. DoctorJohnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to sayit, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions as Dickens was. 

Dickens had the art of making insupportable bores most interesting. Thiswas an art in which the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; butDickens's methods compared to hers are like those of a scene painterwhen compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times whenDickens is consciously "common, " and then he is almost unbearable; butthis objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers. " This book isinartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do notgrow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They arespontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likesto do--and all the world loves a lover who loves his work. 

There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate theromantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby. " There are no really romanticqualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero, no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloomsuddenly as the branch in "Tannhäuser" bloomed. Even Dickens can work nomiracle there. 

It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of thosegentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as hispredecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "TristramShandy, " a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones, " verytiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases ofeighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry. " I wasbrought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverenceand permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of CorinthianBob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulousanalysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblancebetween the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and theadventures of the peerless Pickwick. 

If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, heought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The PoorBoy; or, The Betrayed Baffled, " "The Fair Lilias, " and others toonumerous to mention. 

The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows older, perhaps becomes astudent of Dickens, and is surprised to find that the development ofDickens is much more marked and easily noted than the development ofThackeray. In fact, Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier, sprang into the public light fully equipped and fully armed. Both thesemen had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportionbefore they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art andlife and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was onlybegun with "Pickwick, " which knew neither method nor proportion; and hewho reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new andgood perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically, it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks thatflavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get suchthorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby. " In it Dickenssacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in itthat gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. And Mrs. Vincent Crummlesor of 'Tilda Price. 

Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography, " which ought to be a textbookin all those practical classes of literature that work to turn outself-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of anovel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot inthe works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt tosummarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood. "

Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin toread him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who readsan American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect, and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether onethinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel ofMrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. BoothTarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons whofind leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, therewas a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This isalmost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do notread Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in thewinter, or "Cranford, " or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes thebad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if Ihad had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitteda daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weeklychapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!

George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. Nowell-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries ofMrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. Theheroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, butshe is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificialityof Kingsley's "Hypatia, " which I read at almost the same time, made meadmire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth couldever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or CatherineSeton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring withBlackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholasticphilosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consommé_ of St. Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemedtruer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as_papier-maché_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of thetime. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history, but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not andas "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's readingof Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, ofcourse. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and thescene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel, give me "Middlemarch. " Few persons read it now, and probably fewer willread it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the geniusof a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that italmost defeated the end for which she worked. 

CHAPTER IV

LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS

Some of us have acquired a state of mind which helps us to believe thatwhenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. Ina word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. Itis true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is notvery narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of themost pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all hislife is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, orto preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommendunreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature haveundertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schoolsof critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; andthe "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval andcondemnation. That lets me out, I feel. 

One of my most cherished books is the "Letters to People in the World, "by Saint Francis de Sales. I have known people who have declared that itis entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is abook of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of SaintFrancis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or therelations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source ofpleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which thischarming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal château, henever allowed the peasants on the domain to perform their usual duty, which was to stay up all night and beat the waters of the ponds, orperhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and hisfriends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and couldnot see that it represented a social point of view, which showed thatthe Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France backto him; he could not see the old château and the water in the moonlight, or conceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved of their duty. Ican read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, asI read the "Letters" of Madame de Sévigné or the "Memoirs" of the Ducde Saint Simon. 

I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an Englishtranslation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--theinteriors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon. Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but Ithink it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order tobecome an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphicauthor. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert withoutthe "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a pictureof Mademoiselle de la Vallière looking hopelessly out of the window ofher little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would thechapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly, holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after LouisXIV. Had become devout, in order that he might see them?

But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simonand Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modernand ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has hispet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age whogives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and"Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believethat? He dislikes Miss Austen's novels and sneers at Miss Farrar's"Marriage. " He has never been able to read Miss Edgeworth's book; and heconsiders Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard toexist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in anumber of the _Atlantic Monthly_ not so long ago there is a vivid, pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portionof the Diurnal of Mrs Eliz^th Pepys" by E. Barrington. 

If anybody asks me why I like Pepys, I do not feel obliged to reply. Imight incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a directquestion about books, one does incriminate oneself. 

However, to return to what I was saying--while I love the "Memoirs ofCardinal de Retz, " I adore--to be a little extravagant--the "Letters ofSaint Vincent de Paul. " The man that does not know the real story of thelife of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of thebrotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman reallyfought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only realreformer in the France of his time. 

Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor ofCardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On thecontrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, theArchbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, theworldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a goodpeaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. Heearned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de Sévigné, for whichany discerning man might have been willing to spend half a lifetime. Buteven that is beside the point. He lives for me because he gives apicture of the French ruling classes of his time which is shamelesslytrue. No living man to-day in political office, although he might be asgreat an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so interestinglyshameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if you read himin French, you discover that he knew how to make literature. 

The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became sopenitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should nothave been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations. But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period ofthe founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mereliterature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni, General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the HolyGhost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of theOratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with thereputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one. 

 Give me leave, madame [Cardinal de Retz says] to reflect a little here upon the nature of the mind of man. I believe that there was not in the world a man of an uprighter heart than my father, and I may say that he was stampt in the very mold of virtue. Yet my duels and love-intrigues did not hinder the good man from doing all he could to tye to the Church, the soul in the world perhaps the least ecclesiastical. His predilection for his eldest son, and the view of the archbishoprick of Paris for me, were the true causes of his acting thus; though he neither believed it, nor felt it. I dare say that he thought, nay would have sworn, that he was led in all this by no other motive than the spiritual good of my soul, and the fear of the danger to which it might be exposed in another profession. So true it is that nothing is more subject to delusion than piety. All manner of errors creep and hide themselves under that vail. Piety takes for sacred all her imaginations, of what sort soever; but the best intention in the world is not enough to keep it in that respect free from irregularity. In fine, after all that I have related I remained a churchman; but certainly I had not long continued so, if an accident had not happened which I am now to acquaint you with. 

This is not at all what is called "edifying, " but, from the moral pointof view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against inthe Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation toan established church was just as common in contemporary England, where"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of theclergymen highly placed were neither so intellectual nor so romantic. 

It must be admitted that Cardinal de Retz, like a later French prelate, Talleyrand, made no pretense of being fitted for the Church. Talleyrand's only qualification was that he was lame; and, as a youngerson, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all hisfaults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did hisbest to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel withBassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois deVincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of theAttorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding myduel. " His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it theutmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one'sdestiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal. "

The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "TheThree Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are lessdiffuse, and, not writing _feuilletons_, are not forced to be diffuse. The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century canhardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could godirectly to the sources of his romances. 

Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" ofMadame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. Therewere legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew moreabout this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was throughcertain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" thatI turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as couldbe found. That autobiography is one of the gems of American history, though it does not reveal the whole man. If he had been as frank asCardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It hasnever been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understoodthat thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin issufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that itshould be read just after one has finished for the second or third timethe memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaimthe charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known ayoung woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as apendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett'stranslation of the "Republic of Plato. " She may safely be left to herfate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course ofreading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommendthem to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock theProhibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _à lamode de_ Madame de Staël. 

For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive, but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time beforeand during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this, is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the BestOne Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-fivebooks. 

In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his countryefficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country toFrance and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the Frenchpeople not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in hismemoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has thefaults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with avenom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation ofcontradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of thearistocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris. 

His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation ofthe frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find inthat class of systematic _roués_" who were astonished at the virtue ofthe ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt inthat town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I havenot yet found them. 

In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certaingreat persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre assoon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrandand Philippe Égalité were the most fascinating characters of the FrenchRevolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy who waslistening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to exclaimsuddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about Judas!"

To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quotea short passage from Boswell's "Johnson. " "To discover such weakness, "said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography ofSir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone. " "Nay, " said thepious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of humannature. "

This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris forenlightening us as to the paternity of a son of Madame de Flahaut. Morris, for a time that condoned the amourettes of Benjamin Franklin, was virtuous. Madame de Flahaut, afterward Madame de Souza, gave Morrisa hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "Imay, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is thefather of her child, and it would be unjust. " In this noble moment Mr. Morris chivalrously forgets the existence of the Count de Flahaut!

In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic verses to Madame deFlahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelityof the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; DeLauney's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murderedmen lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is notdisturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock, to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clockthe Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in thebelief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day, he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He iscorroborated in his opinion that Madame de Beauharnais is a poetess by

 a very narrow escape from some rancid butter of which the cook had been very liberal. 

But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth beneath. It seems tome that there is no more interesting and useful book on the FrenchRevolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near DeTocqueville's "Ancient Régime" and "Democracy in America. "

On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the general opinion that Mr. Jefferson was considered a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would bechosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of theHouse of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic, just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all thecold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles ofgovernment which he had imbibed. " Virginia would be, of course, againstBurr, because, Morris writes, Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in the President's chair!

John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson vice-President, in 1800. It is edifying for us who look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profoundreverence, to see them at close range in Gouverneur Morris's pages. 

Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette not nearly so well:

 one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle. 

But, then, Morris had had money transactions with the Lafayettes. Morrisbelieved that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well asWashington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography ofBenjamin Franklin, " not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least onthe same shelf with the perennial Boswell?

I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris manytimes with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into theAutobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from thekickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. Thisautobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourageauthors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It isthe expression of the life of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing, and who writes about himself so well and so sincerely that he gives usan insight into a phase of English character which none of his novelsever elaborated. 

What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the Americanatmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack ofdoggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himselfas a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of hiscaste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence ofself-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what hewanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knewhe could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise ofliterature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good publicservant. 

As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt. Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtainedleisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through thesame sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack ofsentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashionin our day to declare that society is against us when we have to workunremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing, and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as appliedto him--inspiring!

In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice againstMrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans, " as we were alltaught to hate "American Notes, " by Dickens. We all softened towardDickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told storyof the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his motherwithout believing that the recording angel in no way holds herresponsible for her rather vulgar book. 

How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of thebooks written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! Howhe managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tellus. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of thepious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray, " andalthough paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly becausethere was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "TheWarden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aughtin malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very goodreading. As the sailor once said of a piece of rather solid beef, "There's a great deal of chaw in it. "

I pause a moment to reflect on a letter which I have just received froma young college woman who has so far read the manuscript of this book. She writes that it is really not a book so far for professingChristians. 

 My mother and I had expected of you something more edifying, something that would lead us to the reading of good and elevating books. At college I looked on literature as something apart. Since I have come home to Georgia, I find that it is better for me to submit myself to the direction of our good Baptist clergyman, and have no books on our library shelves that I cannot read aloud to the young. One of your favourites, Madame de Sévigné, shocks me by the cruelty of her description of the death of the famous poisoner, Madame de Brinvilliers. And I do not think that the pages of the Duc de Saint-Simon should be read by young people. 

This is an example of what a refined atmosphere may do to a Georgiagirl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a littlevolume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should findlife rather duller if I had not the Duc de Saint-Simon at hand. Besides, I do not think that there is a single young person of my acquaintancewho would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!

Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happensto be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de Sévignéwhen she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad books ought to bepreferred to no books at all. But it would be almost better for theyoung not to begin to read until they are old, if one is to gauge thevalue of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity, after all, isnot ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a certain age isvery desirable. 

While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm andvalue by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity, " which goes deeperinto the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on thesubject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence, " "MainStreet, " "Moon Calf, " "Miss Lulu Bett, " and several other novels, I turnfrom their lack of gaiety to find a reason why art should not be gloomy, and here it is, from Coventry Patmore's "Cheerfulness in Life and Art. "

 "Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice, " says one of the highest authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological science writes, "A cheerful heart is what the Muses love. "

 Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety--of which a word by and by--is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others, it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency; and thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence infer at least a probability of such cause in cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows, it is not overtroubled by those of others, however tender and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt for its cowardice. 

There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which isnot quite the real thing. It is too sentimental and rather too laboured. These two authors, who, if the value of a writer could really depend onthe majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, beour national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit ofcheerfulness. 

Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasanttown of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearianindustry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna, " seems to bevery much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, thatdelight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in thereally great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to bereal he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhapsbecause he feels the public need of protest against the optimisticsentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright norMrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as toassume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworthhad no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in theirday, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answeredto the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to betaken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yetwhich are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. GeneStratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higherphilosophical aspirations, like the author of "The Age of Innocence, "and "Blind Mice, " and "Zell, " and "Main Street, " continue to write, there is no danger that the general crowd of American readers will beshocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or ofthe Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from theresponsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors ofthe description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted byMadame de Sévigné or to revel among the groups of Italians who rangethrough the scenes drawn by Benvenuto Cellini. 

While Pepys is always near at hand, I treat his contemporary, Evelyn, with very distant politeness and respect. Now Evelyn should not betreated in that way. He is always so edifying and so very correct, except when he moralizes about the Church of Rome, that he ought to beread nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as amodel of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy, literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such passagesas this, which Pepys writes on October 19, 1662 (Lord's day):

 Put on my first new lace-band: and so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more. I am sorry to hear that the news of the selling of Dunkirk is taken so generally ill, as I find it is among the merchants; and other things, as removal of officers at Court, good for worse; and all things else made much worse in their report among people than they are. And this night, I know not upon what ground, the gates of the City ordered to be all shut, and double guards everywhere. Indeed I do find everybody's spirit very full of trouble: and the things of the Court and Council very ill taken; so as to be apt to appear in bad colours, if there should ever be a beginning of trouble, which God forbid!

Or, 29th (Lord's day). 

 This morning I put on my best black cloth suit, trimmed with scarlet ribbon, very neat, with my cloak lined with velvet, and a new beaver, which altogether is very noble, with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago. 

Evelyn never condescends to such weaknesses as we find in our belovedPepys!

One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn had been able to deciphersome of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary, " he would have writtenthis tribute, under the date of May 26, 1703:

 This day died Mr. Sam Pepys, a very worthy, industrious and curious person. . . . He lived at Clapham with his partner, Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble house and sweete place, where he enjoyed the fruite of his labours in greate prosperity. He was universally belov'd, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skill'd in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially. . . . Mr. Pepys had been for neere 40 years so much my particular friend, that Mr. Jackson sent me compleat mourning, desiring me to be one to hold up the pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hindered me from doing him this last office. 

All the teachings of the histories of our student days force us to lookon Charles II. As one of the weakest of English kings; but when we cometo enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is muchto be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England underdifficult circumstances than conventional history has given him creditfor. 

It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed tome as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for youwhat formal history never does; he takes you into the heart of his time, and introduces you into the centre of his mind and heart. In literature, in poetry and prose, the reader hopes that the roofs of houses or thetops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with anunderstanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, thoughit may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody findsin gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes usknow our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves--but perhapsmore clearly--can never be rooted out of normal human nature. 

I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and Isat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, andby sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there wasalways Madame de Sévigné. Much was hoped from the long-promised "Memoirsof Talleyrand. " They came; they were disappointing. 

Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in away with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. Andthis is "The Education of Henry Adams, " and almost contemporaneously the"Letters of William James. " It is easy to understand the delight withwhich intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams. "Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked aboutin our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--thateducation consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, andregarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward inone's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americansare taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and whichSamuel Smiles beat into the heads of the English. Henry Adams's lesson, however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; itis a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, wholooks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked onthem, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. Thejudicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink withhorror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of HenryAdams, " for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" ofCardinal Newman!

There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonableand well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; whileCardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for ornot. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than CardinalNewman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so muchabove the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--butintelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enoughto long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, butreasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God thattroubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence ofpain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that apersonal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, GodHimself. 

Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith ina personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; otherswho like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirelynegligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved withoutunderstanding the spirit of Saint Francis d'Assisi:

 Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul. 

 Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this simple and obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory--or sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh crosslights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had taught them and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards--between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc:--

 Hic Jacet Homunculus Scriptor Doctor Barbaricus Henricus Adams Adae Filius et Evae Primo Explicuit Socnam

 The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he meant as satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to a profession. 

 The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered. 

After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of that very great American John Burroughs. Itis the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in ourpolitical history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of noother man that make his book supremely interesting. 

The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams. " We can nolonger talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we knowthat this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a"best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewailthe degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare thatits popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer topurchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissedwith a scornful wave of the hand. 

When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams, " I was informed that itwas "pathetic. " Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, asfar as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air ofpathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it becamethe _Century_--of the novel "Democracy. " Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, theeditor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when onhis return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in theheat of youth, held to be entirely un-American. 

Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adamslived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so preparedby tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beautywherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful. Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to begood for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great dealof energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged tostruggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modernAmericans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was notcompelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever theenraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One cansee from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slightthat he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty isboth a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. HenryAdams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description ofthe death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worstof his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no manmore pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men arefree, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does notalways take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities ofhis book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate withhim, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the power of using wings, whether he uses them or not. 

There are many reasons for the success of his book. The chapters on"Diplomacy, " on "Friends and Foes, " on "Political Morality, " and on "TheBattle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More thanthat, they elucidate conditions of mind which are generally wrapped up, for motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical verbiage. 

Some of the reviewers found "The Education" egotistical. This is toostrong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were notegotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit orself-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public, "The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himselfwithout writing about himself. This seems very much like a platitude. And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. Ifanything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took atone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below theaverage of the real Henry Adams. 

Here, for instance, is a good passage:

 Swinburne tested him [Henry Adams] then and there by one of his favourite tests--Victor Hugo; for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; De Musset was unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing. 

 Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to sustain himself on the wing like De Musset, or even like Hugo; but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost. 

 The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendours of Hugo and Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he had made on Hugo; "I was shown into a large room, " he said, "with women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and uttered the words: "Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!" Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: "Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"

The _Chose sublime_ is an Adamesque touch! It gives the last delicatetint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions andsuch touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! Heis the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, thediscoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the realarchitecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song ofRoland. " How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem incomparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are solaboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glancewith which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He hashis limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects onthe hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, thehalf-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and Englishwho pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help givinggrateful thanks for having found Henry Adams. 

To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems tobe that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the militaryarchitecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with thebeauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is morereceptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would havediscovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture andthe cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, haveprofited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that HenryAdams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize thathe would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, andwhich many of them are sincerely grateful for. 

The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and overagain is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Booksto be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my opinion, are among the One Hundred BestBooks listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his ownshelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms arenot literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises hiscritical vocation; Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarceyhas some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no reallygood French critics to-day, probably because they have so littlematerial to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worthwhile, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of backgroundand perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there aremany leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood. Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, whoonce claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence ofcliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked intogreat enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found thathalf a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!

It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" shouldappear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams, " and, though theJameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. Wehad begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freemanand Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories;but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavourof New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been astate of mind has become different from the real old Boston. 

In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, andMiss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with themodulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to thenovels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " whichI always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of theBreakfast Table, " in the hope that the flavour of New England, which Ifound to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There isalways "The House of the Seven Gables!"

But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten pages of Mrs. Stowe with great pleasure, something she said reminded me of WalterSavage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had everattracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations. " There was an interlude ofenjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historicalpersons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same. Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get onwithout an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations. " SuddenlyLandor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals, " and Irediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heinein Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through manymagazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night, " Zangwill's fewpages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader--by aloving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books. 

You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento whereLady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fineflower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bringback to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. And JuliusCæsar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson, [1] together with thatgroup of semi-happy souls who live on the "enamelled green" of Dante, spiritism might have more to say for itself!

 "'I call a cat a cat, ' as Boileau put it, " remarked Heine. "I would like to know how many men in a hundred are disappointed in the women they marry. "

 "Just as many as have too much imagination, " said Augustus. 

 "No, " said Johnson, shaking his head violently and speaking suddenly in an excited tone. "No. Those who are disappointed are such as are possessed of imagination without judgment; but a man whose imagination does not outrun his judgment is seldom deceived in the realisation of his hopes. I suspect that the same thing is true in the art of poetry, of which Herr Heine is at once a master and a judge. For the qualities that constitute genius are invention, imagination and judgment; invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed; imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind, and enables him to convey to the reader the various form of nature, incidents of life and energies of passion; and judgment, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality. A man who possesses invention and imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of possibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, however, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may attribute the small number of poets who have flourished in the world, and the great number of happy marriages among civilised mankind. "

 "It appears that I must have possessed imagination after all, " said Francis. 

 "If you will allow me to say it, " said Cæsar in his most suave tones, and turning his heavy black eyes upon the king's face, "you had too much. Had you possessed less imagination and more judgment, you might many times have destroyed the Emperor Charles. To challenge him to fight a duel was a gratuitous and very imaginative piece of civility; to let him escape as you did more than once when you could easily have forced an engagement on terms advantageous to yourself, was unpardonable. "

 "I know it, " said Francis, bitterly. "I was not Cæsar. "

 "No, sir, " said Johnson in loud, harsh tones, "nor were you happy in your marriages--"

 "I adore learned men, " whispered Francis to Lady Brenda. He had at once recovered his good humour. 

 "A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element of judgment is necessary in the selection of a wife, " continued the doctor. 

 "I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall in love with each other, " said Lady Brenda. 

 "Intuition, madam, " replied Johnson, "means the mental view; as you use it you mean a very quick and accurate mental view, followed immediately by an unconscious but correct process of deduction. The combination of the two, when they are nicely adjusted, constitutes a kind of judgment which, though it be not always so correct in its conclusions, as that exercised by ordinary logic, has nevertheless the advantage of quickness combined with tolerable precision. For, in matters of love, it is necessary to be quick. "

 "Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon, " said Francis, laughing. 

 "And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his house clean, " returned the doctor. 

 "Do you believe that people always fall in love very quickly?" asked Lady Brenda. 

 "Frequently, though not always. Love dominates quite as much because its attacks are sudden and unexpected, as because most persons believe that to be in love is a desirable state. "

 "Love, " said Cæsar, "is a great general and a great strategist, for he rarely fails to surprise the enemy if he can, but he never refuses an open engagement when necessary. "

[1]

 "_Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto mi fur moetrati gli spiriti magni che del verderli in me stesso 'n esalto_"

 --INFERNO. 

Strange as it may appear, it does not seem to be so much of a descent, or of a break in the chain of continuity, to turn to hear William Jamesspeak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the verybeginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of thelittle circle about him. The conversation goes on--Mr. James never losessight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the secondpart--and you are not made to feel as an eavesdropper. 

Standing on the ladder, unhappily a rather shaky ladder, to put back"With the Immortals" on the shelf, I pass Wells's great novel of"Marriage, " which I would clutch to read again, if I had not alreadybegun this Letter of James--written to his wife:

 I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any _guaranty_ that they will. Make it a guaranty--and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am _überhaupt_ in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't smile at this--it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess. . . . 

Personal expression is, after all, what we long for in literature. Cardinal Newman tells us, I think, in his "Idea of a University, " thatit _is_ the very essence of literature. _Scientia_ is truth, orconclusions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the personalityof the speaker or writer. But literature, to be literature, must bepersonal. It is good literature when it is expressed plastically, and inaccordance with a good usage of its time. A reader like myself does not, perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently with the philosophy of WilliamJames as represented in these "Letters. " One has a languid interest inknowing what he thought of Bergson and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; butfor the constant reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle andSt. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personalimpressions of both the little things and the big things of ourcontemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if youare at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have readthe "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, mayresemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himselfso tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether youngHenry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most understanding human being. The only way to read these "Letters" is to dip into them here and there, as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the vinegar on drop bydrop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulatedby the acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper of humour. Frankly, since I discovered William James as a human being I have begunto read him for the same reason that I read Pepys--for pure enjoyment!

A friend of mine, feeling that I had taken the "Letters of WilliamJames" too frivolously, told me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells tocounteract my mediæval philosophy and too cheerful view of life. Just asif I had not struggled with Mr. Wells, and irritated myself into atemperature in trying to get through his latest preachments! I am notquite sure what I said of Mr. Wells, but I find, in an article by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy in the "New Statesman, " just what I ought to havesaid. 

 This doctrine of the inspired priesthood of authors is exaggerated and dangerous. Neither has it, you see, prevented him from writing "The Wonderful Visit. " Artists should feel, and if necessary be told, that they are on their honour to do their best. That will do. If they flatter themselves that they are messengers from the Father of Light whenever they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any emotional hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a short time afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in a quite different direction. Sincerity of the moment is not sincerity; those who have watched England's prime minister know that. 

William James helped me to wash the bad taste of Mr. Wells's god out ofmy mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man oftalent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man ofgenius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potentDeity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; butVoltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an educationsuch as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes abore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians, are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatismsseriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us thatthe merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he notbegin with--_Qui fit, Mæcenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authorsof fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_, "--whoinsist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horacemight have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much goodtaste and too much knowledge of man in the world to attempt it. 

The more one reads of the very moderns, the more one falls in love withthe ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do youthink anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if heinsisted that we should "sit under him" and assumed a pulpit manner?This is as near as he ever comes to teaching us anything:

 _Lenit albescens animos capillus Litium et rixae cupidos protervae; Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa, Consule Planco. _

Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved himself very much, showed inhis translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost lovesomething as well as himself. It does not become me to recommendbooks--everybody to his own taste!--but I should like to say that forthose whose Latin has become only a faint perfume of attar of roses, like that which is said to cling faintly to one of the desks of MarieAntoinette at Versailles, the translations of our dear Horatius by LordLytton is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the most charmingand most wise of pagan poets. 

Horace says:

 Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us, Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles, Nor old age imminent, Nor the indomitable hand of Death. 

We might have, in spite of the awful examples of Mr. Wells and the otherpreachers, who ought to confine themselves to finer things, desired thatHorace should have gone further and told us what kind of books we oughtto read in our old age. His choice was naturally limited; it wasimpossible for him to buy a book every week, or every month. Thepublishers were not so active in those days. But he might have indicatedthe kind of book that old age might read, in order to renew its youth. Ihave tried "Robinson Crusoe, "--the unequalled--and "Swiss FamilyRobinson"; but they seem too grown up for me now. I have taken to "KingSolomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that perfect gem ofexcitement and illusion, "The Mutineers, " by Charles Boardman Hawes. Iread it, and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising booksellerwill unblushingly compile a library for the old, and begin it with "TheMutineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the Near Old is that thefear of shocking the Young makes them such hypocrites. They pretend thatthey like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they express intenseinterest in new and ponderous books, in the presence of Youth--when theyought to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. But if the Oldreally want to save their faces, and at the same time enjoy glimpses ofthat fountain of youth which we long for at every age, let them acquiretwo books--Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded Man" and "The Quest of ElDorado, " by Dr. J. A. Zahm, whose _nom de plume_ was H. J. Mozans. Thereyou have the real stuff. Together, these two books are a combination ofjust what the Old need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke hecannot dream with any facility when he grows old; and if he has notpossessed himself of these two volumes, he cannot have acquired thatbasis for dreams which the energetic Aged greatly need. "The Gilded Man"is frankly a romance, and yet, strangely enough, a romance of facts, and"The Quest of El Dorado" is the only volume in the English language whenit deals with the El Dorado; it has all the most attractive qualities ofa romance. 

But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob, Son of Battle, " which theauthor of "Alice For Short, " discovered late in life. It is the greatestanimal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is nobly human, and theBlack Killer devilishly human, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs, invented by clever writers. A great book! It is too thrilling; itreminds of "Wuthering Heights"; I shall, therefore, read this eveningsome of Henry Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with "Prideand Prejudice. "

CHAPTER V

BOOKS AT RANDOM

Among nature books that gave me many happy hours on the banks of theDelaware--imperial river!--is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow. ""Better, " Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the twelve labours of Hercules thanattempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the area of anaverage ramble!" _Soit!_ And better than that, "to feel that whatevercreature we may meet will prove companionable--that is, no stranger, butrather an amusing and companionable friend--assures both pleasure andprofit whenever we chance abroad. "

Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his companion can forget theextracts from the diary of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, inthe Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced the number of wild ducks andgeese, he says, even then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was oftenblack with the smaller fowl. 

 I do seldom see the great swans, but father says that they are not unusual in the wide stretches of the Delaware. 

Happy day! when the wedge-shaped battalions of wild geese were almost asfrequently seen as the spattering sparrows now!

 Father allowed me [writes the good Quaker boy, in 1734] to accompany my Indian friend, Oconio, to Watson's creek, that we may gather wild fowl after the Indian manner. With great eagerness, I accompanied Oconio, and thus happened it. We did reach the widest part of that creek early in the morning, I think the sun was scarcely an half-hour high. Oconio straightway hid himself in the tall grass by the water, while I was bidden to lie in the tall grass at a little distance. With his bow and arrows, Oconio quickly shot a duck that came near, by swimming within a short distance of him. I marvelled much with what skill he shot, for his arrow pierced the head of the duck which gave no alarming cry. . . . Oconio now did fashion a circlet of green boughs, and so placed them about his head and shoulders that I saw not his face; he otherwise disrobed and walked into the stream. He held in one hand a shotten duck, so that it swam lustily, and, so equipped, was in the midst of a cluster of fowl, of which he deftly seized several so quickly that their fellows took no alarm. These he strangled beneath the water, and, when he had three of them, came back with caution to where the thick bushes concealed him. He desired that I should do the same, and with much hesitation I disrobed and assumed the disguise Oconio had fashioned; then I put forth boldly towards the gathered fowl, at which they did arise with a great clamour, and were gone. I marvel much why this should have been, but Oconio did not make it clear, and I forbore, through foolish pride, to ask him. And let it not be borne in mind against me [pleads the good Quaker boy] that, when I reached my home, I wandered to the barn, and writing an ugly word upon the door, sat long and gazed at it. Chagrin doth make me feel very meek, I find, but I set no one an example by speech or act, in thus soothing my feelings in so worldly a manner. 

This example may be commended to players of golf, who are inclined to be"worldly. " The episode of Oconio at the best is too long to quote; it, too, has its lesson! One reads Mr. Abbott's defence of the skunkcabbage, for it harbours at its root

 the earliest salamanders, the pretty Maryland yellow throat nests in the hollows of its broad leaves, and rare beetles find a congenial home in the shelter it affords. 

"Upland and Meadow" gives one occasion for thought on the subject ofraccoons. "Foolish creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning coonsare forced to quest or die. "

For a stroll by the Thames--I mean the New England Thames--there is nobook like Ik Marvel's "Dream Life, " but for a day near theDelaware--imperial river!--give me "Upland and Meadow. "

And then with what assurance of satisfaction may one turn forrefreshment to the continual charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby"and "Pepacton. " Burroughs's opinions upon the problems of humanity aremore tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go withhim among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaringlark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, tolook with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is tobegin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no otherauthor gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers ofthe Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the Englishthrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades. 

There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but hemight not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasantEnglishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as hesaid, they were "so homely. " In fact, they were rather pretty girls, andhe had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the wordwith which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met himat Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of therefined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech, " for evenin the eighties there were still _précieuses_. The truth is that hisrural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled hisstyle; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of thegood soil of the country. 

Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but Iwill not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way byDybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. MadameDybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives usan Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's, like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind, " has something of the artificial characterof Watteau. "Walden, " then, is somewhat too varnished; but "Riverby" and"Pepacton" are "homely" and "homey. "

To return to memoirs for a moment, that most delightful of all mentaldissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I findthe "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne. " One cannot imagine anythingmore unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why isMadame de Boigne on the same shelf with these two lovers of nature?Madame de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She loved the world andthe manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is morelike an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ towhich she would prefer to be compared. 

There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame deBoigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no realharm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and givesthe atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in amost fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but awriter of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfullyuninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of HenryVIII. But this is a digression. 

Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne asdisplaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom. " Mr. Menckencannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in hisdesire to be academic, Browne's hyperlatinism or his use of Latin words, like "corpage, " "confinium, " "angustias, " or "Vivacious abominations"and "congaevous generations. "

Mr. Symonds says:

 He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the most puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to confessions of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the result of tortuous reflections on the enigmas of life and revelation. Perhaps the following paragraph enables us to understand the permanent temper of his mind most truly:

 "As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith: the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, _Certum est quia impossible est_. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion. "

Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of theology, aside, SirThomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a littleinto the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modernnovelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life ispurely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole, [2] my favourite among thewriters in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, orhis semi-heroes (there are no good real honest villains in fiction now)lead lives that are not at all interior. And yet every man either leadsan interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldomtalks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art ofmeditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful, is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how tocultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis deSales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of hisimitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As abook of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points. For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on thedifference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism inthis way:

 Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another filed before him, according to the quality of his desert and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of well-ordered politics: till corruption getteth ground;--ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn;--every one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase anything. 

[2] Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who admired his quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The Young Enchanted" of George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius. "

There are singular beings who have tried to read "Religio Medici"continuously. Was it Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one ofthis class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "Ican't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous thathuman beings should exist who take this attitude toward Sir ThomasBrowne, his "Urn Burial" or his "Christian Morals. " It seems almost moremiraculous that this attitude should be taken toward Montaigne, and thatsome folk should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the pleasant, curtailed edition of John Florio's translation, edited by Justin HuntlyMcCarthy! These small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot havethe original French, or the leisure to browse over the big volume ofFlorio's old book as it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is anagreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It somehow or other remindsone of that appalling series of cutdown "Classics, " so largelyrecommended to a public that is seduced to run and read. A condensededition of Froissart may do very well for boys; but who can visualizethe kind of mind content with a reduced version of "Vanity Fair"?

Montaigne is a city of refuge from the whirling words of the uplifters. At times I have been compelled from a sense of duty, a mistaken one, toread whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and "The NewMachiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay, " will be remembered when "Mr. Britling"--by the way, what did Mr. Britling see through?--shall beforgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn to Montaigne. It amazed meto hear Montaigne called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward theeternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and he has fewer superstitions. It was his humanity and his love for religion that turned him fromAristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for Plato. He is a realamateur of good books. Listen to this:

 As for Cicero, I am of the common judgment, that besides learning there was an exquisite eloquence in him: He was a good citizen, of an honest, gentle nature, as are commonly fat and burly men: for so was he. But to speake truly of him, full of ambitious vanity and remisse niceness. And I know not well how to excuse him, in that he deemed his Poesie worthy to be published. It is no great imperfection to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him that he never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie of his name. Concerning his eloquence it is beyond all comparison, and I verily believe that none shall ever equall it. 

Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that ever the book written byBrutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by rememberingthat Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather knowwhat talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent onthe night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. Hehad no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions thatkeep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want tohear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpetsthat precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing"jackets, " the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip outthe favourite oaths of his province with violence. 

"The Romans in their religion, " he says, "were wont to say 'Hoc age';which in ours we say, 'Sursum corda. '"

He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner; he does not care for the_hors d'œuvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to thetranslation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis siveliber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is agood antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgarto think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himselfin the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; andhe does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absoluteas that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. Thediscord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concernshim greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson tohis contemporaries on the subject. 

In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered togetherin "The Prince, " governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfyMontaigne. To him they are nefarious. 

"'The Prince, '" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real lifethan any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipatingEurope from the Middle Ages. "

It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel deMontaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as theprecious sentences of Thomas à Kempis. They are foils; at first sightthere seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michelde Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common withThomas à Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of beingMontaignes, Thomas à Kempis would have written for God alone. He wouldhave resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber haderected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitelycarved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the sidetoward the people and not the side toward the Presence of God, it wasentirely plain and unornamented!

The friendship of Thomas à Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson mighteasily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his lastsupply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling mightexist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be asnothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellousguide to life. The translations of Thomas à Kempis into English vary invalue. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of À Kempis indeleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of BowdlerizingThomas à Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy ofhis love of Christ limps when the mystical centre of it, the Eucharist, is cut out. If that meeting in the upper room had not taken place duringthe paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, souland divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas à Kempiswould never have written "The Following of Christ. " The Bible, even theNew Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul'sEpistles, are not easy sayings, but what better interpretation of thedoctrines of Christ as applied to everyday life can there be found thanin this precious little book?

You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather what comfort you can from thephilosophy of Thoreau's "Walden"--which might, after all, be morecomfortable if it were more pagan. The Pan of Thoreau was a respectablePan, because he was a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in Keble's"Christian Year" if you can; but À Kempis overtops all! It is strange, too, what an appeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers inChristianity. It is a contradiction we meet with every day. And GeorgeEliot was a remarkable example of this, for, in spite of her habitualreverence, she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox dogmas. Anotherparadox seems to be in the fact that Thomas à Kempis appeals so directlyand consciously to the confirmed mystic and to those who have secludedthemselves from the world. At first, I must confess that I found this agreat obstacle to my joy in having found him. 

If Montaigne frequently drove me to À Kempis, À Kempis almost asfrequently in the beginning drove me back to Montaigne. It was notuntil I had become more familiar with the New Testament that I began tosee that À Kempis spoke as one soul to another. In this world for himthere were only three Facts--God, his own soul, and the soul to whom hespoke. 

It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many of my friends who lookedon the Last Supper as a mere symbol of love and hospitality, shouldcling to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. Even the exampleof an intellectual friend of mine, a Bostonian who had lived much inItaly, could not make it clear. He often asserted that he did notbelieve in God; and yet he was desolate if on a certain day in the yearhe did not pay some kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony ofPadua!

I have known him to break up a party in the Adirondacks in order toreach the nearest church where it was possible for him to burn a candlein honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious anniversary! As longas he exists, as long as he continues to burn candles--_les chandellesd'un athée_--I shall accept without understanding the enthusiasm of somany lovers of À Kempis, who cut out the mystical longings for thereception of that divine food which Christ gave out in the upper room. À Kempis says:

 My soul longs to be nourished with Thy body; my heart desires to be united with Thee. 

 Give Thyself to me and it is enough; for without Thee no comfort is available. 

 Without Thee I cannot subsist; and without Thy visitation I cannot live. 

 And, therefore, I must come often to Thee, and receive Thee for the remedy, and for the health and strength of my soul; lest perhaps I faint in the way, if I be deprived of this heavenly food. 

 For so, O most merciful Jesus, Thou wast pleased once to say, when Thou hadst been preaching to the people, and curing sundry diseases: "I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. "

 Deal now in like manner with me, who has left Thyself in the sacrament for the comfort of Thy faithful. 

 For Thou art the most sweet reflection of the soul; and he that shall eat Thee worthily shall be partaker and heir of everlasting glory. 

To every soul, oppressed and humble, À Kempis speaks more poignantlythan even David, in that great cry of the heart and soul, the DeProfundis:

 Behold, then, O Lord, my abjection and frailty [Ps. Xxiv. 18], every way known to Thee. 

 Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire [Ps. Lxviii. 15], that I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly cast down forever. 

 This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in Thy sight, to find that I am so subject to fall and have so little strength to resist my passions. 

 And although I do not altogether consent, yet their assaults are troublesome and grievous to me, and it is exceedingly irksome to live thus always in a conflict. 

 Hence my infirmity is made known to me, because wicked thoughts do always much more easily rush in upon me than they can be cast out again. 

 Oh, that Thou, the most mighty God of Israel, the zealous lover of faithful souls, wouldst behold the labour and sorrow of Thy servant, and stand by me in all my undertakings. 

 Strengthen me with heavenly fortitude, lest the old man, the miserable flesh, not fully subject to the spirit, prevail and get the upper hand, against which we must fight as long as we breathe in this most wretched life. 

 Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and miseries are never wanting; where all things are full of snares and enemies. 

There is no pessimism here, for Thomas à Kempis gives the remedies, theonly remedies offered to the world since light was created before thesun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellectare worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which henever defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knewtheir hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedyso effective as that which À Kempis offers. 

It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fearof hurting or offending the Beloved. 

The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War andon their remedy is "The Rebuilding of Europe, " by David Jayne Hill. There we find this quotation from Villari illuminated:

 but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work written in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect expression of an emancipation from moral restraints far advanced. The Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared. The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for their safety to the nation-state rather than to the solidarity of Christendom; and the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it, consisted in absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one man who should embody its unity, strength, and authority. 

Montaigne felt rather than understood the cruelty and brutality of thestate traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriouslycombatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versaillesand Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles whichguided the world from the Renascence to the year 1918:

 (1) The essence of a State is "sovereignty, " defined as "supreme power. " (2) A sovereign State has the right to declare war upon any other sovereign State for any reason that seems to it sufficient. (3) An act of conquest by the exercise of superior military force entitles the conqueror to the possession of the conquered territory. (4) The population goes with the land and becomes subject to the will of the conqueror. 

What member of the memorable conference, which began at Washington onNovember 12, 1921, would have dared to assert these unmoral principles, accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, inprinciple? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholynovelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life ofthe Middle Ages. 

There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was keptalive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli'sworld, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A betterunderstanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton lessautocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaireless destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic latelynamed a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and ofCatherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir ThomasBrowne and Montaigne sent me, says:

 Down to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 the most odious crime ever committed against a civilized people was, no doubt, the first partition of Poland; yet at the time not a voice was raised against it. Louis XV. Was "infinitely displeased, " but he did not even reply to the King of Poland's appeal for help. George III. Coolly answered that "justice ought to be the invariable rule of sovereigns"; but concluded, "I fear, however, misfortunes have reached the point where redress can be had from the hands of the Almighty alone. " Catherine II. Thought justice satisfied when "everyone takes something. " Frederick II. Wrote to his brother, "The partition will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, and Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the same consecrated body, which is Poland. " Only Maria Theresa felt a twinge of conscience. She took but she felt the shame of it. She wrote: "We have by our moderation and fidelity to our engagements acquired the confidence, I may venture to say the admiration, of Europe. . . . One year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to endure it, and that nothing in the world has cost me more than the loss of our good name. " It is a strange phenomenon that in matters where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly pronounces judgment and spontaneously condemns, the solid mass of moral conviction should count for nothing in affairs of state. Against it a purely national prejudice has never failed to prevail. 

Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons so clearly; nor does SirThomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of thepolitics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works ofeither without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenthcentury, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together. 

Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, andone might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried. This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language, " which appearsin a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are toldthat Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that hisfamily has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and thathe is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is, therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "TheAmerican Language. " Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses inour universities are those which concern themselves with written andspoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schoolsand colleges

 is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it. 

Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive; but he is not soconstructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion intowhich that conflict of dialects in the English language--a languagewhich is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells usthat good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberatelythrowing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as inthe case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is truein the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln wasfed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principleswhich are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of CardinalNewman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincolnhimself, which those who want to write good English follow rather thanthe elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgottenalmost as soon as they are learned. 

Personally, in youthful days, I could make nothing out of the "grammar"of the English language until I had begun to study Latin prosody; andthen it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure ofEnglish, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh ofthe English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton. 

As the English language, spoken everywhere, must depend on good usage, and the bad usage of to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow, it is regrettable that no scientific study of the American vocabulary orof the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quoteMr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content withcorrecting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric. " Later, heread "The Dean's English, " very popular at one time, Richard GrantWhite's "Words and Their Uses, " and perhaps a little book called "TheVerbalist. " To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner ofwriting English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour orthe fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date isnot easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as inthe "Philosophy of Style. " Its principles have a perennial value andnearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated themwith variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involvedas any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying agood deal. 

The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave ofWebster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class ofAmericans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in thematter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. LordBalfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered severalexamples of this. 

"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster'sDictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider allits decisions as final, " said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer whohabitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta. " Shakespeare, he regards asan author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furiousover what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis, " which he saida favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I haveknown literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use ofthe word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody, " Mr. Menckenshows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against Englishconvention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it onthe stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as Ican find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word"consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in theFirst Baptist Church at high noon"!

In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" isbetter than "elevator, " and "station" better than "dépot. " Though theseare departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often whenour critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. Ihave known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated Englishtraditions of speech, to shrink in horror at the mention of "flap-jack"and "ice-cream. " He could never find a substitute in _real_ English for"flap-jack, " but he always substituted "ices" for "ice-cream. " On oneoccasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies, " forthose "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; andhe spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such compositionreally existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seenapproaching with an unmistakable "pie, " the kind supposed by the readersof advertisements to be made by "mothers, " and ordered hastily becauseof the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest triedto save the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry as "a tart. "The host shook his head--"a tart, " in English, could never be covered!

Mr. Mencken shows us that "flap-jack, " "molasses, " "home-spun, ""ice-cream" are old English; that "Bub, " which used to shock Londonvisitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that"muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra. " I wish I had known that whenI was young; it would have saved me a bad mark for paraphrasing"Menelaus and Paris got into a muss over Helen. " But probably the use of"row" to express that little difficulty would not have saved me!

The best judge of Madeira in Philadelphia always said "cheer" for"chair" and "sasser" for "saucer" and "tay" for "tea" and "obleged" for"obliged"; and he drank from his saucer, too; and his table was alwaysprovided with little dishes, like butter plates, for the discarded cups. His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learningwho laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary, and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an educationin himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when hecame to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell fromgrace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in mysearch for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to askhim whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escapefrom the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had notlived at or near the court of Henry VIII!

Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo inEngland, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr. Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speechesof the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used byMr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion sinks into a pastel tint! Mr. Mencken says:

 The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of James I. And the Authorized Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to be but little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the Eighteenth Century. 

The Bible won against the prudery of the new English; prudery will govery far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, inPhiladelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by alittle Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it wasbecause of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, " in the prayer. Thelittle Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the AngelGabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructusventris tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded "more decent"!

Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's revelation that "ante"came into our language through the Spanish; he says, cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later. 

It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr. Mencken's judgment in regardto that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and hequotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language, another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that ourtongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements ofstrength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariablyprecedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry thisusage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be countedat 80, but in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it falls to 61, in Anatole France's prose, to 66, in Gabriele d' Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. 

That our language has only five vowels, which have to do duty for morethan a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy Frenchpreacher who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" as "pluff" hadmuch excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluerde lis, " instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How manyconversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!

There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure ormore food for thought or for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken's"The American Language, " except Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy, "Boswell's "Johnson, " the "Devout Life" of Saint Francis de Sales, Pepys's "Diary, " the "Letters" of Madame de Sévigné, Beveridge's "Life"of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book forodd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and aprecious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verifythe quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thickflakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner isannounced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!

It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of Englishgrammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of viewand of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner inwhich Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read HerbertSpencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and SirConan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, letthem induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. Mencken's statements on thegrowth of the English language! In my time we were expected to takeSpencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt thathis principles have been repeated by every writer on style, includingDr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition, " since Mr. Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principlesreminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he metBeatrice. 

There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as ascience and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while heprovokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in RobertLouis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications instyle in the brochure of the idol of the eighties. 

And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a littlevolume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and theterrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It isCharles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls. " And if one wants to knowhow to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does notcome by nature--there is "Moby Dick, " by Herman Melville, the closefriend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken mustlove him. But he ought to be read as a novelist. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _flâneur_--thechief business of a _flâneur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in oldPhiladelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows;but the _flâneur_ among books finds none of his shop-windowsunrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of aword that sounded something like "sadie. " It meant "thank you. " EveryPennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and theyoften did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but youshould never say "druggist. " I trust that it is no breach of confidenceto repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modernPhiladelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languagesin his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for theboys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshirelad I met the other day. "But you haven't a Yorkshire accent!" "No, sir, " he said, "my parents whipped it out of me. " But there is, in NewYork City, at least the beginning of one American language--the languageof the street. 

 * * * * *

In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I haveoften asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure andeven of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. Forthe plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although Ibelieve, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to areally good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Ofmemoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Créquy havealways been very agreeable to me; I have never been so dull or so tired, that I could not find some solace in the Diary of Mr. Pepys, in theAutobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; andeven the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worthreturning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces soadmirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of allatmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And nowcomes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diariesincluding that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worthliving!

I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King Davidwhom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" weariesme, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praiseThompson's "Hound of Heaven, " because it is dogmatic, I amsurprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all itssplendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are gloriousvisions of truth at a white heat. 

Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be apicture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, thedidactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with nogreat disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could bepreserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I nevercould quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as agreat philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never seethat Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for acultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weighthe merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among thefirst. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian'sFuneral"? Or "My Last Duchess, " or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some ofthe passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for apoem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered forus is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all thephilosophies of Wordsworth. 

To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to theirpower of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my ownfaults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and ofraising me to a higher plane of toleration and of gaiety of heart. 

As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson once applied to worksof fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followersof this consoling art to "_filles de joie_. " He doubtless meant thatthese goddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave usvisions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without beingsensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels, like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona, " which are joyous and serious at once. Ortake "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez. "

Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he readsthem to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must saythat only a few of the essayists really amuse me. They are, as a rule, more witty than humorous, and generally they make one self-conscious, being self-conscious themselves. There are a hundred different types ofthe essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I foundall the prose works of a fine poet and friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. "The result of asevere sense of duty!" he said. 

Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility and failed, though shegained in the end a greater title. Her works are insufferably andcomplacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings withrespect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her firstvolume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress ofDidacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have beennourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St. Francis de Sales. " Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the mostpractical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the formof letters. Next comes Fénelon's and--I know that I shall shock thosewho regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his powerof stimulation, Emerson. 

It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that theseconfessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them Ihave had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind butsimply of relieving my own, by button-holing the reader who happens tocome my way. I should like to add that what is called the coarseness ofthe eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than thenasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lackof talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts. Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common withthe process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles, " to useCharles Reade's phrase. 

If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmnessand patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reasonfor thanking God is that Americans have produced a literature--thecontinuation of an older literature with variations, it is true, --thathas added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mentiononly one book, "The Scarlet Letter, " and I am glad to end my book bywriting the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, orwith France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, areno longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American whowrites of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a title tohis discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes. " Itis an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough forsmiles. 

It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It israpidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literatureand assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and DonMarquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippinglyas any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is nobody writing in thedaily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they doit. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention towhat they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Willthey live? Of course not. Is Émile de Girardin alive? Or all the cleverones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One stillreads the "Portraits de Femmes, " of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve wassomething more than a "columnist. " And these folk will be, too, in time!At any rate, they are good enough for the present. 

Who, writing in French or in any language, _outre-mer_, does better, oras well, as Holliday? And where is the peer of Charles S. Brooks in"Hints to Pilgrims"? "Luca Sarto, " the best novel of old Italian life byan American--since Mrs. Wharton's "Valley of Decision"--proved him to bea fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better psychologically thanMrs. Wharton, but here there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, althoughshe is an admirable artist, grows indifferent and insular at longintervals. 

"Luca Sarto" dropped like the gentle rain from heaven; and then came"Hints to Pilgrims. " This I wanted to write about in the _Yale Review_, but the selfish editor, Mr. Cross, said that he preferred to keep it forhimself!

"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern essay. Strangelyenough, it sent me back to the "Colour of Life" by the only real_précieuse_ living in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read thatwith new delight between certain paragraphs in Brooks's paper "OnFinding a Plot. " Why is not "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenthedition? Or why has it no _claque_? The kind of _claque_ that is socommon now--which opens suddenly like a chorus of cicadas in the "Idyllsof Theocritus"? After all, your education must have been well begunbefore you can enjoy "Hints to Pilgrims, " while for "Huckleberry Finn"the less education you have, the better. Mr. Brooks writes:

 Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you think, have cooled her Southern blood? Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot colour always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the Cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's window. 

 We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt. 

 "Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen. " A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neckcloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster. 

You do not find delightful fooling like this every day; and there ismuch more of it. Take this:

 Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment. " Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding--flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass. 

 Oliver Twist and Nancy--merely acquaintances in the original story--with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player of the ships' band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island--observe the cunning of the plot!--who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman--doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then--a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear--tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall. 

When I found Brooks, I felt again the pang of loss, that TheodoreRoosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims, " before he passed into "theother room" and eternal light shone upon him! He would have discovered"Hints to Pilgrims, " and celebrated it as soon as any of us. 

How he loved books! And he seemed to have read all the right things inhis youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talkedwith you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (inwhom he had not much interest, since he was a _gourmet_ and did notregard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents andascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales--andher scales were smoother than Patti's. 

Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery, " and "The Ancient IrishSagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, beforeChristianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love. It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, andhow he fought for them, and explained them, and lived with them. Thinking of him, the most constant of book-lovers, I can only say, "Farewell and Hail!"

THE END

[Transcriber's notes:People using this book as a reference should be aware that some ofthe spelling and quotations are not necessarily accurate. Some obvious printing errors were corrected(gu'une->qu'une p96; natio->nation p223)Consistent archaic spellings of names of people and times were retainedas is. Accenting was not 'corrected'. Some potential printer's errors left as is include:Gaugain may be Gauguin p237 (Paul Gauguin from context)Who the Holliday refered to in chapter V p244 was is unknown. ]