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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions of a Book-Lover, by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Confessions of a Book-Lover
+
+Author: Maurice Francis Egan
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2007 [EBook #24003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elaine Walker, Janet Kegg and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A
+BOOK-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 TRANSLATION
+INTO 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 ACTION
+IN 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 love
+these perennial friends very early in life. It is the only way to know
+all their "curves," all those little shadows of expression and small
+lights. There is a glamour which you never _see_ if you begin to read
+with a serious intention late in life, when questions of technique and
+grammar and mere words begin to seem too important.
+
+Then you have become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's
+verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance
+beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable
+flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a
+friend--if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for even
+the memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever have
+done anything that will make the book you love less precious to you.
+
+The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of
+miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de
+Sévigné that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but Madame de
+Sévigné 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 when
+I was young, I read several books which I was told afterward were very
+bad indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody told me! The
+youthful mind must possess something of the quality attributed to a
+duck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau" was
+snatched suddenly away from me by a careful mother just as I had begun
+to think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as
+queer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had been allowed
+to finish the book, it would have become by some mental chemical process
+a very edifying criticism of life.
+
+"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a pious
+aunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown of
+Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little by
+Little," for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rather
+shocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted to
+my aunt's pronouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a
+dangerous book," by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book I
+had ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when God
+wasn't looking." She sent me home.
+
+At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter
+Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
+attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that
+nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The
+Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a
+good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my
+mental vision every day of my life.
+
+In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and
+carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in
+advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my
+acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the International
+Sunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geography
+of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the
+whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human
+interest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand,
+sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes
+because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever
+may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New
+Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition
+not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In
+my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between
+truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often very
+difficult 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 in
+Heaven for children to do!" As to distractions, the modern child is
+surrounded by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions of
+the present system of instruction not to leave to a child any moments of
+leisure for the indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering the
+example of my childhood for imitation by the modern parents.
+
+Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in those
+days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long
+afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in
+"The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that the
+beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to
+visualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, that
+a sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was not
+necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only
+necessary 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 holiday
+afternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that I
+had to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It was
+worth the trouble, however.
+
+Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother's
+knee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she never
+read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful
+misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never
+considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At
+first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets
+of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There
+is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the
+heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
+of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after
+the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved
+her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no
+noise.
+
+In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in
+_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard
+III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine
+Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been
+listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice
+in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the
+adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo
+carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
+of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of
+Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer
+creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.
+
+There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had
+access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
+Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not
+so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to
+Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the
+latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--the
+shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may
+be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little
+Em'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind
+was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as
+much 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 in
+literature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired
+Queen 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 was
+difficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was
+"proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare she seemed to regard as
+eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she
+came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I
+never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or
+Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference
+which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;
+and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above
+Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray.
+
+_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, for
+instance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--General
+Strothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane of
+my existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to
+me as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me as
+that other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledge
+that all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a day
+with powdered charcoal!
+
+After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory
+reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no
+emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes
+came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed,
+but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George
+Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George
+Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
+stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful
+book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges
+in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales
+about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the
+ordinary common sense of geese!
+
+Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one
+unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from my
+entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this
+day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply
+interested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come as
+in the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school
+books, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday School
+opposite 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 honest
+villain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes
+were very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared to
+them. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hate
+religion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that I
+had Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were
+equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended, were quite as
+uninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They were
+generally translated from the French, without vitality and without any
+regard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down
+one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima." As it
+concerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might be
+in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off the
+ear 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 short
+period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff in
+it; 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 of
+that excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very great
+book. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days of
+Pompeii," I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but
+in some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by Washington
+Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." _Conspuez les livres des poupées!_
+What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, could
+awaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailing
+clouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes the
+pomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates a
+love 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 des
+Bois," by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was a
+horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laborious
+research in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures of
+these infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but I
+know that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctive
+mood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a French
+romance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin." It was of things
+that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with
+an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the
+gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I
+gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have
+been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were
+written by an author named Léon Gozlan.
+
+About this time, the book auction became a fashion in Philadelphia. If
+your people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to a
+publication called the _Cosmopolitan Art Magazine_, and you received a
+steel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh
+very much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet and
+very well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington at
+Lexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequented
+the book auctions. My father had a great respect for what he called
+"classical literature." He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely
+classical; it was beautifully bound, and he never read it. One day he
+secured a lovely edition of the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore." It had
+been a subject of much competition at the auction, and was cherished
+accordingly. The binding was tooled. It was put on the centre table and
+adored as a work of art. Here was richness!
+
+Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed at present as belonging to
+those old and faded gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake," by
+Lady Blessington, once flourished; but if I could only recall the
+pleasure I had in the reading of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet
+of Korhasson," I think I should be very happy. And the notes to "Lalla
+Rookh" and to Moore's prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"
+was not much of a novel, but the notes were full of amazing Egyptian
+mysteries, which seemed quite as splendid as the machinery in the
+"Arabian Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled of roses, and I
+remember as a labour of love copying out all the allusions to roses in
+these notes with the intention of writing about them when I grew up. My
+mother objected to the translations from Anacreon; she said they were
+"improper"; but my father said that he had been assured on competent
+authority that they were "classic," and of course that settled it. There
+was 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 city
+boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the
+arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an
+incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and
+something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our
+Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little
+world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to read her tragedy, "The Two
+Foscari." A tragedy had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic
+for some offense against the conventionalities demanded of a
+Philadelphia child, with no book but Miss Mitford's, I spent my time
+looking up all the references to roses in her tragedies. These I
+combined with the knowledge acquired from Tom Moore, and made notes for
+a 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's
+Journal_, where it may still be found. My parents, who did not look on
+my literary attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with favour,
+suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as I had no time to look up the
+meaning of the word in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me
+as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which every honest artist
+must 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 think
+that 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 string
+that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself to the imitation of
+this economic child, and was very highly praised for getting the best
+out of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very tough
+knot.
+
+It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series of
+Beadle's "Dime Novels." I looked on them as delectable but inferior.
+There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; but
+if you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which
+concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were very
+likely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole,"
+because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account of
+a real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in the
+abdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very
+"indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutely
+forbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was a
+moral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to do
+with leaper, the effect was not very convincing.
+
+Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the
+youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I
+happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where
+Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from
+leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything
+of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of
+the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were
+rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been
+written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir
+Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
+again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas
+Nickleby."
+
+"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter
+afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable
+city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to
+work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a
+kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it
+was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas
+Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which
+generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you
+never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly
+know 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 dignified
+manner of standing with her head on a spear!
+
+The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It was
+necessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike,
+they became great bores. But what young reader of Dickens can forget the
+hostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little Miss
+Kenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one grows
+older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think
+of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was it
+Cortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas
+Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found
+"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two
+Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough
+for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. My
+later impressions of Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions.
+
+One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as I
+remember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and
+read it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for good
+novels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, took
+again to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin and
+Amelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't think
+that the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I was
+delighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot of
+stupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of the
+story that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no mother
+to guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on the
+forehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I was
+unhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book
+with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That
+is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe
+that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.
+
+For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David
+Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that
+I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later--it was on one June
+afternoon I think--when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed
+to me that for a while all delight in life had ended.
+
+One of those experts in psychology who are always seeking questions
+sometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced
+me, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our
+"Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottled
+cardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, when
+I was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual." My
+mother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southern
+tendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party,
+and admired Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the famous
+Vallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion of
+American statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of a
+very different type.
+
+Julius Cæsar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had
+not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar." It seemed to me that Brutus
+was 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 prevent
+me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the
+ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no
+adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a
+convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the
+pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little
+boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost
+suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was
+not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had
+been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades
+covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully
+wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it
+occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the
+night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when
+he 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, I
+knew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a
+last dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On the
+morning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the
+small boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were about
+to be bereaved, and predicted a coming holiday. I was looked on as
+rather "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. The
+bully and his chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The moment had
+come; 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 to
+the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I
+spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were
+incomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, in the
+"Lives."
+
+The next morning I went to school with lessons unstudied and awaited
+events. The mother of the bully appeared, and entered into an excited
+colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. I announced to the
+boy 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's
+coat, 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 total
+depravity; 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 good
+Christian 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 bully
+let me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, which had leaked out,
+gave me such a reputation that I became a dictator myself, and made
+terms for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which were sometimes
+rather despotic.
+
+It was also during these days that I remember carrying confusion into
+the family when a patronizing, intellectual lady called and said, "I
+hope that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo books?" "No," I
+answered quickly and indiscreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by
+Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie Collins until I read
+"The Moonstone." It seemed that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased
+inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "classics."
+
+My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he read
+the evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long
+horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from the
+novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New
+York _Ledger_ by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the
+times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely and
+aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her
+conversion, disapproved of the New York _Ledger_. In fact, there were
+families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In
+our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical,
+which, with many volumes of Godey's _Lady's Book_, were packed in the
+attic.
+
+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 he
+was about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the back
+numbers of the New York _Ledger_ containing a long serial story by Mrs.
+Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the French
+Revolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with a
+description of a dance in an old château, when the Marquise, who was
+floating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
+glove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where the
+blood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find the
+novel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my father
+sent the numbers of the New York _Ledger_ to the apparently dying man.
+"It's a horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any Christian
+person reading the New York _Ledger_ at the point of death." The young
+man, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed his
+recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories.
+
+There were certain other serial stories I was ordered to read; they were
+stories of the Irish Brigade in France. My mother, I remember,
+disapproved of them because Madame de Pompadour was frequently
+mentioned, and she thought that my father regarded the lady in question
+too tolerantly. These romances were, I think, written by a certain Myles
+O'Reilly who was in some way connected with the army. This procedure of
+reading aloud was not always agreeable, as my father frequently went to
+sleep in the middle of a passage and forgot what I had already read. The
+consequence was that I was obliged to begin the same old story over
+again 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 title
+of the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived in Para; I tried to
+manufacture an imitation of the Urari poison with a view to
+exterminating rats in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
+had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced, at intervals, a
+thrilling novel, with the glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a
+background. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I had ever read. He
+held possession of my imagination, until he was forced out by a Mr.
+Jerningham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany. Saint Malo
+became the only town for me; I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and
+the Stuarts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of Sir Walter
+Scott, were displaced by the Vendéans.
+
+Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me to
+parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent.
+They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the
+adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me to overcome.
+
+About this time, my mother began to feel that I needed to read something
+more gentle, which would root me more effectively in my religion. She
+began, I think, with Cardinal Newman's "Callista" in which there was a
+thrilling chapter called "The Possession of Juba." It seemed to me one
+of the most stirring things I had ever read. Then I was presented with
+Mrs. Sadlier's "The Blakes and the Flanagans," which struck me as a very
+delightful satire, and with a really interesting novel of New York
+called "Rosemary," by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a terribly
+blood-curdling story of the Carbonari in Italy, called "Lionello." After
+this I was wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh; "Natalie,"
+and "Bessie," and "Seven Years," I think were the principals. My father
+declined to read them; he thought they were too sentimental, but as the
+author had an Irish name he was inclined to regard them with tolerance.
+He thought I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom and Jerry; or
+The Adventures of Corinthian Bob," by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to
+this, 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 of
+Froissart for two dollars and a half at an old book stand on Fifth
+Street, near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world during the
+Christmas holidays. After breakfast, I saturated myself with the
+delightful battles in that precious book.
+
+My principal duty was to look after the front pavement. In the spring
+and summer, it was carefully washed twice a week and reddened with some
+kind of paint, which always accompanied a box of fine white sand for the
+scouring of the marble steps; but in the winter, this respectable
+sidewalk 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--or
+in the "square," as we Philadelphians called it. Now it became irksome;
+I neglected to dig the ice from between the bricks; I skimped my
+cleaning of the gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums." The boy next door
+became a mirror of virtue; he was quoted to me as one whose pavement was
+a model to all the neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the Mayor
+passing down our street, had stopped and admired the working of his
+civic spirit, while the result of my efforts was passed by with evident
+contempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart to my heart. Who would
+condescend to wield a broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward of
+ten cents in cash, when he could throw javelins and break lances with
+the knights of the divine Froissart? The end of my freedom came after
+this. The terrible incident of the Mayor's contempt, invented, I
+believe, by the boy next door, induced my mother to believe that I was
+not only losing my morals, but becoming too much of a book-worm. For
+many long weeks I was deprived of any amusing book except "Robinson
+Crusoe." After this interval, vacation came; I seemed to have grown
+older, and books were never quite the same again.
+
+In the vacation, however, when the days were very long and there was a
+great deal of leisure, I found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales"
+and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault, and I was even then very
+much struck by the difference. Of course I read Grimm from cover to
+cover, and went back again over the pages, hoping that I had neglected
+something. The homeliness of the stories touched me; it seemed to me
+that you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany. Madame
+Perrault was more delicate; her fairy tales were pictures of no life
+that ever existed, and there was a great dissimilarity between her
+"Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of "Aschenputtel." As I remember, the
+haughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among the
+ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seem
+smaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's
+slipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in
+_her_ fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no
+such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this
+vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy
+with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in
+Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I
+think I liked him best of all.
+
+That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in
+the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No
+doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of
+scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never
+discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were
+very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never
+was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the
+Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful
+experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be
+expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers
+coming 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 done
+something for his soul.
+
+There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be
+to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were
+persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one
+opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
+episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I
+preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
+devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered
+somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a
+fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was
+"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the
+stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he
+disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere
+prejudice.
+
+The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likes
+to read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myself
+one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon,
+and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale not
+so edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seized
+the book at once. My father was informed of what had occurred. He was
+little alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change the
+whole course of this boy's reading." "We shall have to change the boy
+first," my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At the
+proper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. The
+book was presented to him for destruction.
+
+"It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk about
+any of these stories to the other boys in school?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say much worse things, and I
+would probably have to tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all
+the people in the Boccaccio book were good Catholics, I suppose, as they
+were Italians, and I think, after all, when they caught the plague, they
+died good deaths."
+
+The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and gave me his blessing and
+dismissed me. And my mother seemed to think that I was sufficiently
+exorcised.
+
+After this the books I read were more carefully considered. I was given
+the "Tales of Canon Schmidt"--dear little stories of German children in
+the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, which went very well
+with another volume I found at this time called "Jack Halifax," not
+"John Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had already read to me--but a
+curious little tome long out of print. And then there sailed upon my
+vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish novelist, Hendrik
+Conscience, whose "Lion of Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and
+there were "Wooden Clara," and other pieces which made one feel as if
+one 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; but
+these were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may not have been
+much of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "The
+Virginians" or "Esmond." They were what my father called
+"classics"--things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" was
+quite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionary
+history, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. I
+recall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her
+thumb to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This is
+all that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neither
+Henry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemed
+to have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."
+
+After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through a
+book, 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 Henri
+de la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists,
+and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned the
+compliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayette
+a great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the beautiful Marie
+Antoinette!
+
+When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed, as the result
+of my reading, a great belief in all lost causes. I had become
+exceedingly devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor had
+sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an
+antidote to the lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather troubled
+to find so many "swear words" in it, but I made all the allowances that
+a real lover of literature is often compelled to make!
+
+
+_The Bible_
+
+The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, as
+a moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable
+value. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read it
+constantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version and
+the King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learned
+to recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King James
+version--which I always read when I went to one of my cousins--I found
+the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time I
+was limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as it
+was considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testament
+unexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raised
+for some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a great
+deal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and histories of the
+Old Testament. I soon discovered that it was impossible to understand
+the allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible.
+What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had never
+known the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field,
+permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume if
+one knew nothing about the Song of Solomon.
+
+Putting aside the question as to whether young readers should be let
+loose in the Old Testament or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
+justified in including ignorance as the supremest virtue, he who does
+not make himself familiar with Biblical ideas and phraseology finds
+himself in after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. It used
+to be said of the typical English gentleman that all he needed to know
+was to ride after the hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
+absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most moderns. To construe
+Horace, of course, meant that he should have at least a speaking
+acquaintance with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature, and this
+knowledge gave him a grip on the universal speech of all cultivated
+people. However useless his allusions to Chloë and to Mæcenas were in
+the business of practical life, he was at least able to understand what
+they meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the Latins stamped him
+as speaking the speech of a gentleman.
+
+Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is fitted with allusions that
+clarify and illuminate the ordinary speech. He may not have any
+technical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may be so great as to
+debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but
+his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a
+colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace.
+Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a
+measure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make life
+endurable.
+
+Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. Even the poets often now
+assume that Clytie is a name that requires an explanation and that
+Daphne and her flight through the laurel do not bring up immediate
+memories of Syrinx and the reeds. The Dictionary of Lamprière is covered
+with dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid without an answering
+glance of comprehension from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;
+it is only that, in the modern system, the old mythology is not taken
+very seriously.
+
+Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be a necessary part of a
+gentleman's education, there is no class of allusions from which we can
+draw to lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we turn to the
+Bible. This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders it
+rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young
+people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a
+rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a
+Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when
+he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost
+sure to speak of Jonah and the whale!
+
+It is disappointing to notice this gradual change that has taken place
+in the attitude of the younger generation toward the Sacred Book. The
+Sunday Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies of importance
+and to overload the memories of their little disciples with a multitude
+of texts, or to over-explain every allusion in the terms of physical
+geography, etc., may in a measure be responsible for this, but they
+cannot be entirely responsible. One must admit that diversities of
+interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a religious point of view
+will always be an obstacle to their use in schools where the children of
+Jews, of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian denominations
+assemble. But there is always the home, where the first impetus to a
+satisfactory knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. The decay
+of the practice of reading aloud in our homes is very evident in the
+lack of real culture--or, rather, rudiments of real culture--in our
+children. 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 gave
+me a background against which I could see the trend of the books I
+devoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them;
+besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for a
+boy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standard
+by which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expression
+of life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamations
+full of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love,
+in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple
+stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which
+has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting
+adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It
+is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and
+I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter
+writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Cæsar,
+and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They
+may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of
+their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more
+you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human
+he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes
+it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission
+has always been a great delight to me!
+
+Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phases
+of 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 seemed
+only natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination from
+God. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is a
+miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of a
+miracle 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 and
+plead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generally
+right. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who could
+speak to the Greeks in their own language.
+
+Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple of
+Huxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible
+which was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and with
+the 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 modern
+time, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretation
+of the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith which
+St. Paul preached.
+
+Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delight
+the letters of Madame de Sévigné, I put her second as a writer of
+letters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to his
+sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to Dead
+Authors," and a very great letter I found in an English translation of
+Balzac's "Le Lys dans la Vallée."
+
+It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with
+these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often
+reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take
+money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he
+worked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was very
+grateful to Phœbe for remembering that he was a hungry man and in
+need of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengers
+Aquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking them
+from Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able to
+make their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had not
+interfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked
+"Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesus
+were as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleased
+that his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. I
+always felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus would
+give him a better chance of supporting himself.
+
+That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries in his youth, one easily
+guessed. It was plain, too, that he had had the best possible
+instructors, and I liked to believe, when I was young, that his muscles
+had been well trained in the sports of gentlemen of his class.
+Altogether, so graphic were his descriptions and so potent his
+personality that, while Julius Cæsar and Brutus receded, he filled the
+foreground, and all the more because at this time I picked up an English
+translation of Suetonius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as I
+had 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, and
+I found St. Luke very good reading, though I often wished that, as I
+understood he had some reputation as an artist, he had adorned his
+writings with illustrations.
+
+It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote in
+English, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different from
+one another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great part
+of my time in classes where Nepos and Cæsar were translated by my dear
+young friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator,
+I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of the
+translators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had no
+interest whatever in the translations which we made daily for the
+impatient ears of our instructors!
+
+One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because he was such a good
+fighter. When he said he fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these
+beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons who persecuted and
+contradicted him. No obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too,
+although he called things by their right names and his denunciations
+were so vivid and mouthfilling that you knew his enemies must have been
+afraid to open their lips while he was near them, whatever they might
+have said behind his back.
+
+My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at school
+when discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended to
+conversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it came
+to my turn I answered "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
+Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander
+the Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I was
+looked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, and
+he asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, coming
+suddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought with
+beasts." This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dear
+comrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer for
+it as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they
+discovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next composition
+day, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "being
+filled with all iniquity," and other evil things which brought down a
+horrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such
+plain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I was
+only quoting St. Paul to the Romans.
+
+Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. Be that as it may, I
+regarded him as a very good friend indeed, for some of his "language,"
+quoted in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on one's
+enemies than any swear word that could be invented. I am not excusing my
+attitude toward the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected my
+youthful mind. There was something extremely romantic in the very
+phrase, "the tumult of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to mean a
+whole chapter of a novel in itself.
+
+And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have a
+sympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, on
+its way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiable
+barbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help liking
+the Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was a
+Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him of
+chastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given him
+by Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
+seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! He
+rendered unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. And one could easily
+imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered into
+the hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city!
+And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, through
+the 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 the
+King Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautiful
+Bernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finally
+they did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity and
+exquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paul
+went to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the very
+fineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment.
+"This man," I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set at
+liberty, if he had not appealed to Cæsar."
+
+It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet Micheas, who had
+previously 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 with
+the fulfilments of the New were interesting, and I found great pleasure
+in 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, by
+some reference or other in another book, to read the twenty-third psalm
+of David, in the King James version. It struck me as much more simple
+and 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 have
+looked on as dangerous any attempt to ally English literature with the
+Bible--I soon discovered that nearly everything I read owed something to
+the Bible. At first, the comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the
+King James version enraptured me so much that I began to find fault with
+the Latinized phrases of the Vulgate in English. It was the fashion in
+the early seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in the
+little group at school interested in English literature. Street cars at
+this time were comparatively new in Philadelphia, and I think we reached
+the last extremity of Saxonism in speech when we spoke of them as "folk
+wains." The tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred the Book
+of Job and the story of Ruth in the Latinized version, because the words
+were more mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to translate
+everything into a bald "early English medium", which for a time I had
+been 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 of
+Isaiah. The Latinized medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; and
+then, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes in the Douai version
+than in the King James. In both versions, some passages were so obscure
+that I often wondered how anybody could get any meaning out of them. I
+was often astonished to find in English novels that the old people in
+the cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great length, out of
+which 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 live
+book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at the same time--if anybody had
+asked me whether, being marooned on an island, I should have most
+preferred 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 Ancient
+Rome," would have suited me better, provided, of course, that I could
+have chosen only one book.
+
+It was borne in on me many times that no author could improve on the
+phrasing of the Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James versions
+there are passages which, leaving aside all question of doctrine, it is
+sacrilege to try to improve. The French translation of the Bible is, as
+everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that may account for the fact
+that, while regarded as a precious depository of doctrine, it is not a
+household book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations of Clement
+Marot--called hymns--naturally bored a people who, in their hearts,
+believe that God listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the
+language of the Academy! In their novels, dealing with the beginnings of
+Christianity--and there are many such novels in French unknown in other
+countries--it is hard for a French author not to be rhetorical, in the
+manner 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 words
+of 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 persons
+existing--happily, they have all gone to the great beyond--who thought
+that the "talented" author could have done better!
+
+
+_Essays and Essayists_
+
+I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerous
+reading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptist
+friends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading of
+Emerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parish
+never denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offered
+his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to these
+objections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading of
+my boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parents
+and guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain books
+made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so in
+words, 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 early
+edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts and
+to 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 close
+together, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did not
+get so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked the
+lessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when he
+mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I was
+amiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege of
+studying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on the
+subject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and,
+from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found out
+his mistake.
+
+Perhaps I might have been better engaged in reading the more practical
+books offered to boys in our own time, if we had had them. There were
+some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to the comprehension of
+the young; but not so many as there are now. One of my uncles
+recommended the works of Samuel Smiles--"Self-Help" I think was his
+favourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed to me. My small allowance,
+paid weekly, could not have been affected by "Thrift", and when my uncle
+quoted passages from this tiresome book I astounded him by replying, in
+a phrase I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, that if I had a
+quarter to spend instead of twelve cents, I would give half of it for a
+hyacinth! My miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed, and that
+Emerson had doubtless found it in that dangerous book, the Koran.
+
+I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays of
+Emerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be really
+American; in the second, and largely because of their quality, they
+offered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which had
+succeeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money and
+luxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, where
+simple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and moved
+away into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumour
+that some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagant
+expenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
+stopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of our
+old-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. For
+the first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as the
+principal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons were
+classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferous
+atmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As to
+his philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than the
+religious opinions of Julius Cæsar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged
+to read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay.
+
+By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. The inflation of his style
+did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis." That
+on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimately
+to the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto,
+"Tread the lilies under foot." I was for the Bourbons! The French
+Revolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (in
+Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had lived
+through the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probably
+the same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whose
+connections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk to
+Fabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list of
+the condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substituting
+in 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 of
+our family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up and
+down Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief,
+bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believed
+that he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
+We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in our
+neighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured
+every line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. It
+seemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out of
+my life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescued
+Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed
+impossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friends
+who went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie de
+Buxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whose
+letters lie before me as I write.
+
+In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul
+Richter, 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 an
+unreal and lurid book.
+
+Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had
+from 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, he
+reminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott's
+Catherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was an
+unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he
+seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
+which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I
+cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without
+believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So
+much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long
+thoughts 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 it
+only as the world? Give me the old volume of Montaigne and a loaf of
+bread--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 wild
+place! I did not, of course, know, in those early days, what in his
+flavour attracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the very flavour
+and essence of Old France. Carlyle's impressions of historical persons
+interested me, but Montaigne was the most actual of living persons who
+spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly his. To be sure, I read
+him in Florio's translation.
+
+I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modern
+writer, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who
+contributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazine
+called the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and
+Bismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that he
+wrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were so
+interesting and apparently so true that they really became part of my
+life. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of all
+modern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, I
+should have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le
+Sabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared to
+an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip's
+Church at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth.
+Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series of
+sketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like
+other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like
+those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and
+purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken
+out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with
+pleasure 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 the
+Mast." "Walden" I learned to like, but I much preferred Fenimore
+Cooper's description of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book of a man
+playing at out-of-doors, imagining his wildness, and never really liking
+to be too far from the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I
+discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that I began to see that nature
+had beauties in all weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature
+alone never appealed to me. A landscape without human beings seemed
+deadly dull; and I did not understand until I grew much older that I had
+really believed that good art was an improvement on nature.
+
+I have not the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see the
+works of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels
+recently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity and
+what one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as to
+the relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp." I recall
+vividly 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's
+studio and I knew so well from my experience in the drawing classes at
+school, how nature was neglected for artificial models, that I hailed
+these words with great joy.
+
+Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for the
+Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes the
+beginning of the æsthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It may
+seem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts in
+Godey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and an
+occasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of the
+chromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every
+self-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, very
+good casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. My
+father greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had been
+celebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it as
+almost "improper."
+
+Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia, wanted not exactly
+something better, but something more vivid. There were few sports; long
+walks and a little cricket supplied the place of the coming baseball and
+tennis.
+
+In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of his weekly walks with Mr.
+Edward Roth, the head of a military school and the author of "Christus
+Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an occasional row on the
+Schuylkill with him as the best part of my education. But this was
+later. All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, was to walk and
+talk and read.
+
+The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. The
+beginning 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 lately
+read "Jane Eyre." This added interest to the volume, and there came the
+details of the invention of the new hut, intended to be a shelter
+against all weathers, so that the artist might study nature on intimate
+terms. 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 the
+heather changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our pet place of
+beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or river if you like, was not the same
+every day in the year except when the ice bound it! This may seem a
+rather stupid state of mind; but it is the stupidity that is very
+common. I could understand how interesting it would be to be in
+snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton thus described his
+hut:
+
+     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 of
+the Clouds," and the little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset,
+Sept. 23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before struck me that Loch
+Awe was different on September 23, 1860, from what it was at other
+times, or--to carry the idea further--that the imperial Delaware had
+changed since that momentous time when George Washington crossed it, or
+the 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 at
+Rest." Hamerton, who is probably now very much out of fashion, taught me
+the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an accessory to Emerson, the
+philosophy of enjoying the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who,
+I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; and I still think that
+there can be no better introduction to a consideration of the relation
+of 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 passage
+in Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" that emphasized the need
+of 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 "The
+Intellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic,
+as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. For
+instance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty was
+unfavourable to the intellectual life! It was enlightening to know the
+reason why a man should wear evening dress after six o'clock, and why
+the sporting of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of the
+Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character!
+
+And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished
+Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful
+self-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 pages
+which were intensely stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they
+like; 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 this
+Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's Camp" ought to be
+included in every list of books.
+
+It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following of Christ," and she
+interested me in Saint Teresa, that illustrious woman so well compounded
+of mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, I could find no good
+"Life." But Thomas à Kempis was a revelation! He fitted into nearly
+every 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 came
+to understand that the counsel of perfection which Christ gave to the
+rich young man was not intended for the whole world, and many fine
+passages in À Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than my own.
+
+Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. I
+found him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with À Kempis. His
+philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a
+very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my
+English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he
+said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even
+philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the
+works of Marcus Aurelius!"
+
+It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little
+plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art
+of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a
+very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book
+itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always
+seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by
+Ruskin 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 "The
+Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to
+form 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, probably
+because it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find a
+copy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found one
+most unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discovered
+the copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just half
+of my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. I
+must have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for I
+had 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-felt
+want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No
+doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might
+have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and
+art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately
+tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.
+
+By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made
+apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double
+and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real
+violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a
+bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green
+ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the
+effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
+to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was
+artificial, 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 book
+happens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is a
+great temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that I
+think that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must
+be judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me to
+acquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art and
+life. 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 volumes
+that graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of the
+Cathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to being
+prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find
+some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and
+pigments before he began to paint with the pen.
+
+Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which
+we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little
+by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for
+those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which
+shock 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. These
+were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
+the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
+of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
+interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
+letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eugénie and her
+coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
+literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
+Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.
+
+One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile
+Library--now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
+size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as to
+its shelves--had an excellent collection of volumes in French.
+
+How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that
+library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
+Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided
+by the critics of the period. I found Amédée Achard as interesting as
+Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even
+"La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending
+her for her "vitality." I found Madame de Gérardin's "La Femme qui
+Déteste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not
+seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed
+to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest
+and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by
+Octave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne
+Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seiglière," by Jules
+Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of
+their predecessors.
+
+At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte de
+Chambord--Henry V., as a few of us preferred to call him. And this
+reminds me of my partisanship in things English--if I may turn for the
+moment 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 time
+attached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in England
+invariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, to
+indicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small and
+frugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host--he
+was an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant--insisted on waving
+his glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were
+drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water--whoever he might
+be--and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutal
+Hanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, might
+be still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of Mary
+Stuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary of
+Scotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!
+
+Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
+not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
+suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
+suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
+corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
+admirably correct.
+
+Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
+dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
+seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
+seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
+excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
+Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
+attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
+Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
+did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
+acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
+his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
+recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
+it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
+these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
+mentioned with rapt admiration.
+
+But to come to the poets!
+
+It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
+that I discovered Maurice de Guérin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
+from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Guérin on the ground
+of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
+account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
+looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
+negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
+Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
+find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
+Testament at times.
+
+Keats and Maurice de Guérin will be always associated in my mind. I
+discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
+eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
+considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
+whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
+intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural
+selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then
+all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Guérin.
+
+I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister
+Eugénie. 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 Marie
+Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
+calm life of Eugénie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to
+understand 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 me
+the 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 all
+my Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and
+all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not
+occur to me then--at least I did not know it--that the great Greek
+statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that
+glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure"
+seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with
+human emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of the
+opening? 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 de
+Guérin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sister
+together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate
+and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice
+loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read
+the Journals of the De Guérins, I had leisure. A period of ill health
+stopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days that
+could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring
+days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these
+two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought
+to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for
+quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing
+the impression that Maurice de Guérin made. It was a great surprise to
+find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt
+Whitman, 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--sketches
+which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any
+pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
+able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
+human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
+came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
+other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
+letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.
+
+As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
+world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
+pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eugénie de Guérin had a
+living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on
+Maurice de Guérin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
+sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
+written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
+sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
+piety should be sentimental, if Eugénie's sentiment can be characterized
+by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was evident that
+any one who read French literature at all must be aware that there were
+hundreds 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 even
+more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugénie, being
+less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
+sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
+sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
+the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
+sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
+charm of Eugénie de Guérin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
+landscape, 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 a
+little space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short
+outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in
+this; but Eugénie de Guérin exemplifies its value much more than any
+other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
+joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing
+this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to
+recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_
+which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent
+amusements.
+
+The devotion of Eugénie de Guérin to her brother resembles that of
+Madame de Sévigné for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George
+Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her
+characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the
+Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De
+Guérin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the reading
+of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now probably
+forgotten, and to go back to Keats.
+
+After Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek
+than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guérin,
+and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
+life; 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 is
+too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved,
+while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of
+a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for
+the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.
+When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was
+not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.
+The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal
+laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to
+study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry
+Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot
+have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected
+after his best verse had been written.
+
+Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in his
+religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director,
+Père de Lamennais--the "M. Féli" of the little paradise of la Chénie. To
+the delight of some of the more independent and emancipated of the
+literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice was
+becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to
+make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost
+equally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain, although it did not
+change 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 singing
+poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
+"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
+great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual.
+Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
+conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
+talk." Eugénie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
+enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
+Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Trébutien's
+"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guérin." It would be folly
+for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the
+atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
+delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
+Eugénie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
+feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
+beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"
+
+One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
+from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
+this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
+imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
+the 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 admirers
+of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
+secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
+Maurice de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
+common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
+the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
+his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
+this!--Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame de Sévigné,
+Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
+related.
+
+In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
+not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
+that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
+take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
+who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.
+
+The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the
+dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while
+they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite
+process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
+honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen
+in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this
+teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and
+obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman
+Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
+to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived
+and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
+Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make
+the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the
+Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted
+were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the
+glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!
+
+The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard
+work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guérin's "Centaure," to read
+joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While
+browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of
+Tourguéneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found
+Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has
+now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of
+Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these
+poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the
+hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from
+Oxford 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 he
+had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect,
+treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in
+merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
+poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases,
+very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and
+partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence
+Stedman 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 in
+English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
+in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
+swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
+delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
+degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
+extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
+against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
+the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
+silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
+Sicilian 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 chiselled
+sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
+the 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 he
+known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
+rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
+poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
+Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
+sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
+heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
+Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
+paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
+_enragé_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
+confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
+even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
+a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
+thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
+prairie.
+
+
+_Dante_
+
+A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may
+find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is
+dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous
+tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
+once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two
+conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.
+"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of
+reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On
+the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous
+books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the
+windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."
+
+Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the
+winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's
+"Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially in
+country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many
+journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have
+taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.
+Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably
+learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of
+this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good
+books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.
+
+The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
+proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
+talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
+enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
+height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
+capable 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 rimed
+translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
+growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
+are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
+the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
+wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
+order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
+one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
+necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
+enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
+the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
+valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
+occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
+"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
+contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
+English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
+Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
+translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
+the 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 death
+and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
+means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the
+green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was
+the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen
+souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific
+Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
+in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts
+of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on
+as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the
+"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any
+sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church
+Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that
+all 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 to
+that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the
+Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict
+Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their
+Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the
+merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and
+of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or
+sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in
+this world.
+
+And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant,
+among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and
+opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the
+Voltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in Hell!
+And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this
+Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the
+way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time,
+is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents of
+Constantine's donation were mediæval forgeries. Dante believed, however,
+that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being
+of 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 the
+Faithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as in
+the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the
+Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book,
+suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So
+may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming
+under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?
+
+Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor
+does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There
+is 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 the
+better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in
+modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added
+the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--the
+musical 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 Pope
+Gregory that saved Trajan.
+
+When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we
+find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The
+"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For
+instance, 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 his
+widow 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 may
+long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul
+in 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 the
+victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
+three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought
+guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
+says,
+
+    _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 his
+generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It
+is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great
+reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are
+hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever
+the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest
+in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his
+portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"
+with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace
+into something very beautiful, was new.
+
+We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson
+while we were not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures which
+he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They
+were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that
+the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our
+eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
+Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is
+the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality,
+a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and
+scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a
+Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The
+result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the
+man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary
+expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is
+of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
+they 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 Arthur
+Quiller-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 rapidly
+becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
+Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
+might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
+emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
+before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
+into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
+jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
+the 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 more
+splendid and appealing?
+
+The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
+itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
+were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
+requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
+is beyond the touch of time. The women in François Villon's "Ballade of
+Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
+beauty 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 it
+was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
+that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
+perhaps eternal.
+
+Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
+is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
+damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
+singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
+sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
+and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
+produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
+or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
+intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
+age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
+discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
+León; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
+attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
+revolutionists.
+
+The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a
+high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear
+for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the
+use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but
+they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she
+has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and
+even splendid. But there are others!
+
+It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read
+Coventry 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 the
+proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The
+Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and
+Sleep," 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 is
+a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each
+stanza. 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" is
+merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would
+be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent
+through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of
+rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of
+sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely
+accessory 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 of
+academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the
+slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real
+success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
+hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical
+poets 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, and
+even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
+Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
+tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
+Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
+masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
+fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
+of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
+Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
+Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
+rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
+hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
+action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
+the thought.
+
+But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
+perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
+poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
+some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
+outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
+Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
+compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
+unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
+neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
+her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
+throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
+on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.
+
+It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English
+Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the
+time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at
+all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the
+odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English
+Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has
+freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied
+charm, 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 the
+opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect
+expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the
+intangible "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 is
+not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.
+
+Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse
+which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
+imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
+been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
+indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
+repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
+is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
+of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
+established 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 time
+that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
+curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted
+the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that
+Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that
+"Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not
+detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons
+brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?
+
+And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
+Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
+been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
+ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
+young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
+Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
+much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
+Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
+of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
+Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
+Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
+devout 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 imitate
+him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
+easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
+dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
+with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
+poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some
+noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
+passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
+existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
+gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
+improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
+carved 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, though
+they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
+was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
+passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
+few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.
+
+Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could
+meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts
+in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us
+represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the
+Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another
+thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a
+marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.
+
+Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had
+a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after
+verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a
+breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across
+the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I
+wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or
+Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or
+even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the
+choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And
+there 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 beginning
+to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
+lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
+Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
+want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
+young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
+private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
+cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
+advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
+astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
+Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
+their aftermath, the æsthetic poets, really got more colour and
+amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
+of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blasé and cynical
+and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
+many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.
+
+Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights
+and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In
+England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than
+Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the
+English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they
+wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.
+
+I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
+Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
+never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
+_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
+for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
+"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
+amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
+closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
+obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
+"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
+Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
+cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
+trifle!
+
+    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 he
+hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans,
+Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo
+accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the
+New.
+
+When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully
+examined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue and
+explanations, 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 la
+Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as
+an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to
+say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his
+cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of
+modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about
+an old-fashioned aëroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
+centre of something interesting.
+
+The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear
+and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the
+very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the
+principle 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 appeal
+to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary
+to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw
+in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the
+poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good
+example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it
+is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not
+ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the
+expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is
+certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings
+of 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 her
+contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the
+professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and
+angry 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, but
+who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as
+an 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 character
+might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to
+ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all,
+when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the
+Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of
+Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse
+unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
+series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven
+of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
+Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.
+
+Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
+it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
+is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
+relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
+could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
+Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
+poets, 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 mediæval
+knights cut out of pasteboard.
+
+By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
+statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
+modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
+test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
+different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
+those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
+"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
+cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
+Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
+Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
+Kreymborg and others new--_chacun à son goût_--I feel that by comparison
+with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because
+they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.
+
+Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
+shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
+neither 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 than
+Shakespeare, in "Julius Cæsar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
+Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
+really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
+religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
+themselves.
+
+If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
+he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
+the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
+painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
+the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
+them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
+Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
+poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
+efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
+which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
+Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
+struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
+Christianity 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 a
+statuette of Leda and the Swan or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as a
+shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
+blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
+a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
+beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
+impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
+unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
+past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
+write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
+very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
+the pulsations of the hearts of others.
+
+Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
+shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
+believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
+to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
+Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
+Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
+manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
+illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.
+
+Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love
+in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be
+united with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.
+They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that
+ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the
+mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.
+
+Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but
+in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the
+search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the
+splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost
+fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of
+Saint 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 poets
+pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a
+corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious
+colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a
+pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.
+
+To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this
+seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;
+and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity
+did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante,
+in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that
+the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of
+gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when
+Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks
+were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers
+represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their
+lives.
+
+The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from
+despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome
+came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had
+children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any
+god 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 be
+united 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 a
+man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CERTAIN NOVELISTS
+
+
+My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens was an evolution rather than a
+discovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby," the
+book became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimes
+felt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not know
+him!
+
+Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and that
+chuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian guide
+introduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joys
+indeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind of
+humour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities of
+Artemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.
+Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages, my pleasure in the
+works 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 a
+time. 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 human
+interest, a lack of coarseness, which placed it immeasurably above that
+of Mark Twain.
+
+The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the
+greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens
+redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and
+deeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds
+apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I
+know persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they could
+in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as a
+masterpiece.
+
+It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests his
+narrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack of
+knowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for an
+appearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual.
+That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kind
+friend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many other
+authors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easily
+understood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain.
+
+Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very different
+causes. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of an
+understanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
+spirituality without which no great work can be effective. It was
+because Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his
+study of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from the
+point 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 new
+to him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel is
+nevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with a
+France that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as the
+mauve tints through which certain artists see their figures and
+landscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
+lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of a
+great power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without that
+training which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sources
+of French history.
+
+In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the power to reach the
+sources; it was an inability to understand the character of the woman
+whom he reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and an invincible
+ignorance of the character of her time. Mark Twain was modern; but
+modern in the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry Finn" and the
+other young Americans--whom our youth are expected to like, if not to
+imitate--are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those libraries who
+recommend typical books to eager juvenile readers. But let that pass for
+the moment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any man or woman of
+refinement who will hold a brief in defense of the vulgarity of "A
+Connecticut 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 world
+over--cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The average American
+reads Mark Twain only to be amused, or to recall the adventures of a
+time not far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, whether my
+compatriots are in the habit of looking into books for a philosophy or
+not, or of considering the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it
+does not follow that it is to their credit if they neglect an analysis
+which cultivated readers in other countries seldom omit.
+
+If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety
+which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but
+as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions,
+I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American
+reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has
+become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a
+time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all
+self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of
+culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's
+statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not
+think that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or of
+Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more
+pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of
+Autolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"
+
+"You who admire Don Quixote," said an infuriated Mark Twainite, "should
+not talk of coarseness. There are pages in that romance of Cervantes
+which I would not allow my son or daughter to read."
+
+One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side to
+show what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
+is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were not
+his. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not mean
+innocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admit
+that the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was no
+conspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness,
+however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither
+Cervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.
+
+To them, even the ordinary things of life have a certain sacerdotal
+quality; but Mark Twain abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors
+a vacuum. To say that he has affected the American spirit or the
+American heart would be to go too far--for Americans are irreverent only
+on the surface. It seems to me that they are the most reverent people in
+the world toward those essential qualities which make up the spiritual
+parts of life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is just at present
+the one author to whom all Europe and all outlanders point as the great
+typical American writer!
+
+That a delightful kind of American humour may exist without
+exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many
+joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that
+are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm
+and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the
+American 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, so
+pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the
+knowledge 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 was
+during 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 the
+maze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrived
+just when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was the
+only real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine as
+the sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed from
+the earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not be
+forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived.
+
+Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had in
+the past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one of
+the most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" was
+one of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a better
+novel 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 be
+forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
+professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
+succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
+pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
+talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
+memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
+remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phœbe Junior"--finds a slowly
+decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
+"Les Rois en Exilé" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
+literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
+"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
+to be unread.
+
+To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially
+bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series
+is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo
+books to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracy
+which the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes adapted to
+the subway is supposed to indicate, is a real menace when one discovers
+that "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!
+
+We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity, but it is my belief that
+Sodom and Gomorrah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of that
+time had made it possible to keep books like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" in
+general circulation!
+
+It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as long as English men and
+women of the upper and middle classes continued to exist, he might go on
+writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And the same thing might be
+said of Booth Tarkington in relation to his unique chronicles of
+youth--that is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal Soul. His
+types are American, but there are Americas and Americas. Usage permits
+us to use a term for our part of the continent to which our Canadian and
+South and Central Americans and Mexicans might reasonably object; but
+while 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 in
+Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances would have made him
+different. The consciousness of class distinction would have made him
+old before his time; and though he might be just as amusing--he would
+not have been amusing quite in the same way.
+
+And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. Tarkington's imaginative
+synthesis. He is individual and of his own soil; he knows very well that
+it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to invent; he has only to
+perceive with those rare gifts of perception which he possesses. It all
+seems so easy until you try to do it yourself!
+
+The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageant
+of the "Table Round," is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but
+no child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child has
+suffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainable
+hardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something or
+other prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parents
+are bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibres
+of his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrod
+has gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be so
+unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"
+Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real as
+those parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens is
+pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybody
+admits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
+to be pathetic.
+
+One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful situations which
+seem to ripple from the pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being
+the 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's
+entrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's best. Penrod is expected to
+find, according to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the
+cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young lady unengaged, who
+was Miss Rennsdale, aged eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his
+call.
+
+     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 have
+so conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
+gets it just right. He has created boy characters which will live
+because they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after Mark
+Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's "Child's
+History of England." The two books have various gross faults in common
+and these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
+says 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 do
+very 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 no
+reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
+papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
+defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
+for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
+fact 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, the
+more modern definition would have been very different from what the
+English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
+a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
+England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
+by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
+exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
+Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
+thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
+often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
+analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
+was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
+if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
+gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
+Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
+Weller. Why not?
+
+There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes,
+which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms
+of the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out,
+though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lower
+classes of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because they
+are satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Weller
+represents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's
+"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When one
+examines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
+lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the
+English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all
+conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be
+a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor
+Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say
+it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions as Dickens was.
+
+Dickens had the art of making insupportable bores most interesting. This
+was an art in which the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but
+Dickens's methods compared to hers are like those of a scene painter
+when compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times when
+Dickens is consciously "common," and then he is almost unbearable; but
+this objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers." This book is
+inartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not
+grow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They are
+spontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes
+to do--and all the world loves a lover who loves his work.
+
+There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate the
+romantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby." There are no really romantic
+qualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero,
+no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom
+suddenly as the branch in "Tannhäuser" bloomed. Even Dickens can work no
+miracle there.
+
+It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of those
+gentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as his
+predecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "Tristram
+Shandy," a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones," very
+tiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of
+eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was
+brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
+and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian
+Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
+analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance
+between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the
+adventures of the peerless Pickwick.
+
+If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, he
+ought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The Poor
+Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias," and others too
+numerous to mention.
+
+The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows older, perhaps becomes a
+student of Dickens, and is surprised to find that the development of
+Dickens is much more marked and easily noted than the development of
+Thackeray. In fact, Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier,
+sprang into the public light fully equipped and fully armed. Both these
+men had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportion
+before they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art and
+life and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
+begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither method nor proportion; and he
+who reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new and
+good perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically,
+it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks that
+flavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get such
+thorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens
+sacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in it
+that gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles
+or of 'Tilda Price.
+
+Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography," which ought to be a textbook
+in all those practical classes of literature that work to turn out
+self-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of a
+novel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot in
+the works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt to
+summarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
+
+Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
+read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
+an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
+and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
+thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
+1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
+Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
+Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
+find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
+and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
+was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
+almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
+read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
+winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
+bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
+had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
+a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
+chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!
+
+George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. No
+well-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
+Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. The
+heroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, but
+she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificiality
+of Kingsley's "Hypatia," which I read at almost the same time, made me
+admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth could
+ever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or Catherine
+Seton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring with
+Blackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholastic
+philosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consommé_ of St.
+Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemed
+truer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as
+_papier-maché_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of the
+time. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history,
+but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and
+as "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's reading
+of Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, of
+course. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and the
+scene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel,
+give me "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and probably fewer will
+read it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the genius
+of a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that it
+almost 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 that
+whenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. In
+a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. It
+is true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not
+very narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of the
+most pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all his
+life is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, or
+to preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommend
+unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature have
+undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools
+of critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; and
+the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval and
+condemnation. 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 it
+is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a
+book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint
+Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the
+relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of
+pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this
+charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal château, he
+never 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, or
+perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his
+friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could
+not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that
+the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back
+to 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. I
+can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as
+I read the "Letters" of Madame de Sévigné or the "Memoirs" of the Duc
+de Saint Simon.
+
+I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English
+translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--the
+interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon.
+Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
+think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to
+become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic
+author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without
+the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture
+of Mademoiselle de la Vallière looking hopelessly out of the window of
+her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the
+chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly,
+holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis
+XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?
+
+But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simon
+and Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
+and ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has his
+pet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age who
+gives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and
+"Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believe
+that? 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 he
+considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard to
+exist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in a
+number of the _Atlantic Monthly_ not so long ago there is a vivid,
+pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portion
+of 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. I
+might incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a direct
+question about books, one does incriminate oneself.
+
+However, to return to what I was saying--while I love the "Memoirs of
+Cardinal de Retz," I adore--to be a little extravagant--the "Letters of
+Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does not know the real story of the
+life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the
+brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really
+fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real
+reformer in the France of his time.
+
+Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of
+Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the
+contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the
+Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the
+worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good
+peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He
+earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de Sévigné, for which
+any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a lifetime. But
+even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he gives a
+picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is shamelessly
+true. No living man to-day in political office, although he might be as
+great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so interestingly
+shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if you read him
+in French, you discover that he knew how to make literature.
+
+The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so
+penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
+have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
+But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
+the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
+literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
+General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
+Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
+Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
+reputation 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 point
+of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in
+the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to
+an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where
+"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the
+clergymen 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 younger
+son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his
+faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his
+best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with
+Bassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois de
+Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the
+Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my
+duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the
+utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's
+destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."
+
+The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The
+Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less
+diffuse, and, not writing _feuilletons_, are not forced to be diffuse.
+The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can
+hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go
+directly to the sources of his romances.
+
+Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of
+Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
+were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more
+about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through
+certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that
+I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could
+be 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 as
+Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but,
+then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has
+never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood
+that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is
+sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it
+should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time
+the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim
+the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a
+young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a
+pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's
+translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
+fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
+reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
+them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
+Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _à la
+mode 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 before
+and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this,
+is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best
+One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five
+books.
+
+In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country
+efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to
+France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French
+people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his
+memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
+faults 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 a
+venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of
+contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the
+aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.
+
+His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of
+the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called
+"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in
+that class of systematic _roués_" who were astonished at the virtue of
+the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in
+that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have
+not yet found them.
+
+In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
+great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
+soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
+and Philippe Égalité were the most fascinating characters of the French
+Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy who was
+listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to exclaim
+suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about Judas!"
+
+To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quote
+a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness,"
+said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of
+Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the
+pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of human
+nature."
+
+This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for
+enlightening 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 Morris
+a hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "I
+may, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is the
+father 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 de
+Flahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelity
+of the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; De
+Launey's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered
+men lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is not
+disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock,
+to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock
+the Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in the
+belief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day,
+he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He is
+corroborated 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 to
+me that there is no more interesting and useful book on the French
+Revolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near De
+Tocqueville'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 be
+chosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of the
+House of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic,
+just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all the
+cold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles of
+government which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against
+Burr, 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 profound
+reverence, 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. Morris
+believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as
+Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of
+Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
+the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?
+
+I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many
+times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the
+Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the
+kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This
+autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
+authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is
+the 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 us
+an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels
+ever elaborated.
+
+What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American
+atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of
+doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself
+as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his
+caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
+self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he
+wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew
+he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of
+literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public
+servant.
+
+As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt.
+Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained
+leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the
+same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of
+sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashion
+in our day to declare that society is against us when we have to work
+unremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing,
+and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as applied
+to him--inspiring!
+
+In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice against
+Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans," as we were all
+taught to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all softened toward
+Dickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told story
+of the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his mother
+without believing that the recording angel in no way holds her
+responsible for her rather vulgar book.
+
+How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of the
+books written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! How
+he managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tell
+us. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of the
+pious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray," and
+although paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly because
+there was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "The
+Warden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aught
+in malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very good
+reading. 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 from
+a 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 professing
+Christians.
+
+     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 Georgia
+girl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a little
+volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find
+life 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 acquaintance
+who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!
+
+Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens
+to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de Sévigné
+when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad books ought to be
+preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost better for the
+young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is to gauge the
+value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity, after all, is
+not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a certain age is
+very desirable.
+
+While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and
+value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
+into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the
+subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
+Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn
+from 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 is
+not 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 on
+the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be
+our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of
+cheerfulness.
+
+Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant
+town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian
+industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.
+Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be
+very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that
+delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the
+really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be
+real he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhaps
+because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic
+sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters.
+But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright nor
+Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to
+assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
+had no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in their
+day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered
+to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be
+taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet
+which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene
+Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher
+philosophical 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 be
+shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or of
+the Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from the
+responsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors of
+the description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted by
+Madame de Sévigné or to revel among the groups of Italians who range
+through 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 be
+treated 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 be
+read nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as a
+model of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy,
+literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such passages
+as 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 beloved
+Pepys!
+
+One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn had been able to decipher
+some of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have written
+this 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 look
+on Charles II. as one of the weakest of English kings; but when we come
+to enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is much
+to be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England under
+difficult circumstances than conventional history has given him credit
+for.
+
+It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed to
+me as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you
+what 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 the
+tops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with an
+understanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, though
+it may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody finds
+in gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us
+know our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves--but perhaps
+more clearly--can never be rooted out of normal human nature.
+
+I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and I
+sat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, and
+by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there was
+always Madame de Sévigné. Much was hoped from the long-promised "Memoirs
+of Talleyrand." They came; they were disappointing.
+
+Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in a
+way with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. And
+this is "The Education of Henry Adams," and almost contemporaneously the
+"Letters of William James." It is easy to understand the delight with
+which intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams."
+Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about
+in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--that
+education consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, and
+regarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward in
+one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans
+are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which
+Samuel 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; it
+is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
+looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on
+them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The
+judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with
+horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry
+Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of
+Cardinal Newman!
+
+There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable
+and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while
+Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it,
+Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
+not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal
+Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much
+above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--but
+intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough
+to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but
+reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God that
+troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of
+pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a
+personal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, God
+Himself.
+
+Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in
+a personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others
+who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely
+negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without
+understanding 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. It
+is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our
+political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no
+other man that make his book supremely interesting.
+
+The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no
+longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know
+that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a
+"best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail
+the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that
+its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion,
+and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to
+purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed
+with a scornful wave of the hand.
+
+When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it
+was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as
+far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air of
+pathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it became
+the _Century_--of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the
+editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
+his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the
+heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.
+
+Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams
+lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
+by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty
+wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful.
+Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be
+good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal
+of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to
+struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern
+Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
+compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the
+enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can
+see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight
+that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is
+both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry
+Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of
+the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst
+of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no man
+more pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men are
+free, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does not
+always take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities of
+his book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with
+him, 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 "The
+Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More than
+that, 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 too
+strong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were not
+egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit or
+self-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public,
+"The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himself
+without writing about himself. This seems very much like a platitude.
+And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. If
+anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took a
+tone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below the
+average 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 delicate
+tint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions and
+such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! He
+is the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the
+discoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the real
+architecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song of
+Roland." How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem in
+comparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are so
+laboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glance
+with which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He has
+his limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects on
+the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, the
+half-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and English
+who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help giving
+grateful thanks for having found Henry Adams.
+
+To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems to
+be that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the military
+architecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with the
+beauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more
+receptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would have
+discovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture and
+the cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, have
+profited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that Henry
+Adams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize that
+he would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, and
+which many of them are sincerely grateful for.
+
+The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over
+again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books
+to 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 Best
+Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own
+shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts,
+soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are
+not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his
+critical vocation; Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey
+has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really
+good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little
+material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth
+while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background
+and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are
+many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood.
+Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who
+once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of
+cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into
+great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that
+half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!
+
+It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should
+appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the
+Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We
+had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman
+and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories;
+but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
+of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a
+state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.
+
+In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and
+Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the
+modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the
+novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which
+I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I
+found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is
+always "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 Walter
+Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever
+attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of
+enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted,
+so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical
+persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same.
+Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on
+without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly
+Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I
+rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine
+in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many
+magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's few
+pages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader--by a
+loving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books.
+
+You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento where
+Lady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine
+flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bring
+back to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius
+Cæsar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together with that
+group 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 James
+speak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the very
+beginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of the
+little circle about him. The conversation goes on--Mr. James never loses
+sight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the second
+part--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 already
+begun 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," that
+it _is_ the very essence of literature. _Scientia_ is truth, or
+conclusions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the personality
+of the speaker or writer. But literature, to be literature, must be
+personal. It is good literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
+accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader like myself does not,
+perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently with the philosophy of William
+James as represented in these "Letters." One has a languid interest in
+knowing what he thought of Bergson and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but
+for the constant reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and
+St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal
+impressions of both the little things and the big things of our
+contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you
+are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read
+the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may
+resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself
+so tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether young
+Henry 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 by
+drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated
+by 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 begun
+to 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 William
+James" too frivolously, told me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to
+counteract my mediæval philosophy and too cheerful view of life. Just as
+if I had not struggled with Mr. Wells, and irritated myself into a
+temperature in trying to get through his latest preachments! I am not
+quite 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 have
+said.
+
+     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 of
+my mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man of
+talent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man of
+genius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potent
+Deity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; but
+Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an education
+such as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
+bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians,
+are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms
+seriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us that
+the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not
+begin with--_Qui fit, Mæcenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authors
+of fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_,"--who
+insist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
+might have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much good
+taste 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 with
+the ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do you
+think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if he
+insisted 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 in
+his translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
+something as well as himself. It does not become me to recommend
+books--everybody to his own taste!--but I should like to say that for
+those 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 Marie
+Antoinette at Versailles, the translations of our dear Horatius by Lord
+Lytton is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the most charming
+and 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 other
+preachers, who ought to confine themselves to finer things, desired that
+Horace should have gone further and told us what kind of books we ought
+to read in our old age. His choice was naturally limited; it was
+impossible for him to buy a book every week, or every month. The
+publishers were not so active in those days. But he might have indicated
+the kind of book that old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
+have tried "Robinson Crusoe,"--the unequalled--and "Swiss Family
+Robinson"; but they seem too grown up for me now. I have taken to "King
+Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that perfect gem of
+excitement and illusion, "The Mutineers," by Charles Boardman Hawes. I
+read it, and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising bookseller
+will unblushingly compile a library for the old, and begin it with "The
+Mutineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the Near Old is that the
+fear of shocking the Young makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
+they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they express intense
+interest in new and ponderous books, in the presence of Youth--when they
+ought to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. But if the Old
+really want to save their faces, and at the same time enjoy glimpses of
+that fountain of youth which we long for at every age, let them acquire
+two books--Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded Man" and "The Quest of El
+Dorado," by Dr. J. A. Zahm, whose _nom de plume_ was H. J. Mozans. There
+you have the real stuff. Together, these two books are a combination of
+just what the Old need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke he
+cannot dream with any facility when he grows old; and if he has not
+possessed himself of these two volumes, he cannot have acquired that
+basis 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 when
+it deals with the El Dorado; it has all the most attractive qualities of
+a romance.
+
+But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob, Son of Battle," which the
+author of "Alice For Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest
+animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is nobly human, and the
+Black Killer devilishly human, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs,
+invented by clever writers. A great book! It is too thrilling; it
+reminds of "Wuthering Heights"; I shall, therefore, read this evening
+some of Henry Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with "Pride
+and Prejudice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BOOKS AT RANDOM
+
+
+Among nature books that gave me many happy hours on the banks of the
+Delaware--imperial river!--is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow."
+"Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the twelve labours of Hercules than
+attempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the area of an
+average ramble!" _Soit!_ And better than that, "to feel that whatever
+creature we may meet will prove companionable--that is, no stranger, but
+rather an amusing and companionable friend--assures both pleasure and
+profit whenever we chance abroad."
+
+Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his companion can forget the
+extracts from the diary of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
+the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced the number of wild ducks and
+geese, he says, even then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was often
+black 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 as
+frequently 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 skunk
+cabbage, 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 of
+raccoons. "Foolish creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning coons
+are forced to quest or die."
+
+For a stroll by the Thames--I mean the New England Thames--there is no
+book like Ik Marvel's "Dream Life," but for a day near the
+Delaware--imperial river!--give me "Upland and Meadow."
+
+And then with what assurance of satisfaction may one turn for
+refreshment to the continual charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby"
+and "Pepacton." Burroughs's opinions upon the problems of humanity are
+more tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
+him among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaring
+lark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, to
+look with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is to
+begin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no other
+author gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers of
+the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the English
+thrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades.
+
+There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but he
+might not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasant
+Englishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as he
+said, they were "so homely." In fact, they were rather pretty girls, and
+he had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
+with which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him
+at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully
+"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the
+refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
+in the eighties there were still _précieuses_. The truth is that his
+rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his
+style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the
+good soil of the country.
+
+Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I
+will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by
+Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame
+Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us
+an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's,
+like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character
+of 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 mental
+dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of
+"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find
+the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything
+more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is
+Madame 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 and
+the manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is more
+like an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ to
+which she would prefer to be compared.
+
+There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame de
+Boigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no real
+harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and gives
+the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a
+most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a
+writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully
+uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry
+VIII. But this is a digression.
+
+Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne as
+displaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr. Mencken
+cannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in his
+desire 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, Sir
+Thomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a little
+into the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modern
+novelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life is
+purely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
+writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, or
+his 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 leads
+an interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldom
+talks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art of
+meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful,
+is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how to
+cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
+Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his
+imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a
+book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points.
+For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the
+difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in
+this 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 of
+this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "I
+can't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous that
+human beings should exist who take this attitude toward Sir Thomas
+Browne, his "Urn Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems almost more
+miraculous that this attitude should be taken toward Montaigne, and that
+some folk should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the pleasant,
+curtailed edition of John Florio's translation, edited by Justin Huntly
+McCarthy! These small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot have
+the original French, or the leisure to browse over the big volume of
+Florio's old book as it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an
+agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It somehow or other reminds
+one of that appalling series of cutdown "Classics," so largely
+recommended to a public that is seduced to run and read. A condensed
+edition of Froissart may do very well for boys; but who can visualize
+the 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, to
+read whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and "The New
+Machiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay," will be remembered when "Mr.
+Britling"--by the way, what did Mr. Britling see through?--shall be
+forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn to Montaigne. It amazed me
+to hear Montaigne called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward the
+eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and he has fewer superstitions.
+It was his humanity and his love for religion that turned him from
+Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for Plato. He is a real
+amateur 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 by
+Brutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
+that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather know
+what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on
+the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He
+had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that
+keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to
+hear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpets
+that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing
+"jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out
+the 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'Å“uvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the
+translation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis sive
+liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is a
+good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar
+to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself
+in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and
+he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute
+as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The
+discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns
+him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to
+his contemporaries on the subject.
+
+In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together
+in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy
+Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.
+
+"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life
+than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating
+Europe from the Middle Ages."
+
+It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de
+Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the
+precious sentences of Thomas à Kempis. They are foils; at first sight
+there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel
+de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with
+Thomas à Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being
+Montaignes, Thomas à Kempis would have written for God alone. He would
+have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had
+erected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitely
+carved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
+toward the people and not the side toward the Presence of God, it was
+entirely plain and unornamented!
+
+The friendship of Thomas à Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson might
+easily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
+supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling might
+exist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be as
+nothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellous
+guide to life. The translations of Thomas à Kempis into English vary in
+value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of À Kempis in
+deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing
+Thomas à Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of
+his 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 during
+the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul
+and divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas à Kempis
+would never have written "The Following of Christ." The Bible, even the
+New Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul's
+Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what better interpretation of the
+doctrines of Christ as applied to everyday life can there be found than
+in this precious little book?
+
+You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather what comfort you can from the
+philosophy of Thoreau's "Walden"--which might, after all, be more
+comfortable if it were more pagan. The Pan of Thoreau was a respectable
+Pan, 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 in
+Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with every day. And George
+Eliot was a remarkable example of this, for, in spite of her habitual
+reverence, she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox dogmas. Another
+paradox seems to be in the fact that Thomas à Kempis appeals so directly
+and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to those who have secluded
+themselves from the world. At first, I must confess that I found this a
+great obstacle to my joy in having found him.
+
+If Montaigne frequently drove me to À Kempis, À Kempis almost as
+frequently in the beginning drove me back to Montaigne. It was not
+until I had become more familiar with the New Testament that I began to
+see that À Kempis spoke as one soul to another. In this world for him
+there were only three Facts--God, his own soul, and the soul to whom he
+spoke.
+
+It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many of my friends who looked
+on the Last Supper as a mere symbol of love and hospitality, should
+cling to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. Even the example
+of an intellectual friend of mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in
+Italy, could not make it clear. He often asserted that he did not
+believe in God; and yet he was desolate if on a certain day in the year
+he did not pay some kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
+Padua!
+
+I have known him to break up a party in the Adirondacks in order to
+reach the nearest church where it was possible for him to burn a candle
+in honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious anniversary! As long
+as he exists, as long as he continues to burn candles--_les chandelles
+d'un athée_--I shall accept without understanding the enthusiasm of so
+many lovers of À Kempis, who cut out the mystical longings for the
+reception 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 poignantly
+than even David, in that great cry of the heart and soul, the De
+Profundis:
+
+     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, the
+only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the
+sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect
+are worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
+never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knew
+their hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedy
+so effective as that which À Kempis offers.
+
+It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fear
+of hurting or offending the Beloved.
+
+The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War and
+on 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 the
+state traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriously
+combatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versailles
+and Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles which
+guided 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 on
+November 12, 1921, would have dared to assert these unmoral principles,
+accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, in
+principle? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholy
+novelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life of
+the Middle Ages.
+
+There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was kept
+alive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's
+world, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A better
+understanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton less
+autocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaire
+less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic lately
+named a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and of
+Catherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir Thomas
+Browne 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 Sir
+Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the
+politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of
+either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth
+century, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together.
+
+Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and
+one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.
+This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears
+in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told
+that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his
+family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that
+he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is,
+therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The
+American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in
+our universities are those which concern themselves with written and
+spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools
+and 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 so
+constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into
+which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language
+which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us
+that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
+throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
+the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true
+in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was
+fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles
+which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal
+Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln
+himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than
+the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten
+almost 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; and
+then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of
+English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of
+the 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 or
+of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote
+Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with
+correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
+read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant
+White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The
+Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of
+writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"
+was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or
+the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is
+not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in
+the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and
+nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them
+with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved
+as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a
+good deal.
+
+The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of
+Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class of
+Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the
+matter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord
+Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several
+examples of this.
+
+"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's
+Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all
+its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who
+habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as
+an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious
+over what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis," which he said
+a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have
+known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of
+the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody," Mr. Mencken
+shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
+convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on
+the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
+can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word
+"consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in the
+First Baptist Church at high noon"!
+
+In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" is
+better than "elevator," and "station" better than "dépot." Though these
+are departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often when
+our critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. I
+have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated English
+traditions 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 one
+occasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," for
+those "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; and
+he spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such composition
+really existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seen
+approaching with an unmistakable "pie," the kind supposed by the readers
+of advertisements to be made by "mothers," and ordered hastily because
+of the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest tried
+to 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 London
+visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that
+"muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when
+I 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 always
+provided with little dishes, like butter plates, for the discarded cups.
+His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learning
+who laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary,
+and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an education
+in himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when he
+came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell from
+grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my
+search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask
+him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape
+from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not
+lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!
+
+Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in
+England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
+Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches
+of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used by
+Mr. 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 go
+very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in
+Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a
+little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was
+because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The
+little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel
+Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus
+ventris 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 regard
+to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
+quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language,
+another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
+tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of
+strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably
+precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this
+usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted
+at 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 more
+than a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy French
+preacher who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" as "pluff" had
+much excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluer
+de lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How many
+conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!
+
+There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or
+more 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 for
+odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a
+precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify
+the quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thick
+flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner is
+announced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!
+
+It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of English
+grammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
+and of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner in
+which Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
+Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir
+Conan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, let
+them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. Mencken's statements on the
+growth of the English language! In my time we were expected to take
+Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt that
+his principles have been repeated by every writer on style, including
+Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition," since Mr.
+Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principles
+reminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he met
+Beatrice.
+
+There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as a
+science and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while he
+provokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in Robert
+Louis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications in
+style in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.
+
+And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a little
+volume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the
+terrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It is
+Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." And if one wants to know
+how to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does not
+come by nature--there is "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville, the close
+friend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken must
+love him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _flâneur_--the
+chief business of a _flâneur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in old
+Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows;
+but the _flâneur_ among books finds none of his shop-windows
+unrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of a
+word that sounded something like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every
+Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and they
+often did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you
+should never say "druggist." I trust that it is no breach of confidence
+to repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modern
+Philadelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languages
+in his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for the
+boys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
+lad 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 New
+York City, at least the beginning of one American language--the language
+of the street.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I have
+often asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure and
+even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. For
+the plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although I
+believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to a
+really good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Of
+memoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Créquy have
+always 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 the
+Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and
+even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth
+returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so
+admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all
+atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now
+comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries
+including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth
+living!
+
+I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David
+whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
+me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise
+Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am
+surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its
+splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious
+visions of truth at a white heat.
+
+Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a
+picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
+didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no
+great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
+preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never
+could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a
+great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see
+that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a
+cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh
+the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the
+first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's
+Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of
+the passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for a
+poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for
+us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the
+philosophies of Wordsworth.
+
+To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their
+power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own
+faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of
+raising 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 works
+of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers
+of this consoling art to "_filles de joie_." He doubtless meant that
+these goddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave us
+visions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without being
+sensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels,
+like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which are joyous and serious at once. Or
+take "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."
+
+Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads
+them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say
+that 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 of
+the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found
+all 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 a
+severe sense of duty!" he said.
+
+Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility and failed, though she
+gained in the end a greater title. Her works are insufferably and
+complacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings with
+respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her first
+volume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress of
+Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have been
+nourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St.
+Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the most
+practical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the form
+of letters. Next comes Fénelon's and--I know that I shall shock those
+who regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his power
+of stimulation, Emerson.
+
+It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that these
+confessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them I
+have had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind but
+simply of relieving my own, by button-holing the reader who happens to
+come my way. I should like to add that what is called the coarseness of
+the eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than the
+nasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lack
+of talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts.
+Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common with
+the process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles," to use
+Charles Reade's phrase.
+
+If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmness
+and patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
+for thanking God is that Americans have produced a literature--the
+continuation of an older literature with variations, it is true,--that
+has added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mention
+only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," and I am glad to end my book by
+writing the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, or
+with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, are
+no longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
+writes of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a title to
+his discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It
+is an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough for
+smiles.
+
+It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is
+rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature
+and assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don
+Marquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippingly
+as any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is nobody writing in the
+daily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they do
+it. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention to
+what they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Will
+they live? Of course not. Is Émile de Girardin alive? Or all the clever
+ones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One still
+reads the "Portraits de Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
+something 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, or
+as 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 by
+an American--since Mrs. Wharton's "Valley of Decision"--proved him to be
+a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better psychologically than
+Mrs. Wharton, but here there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
+she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent and insular at long
+intervals.
+
+"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 for
+himself!
+
+"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern essay. Strangely
+enough, 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 that
+with new delight between certain paragraphs in Brooks's paper "On
+Finding a Plot." Why is not "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth
+edition? Or why has it no _claque_? The kind of _claque_ that is so
+common now--which opens suddenly like a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls
+of Theocritus"? After all, your education must have been well begun
+before 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 is
+much 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 Theodore
+Roosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the
+other 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 in
+his youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
+with you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in
+whom he had not much interest, since he was a _gourmet_ and did not
+regard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents and
+ascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales--and
+her scales were smoother than Patti's.
+
+Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," and "The Ancient Irish
+Sagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";
+and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before
+Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love.
+It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and
+how 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 of
+the 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 retained
+as 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.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Confessions of a Book-Lover, by 
+Maurice Francis Egan
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diff --git a/24003-0.zip b/24003-0.zip
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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions of a Book-Lover, by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Confessions of a Book-Lover
+
+Author: Maurice Francis Egan
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2007 [EBook #24003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elaine Walker, Janet Kegg and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A
+BOOK-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 TRANSLATION
+INTO 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 ACTION
+IN 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 love
+these perennial friends very early in life. It is the only way to know
+all their "curves," all those little shadows of expression and small
+lights. There is a glamour which you never _see_ if you begin to read
+with a serious intention late in life, when questions of technique and
+grammar and mere words begin to seem too important.
+
+Then you have become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's
+verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance
+beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable
+flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a
+friend--if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for even
+the memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever have
+done anything that will make the book you love less precious to you.
+
+The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of
+miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de
+Sévigné that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but Madame de
+Sévigné 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 when
+I was young, I read several books which I was told afterward were very
+bad indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody told me! The
+youthful mind must possess something of the quality attributed to a
+duck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau" was
+snatched suddenly away from me by a careful mother just as I had begun
+to think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as
+queer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had been allowed
+to finish the book, it would have become by some mental chemical process
+a very edifying criticism of life.
+
+"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a pious
+aunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown of
+Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little by
+Little," for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rather
+shocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted to
+my aunt's pronouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a
+dangerous book," by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book I
+had ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when God
+wasn't looking." She sent me home.
+
+At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter
+Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
+attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that
+nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The
+Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a
+good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my
+mental vision every day of my life.
+
+In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and
+carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in
+advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my
+acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the International
+Sunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geography
+of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the
+whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human
+interest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand,
+sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes
+because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever
+may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New
+Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition
+not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In
+my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between
+truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often very
+difficult 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 in
+Heaven for children to do!" As to distractions, the modern child is
+surrounded by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions of
+the present system of instruction not to leave to a child any moments of
+leisure for the indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering the
+example of my childhood for imitation by the modern parents.
+
+Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in those
+days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long
+afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in
+"The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that the
+beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to
+visualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, that
+a sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was not
+necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only
+necessary 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 holiday
+afternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that I
+had to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It was
+worth the trouble, however.
+
+Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother's
+knee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she never
+read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful
+misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never
+considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At
+first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets
+of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There
+is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the
+heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
+of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after
+the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved
+her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no
+noise.
+
+In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in
+_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard
+III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine
+Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been
+listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice
+in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the
+adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo
+carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
+of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of
+Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer
+creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.
+
+There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had
+access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
+Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not
+so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to
+Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the
+latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--the
+shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may
+be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little
+Em'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind
+was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as
+much 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 in
+literature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired
+Queen 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 was
+difficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was
+"proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare she seemed to regard as
+eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she
+came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I
+never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or
+Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference
+which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;
+and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above
+Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray.
+
+_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, for
+instance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--General
+Strothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane of
+my existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to
+me as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me as
+that other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledge
+that all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a day
+with powdered charcoal!
+
+After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory
+reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no
+emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes
+came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed,
+but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George
+Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George
+Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
+stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful
+book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges
+in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales
+about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the
+ordinary common sense of geese!
+
+Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one
+unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from my
+entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this
+day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply
+interested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come as
+in the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school
+books, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday School
+opposite 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 honest
+villain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes
+were very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared to
+them. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hate
+religion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that I
+had Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were
+equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended, were quite as
+uninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They were
+generally translated from the French, without vitality and without any
+regard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down
+one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima." As it
+concerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might be
+in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off the
+ear 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 short
+period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff in
+it; 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 of
+that excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very great
+book. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days of
+Pompeii," I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but
+in some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by Washington
+Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." _Conspuez les livres des poupées!_
+What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, could
+awaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailing
+clouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes the
+pomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates a
+love 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 des
+Bois," by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was a
+horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laborious
+research in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures of
+these infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but I
+know that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctive
+mood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a French
+romance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin." It was of things
+that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with
+an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the
+gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I
+gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have
+been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were
+written by an author named Léon Gozlan.
+
+About this time, the book auction became a fashion in Philadelphia. If
+your people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to a
+publication called the _Cosmopolitan Art Magazine_, and you received a
+steel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh
+very much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet and
+very well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington at
+Lexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequented
+the book auctions. My father had a great respect for what he called
+"classical literature." He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely
+classical; it was beautifully bound, and he never read it. One day he
+secured a lovely edition of the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore." It had
+been a subject of much competition at the auction, and was cherished
+accordingly. The binding was tooled. It was put on the centre table and
+adored as a work of art. Here was richness!
+
+Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed at present as belonging to
+those old and faded gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake," by
+Lady Blessington, once flourished; but if I could only recall the
+pleasure I had in the reading of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet
+of Korhasson," I think I should be very happy. And the notes to "Lalla
+Rookh" and to Moore's prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"
+was not much of a novel, but the notes were full of amazing Egyptian
+mysteries, which seemed quite as splendid as the machinery in the
+"Arabian Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled of roses, and I
+remember as a labour of love copying out all the allusions to roses in
+these notes with the intention of writing about them when I grew up. My
+mother objected to the translations from Anacreon; she said they were
+"improper"; but my father said that he had been assured on competent
+authority that they were "classic," and of course that settled it. There
+was 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 city
+boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the
+arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an
+incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and
+something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our
+Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little
+world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to read her tragedy, "The Two
+Foscari." A tragedy had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic
+for some offense against the conventionalities demanded of a
+Philadelphia child, with no book but Miss Mitford's, I spent my time
+looking up all the references to roses in her tragedies. These I
+combined with the knowledge acquired from Tom Moore, and made notes for
+a 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's
+Journal_, where it may still be found. My parents, who did not look on
+my literary attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with favour,
+suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as I had no time to look up the
+meaning of the word in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me
+as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which every honest artist
+must 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 think
+that 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 string
+that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself to the imitation of
+this economic child, and was very highly praised for getting the best
+out of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very tough
+knot.
+
+It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series of
+Beadle's "Dime Novels." I looked on them as delectable but inferior.
+There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; but
+if you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which
+concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were very
+likely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole,"
+because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account of
+a real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in the
+abdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very
+"indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutely
+forbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was a
+moral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to do
+with leaper, the effect was not very convincing.
+
+Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the
+youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I
+happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where
+Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from
+leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything
+of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of
+the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were
+rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been
+written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir
+Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
+again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas
+Nickleby."
+
+"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter
+afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable
+city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to
+work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a
+kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it
+was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas
+Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which
+generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you
+never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly
+know 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 dignified
+manner of standing with her head on a spear!
+
+The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It was
+necessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike,
+they became great bores. But what young reader of Dickens can forget the
+hostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little Miss
+Kenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one grows
+older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think
+of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was it
+Cortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas
+Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found
+"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two
+Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough
+for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. My
+later impressions of Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions.
+
+One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as I
+remember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and
+read it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for good
+novels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, took
+again to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin and
+Amelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't think
+that the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I was
+delighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot of
+stupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of the
+story that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no mother
+to guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on the
+forehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I was
+unhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book
+with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That
+is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe
+that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.
+
+For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David
+Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that
+I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later--it was on one June
+afternoon I think--when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed
+to me that for a while all delight in life had ended.
+
+One of those experts in psychology who are always seeking questions
+sometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced
+me, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our
+"Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottled
+cardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, when
+I was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual." My
+mother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southern
+tendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party,
+and admired Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the famous
+Vallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion of
+American statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of a
+very different type.
+
+Julius Cæsar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had
+not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar." It seemed to me that Brutus
+was 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 prevent
+me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the
+ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no
+adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a
+convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the
+pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little
+boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost
+suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was
+not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had
+been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades
+covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully
+wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it
+occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the
+night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when
+he 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, I
+knew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a
+last dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On the
+morning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the
+small boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were about
+to be bereaved, and predicted a coming holiday. I was looked on as
+rather "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. The
+bully and his chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The moment had
+come; 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 to
+the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I
+spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were
+incomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, in the
+"Lives."
+
+The next morning I went to school with lessons unstudied and awaited
+events. The mother of the bully appeared, and entered into an excited
+colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. I announced to the
+boy 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's
+coat, 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 total
+depravity; 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 good
+Christian 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 bully
+let me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, which had leaked out,
+gave me such a reputation that I became a dictator myself, and made
+terms for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which were sometimes
+rather despotic.
+
+It was also during these days that I remember carrying confusion into
+the family when a patronizing, intellectual lady called and said, "I
+hope that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo books?" "No," I
+answered quickly and indiscreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by
+Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie Collins until I read
+"The Moonstone." It seemed that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased
+inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "classics."
+
+My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he read
+the evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long
+horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from the
+novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New
+York _Ledger_ by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the
+times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely and
+aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her
+conversion, disapproved of the New York _Ledger_. In fact, there were
+families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In
+our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical,
+which, with many volumes of Godey's _Lady's Book_, were packed in the
+attic.
+
+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 he
+was about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the back
+numbers of the New York _Ledger_ containing a long serial story by Mrs.
+Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the French
+Revolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with a
+description of a dance in an old château, when the Marquise, who was
+floating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
+glove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where the
+blood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find the
+novel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my father
+sent the numbers of the New York _Ledger_ to the apparently dying man.
+"It's a horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any Christian
+person reading the New York _Ledger_ at the point of death." The young
+man, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed his
+recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories.
+
+There were certain other serial stories I was ordered to read; they were
+stories of the Irish Brigade in France. My mother, I remember,
+disapproved of them because Madame de Pompadour was frequently
+mentioned, and she thought that my father regarded the lady in question
+too tolerantly. These romances were, I think, written by a certain Myles
+O'Reilly who was in some way connected with the army. This procedure of
+reading aloud was not always agreeable, as my father frequently went to
+sleep in the middle of a passage and forgot what I had already read. The
+consequence was that I was obliged to begin the same old story over
+again 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 title
+of the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived in Para; I tried to
+manufacture an imitation of the Urari poison with a view to
+exterminating rats in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
+had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced, at intervals, a
+thrilling novel, with the glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a
+background. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I had ever read. He
+held possession of my imagination, until he was forced out by a Mr.
+Jerningham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany. Saint Malo
+became the only town for me; I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and
+the Stuarts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of Sir Walter
+Scott, were displaced by the Vendéans.
+
+Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me to
+parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent.
+They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the
+adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me to overcome.
+
+About this time, my mother began to feel that I needed to read something
+more gentle, which would root me more effectively in my religion. She
+began, I think, with Cardinal Newman's "Callista" in which there was a
+thrilling chapter called "The Possession of Juba." It seemed to me one
+of the most stirring things I had ever read. Then I was presented with
+Mrs. Sadlier's "The Blakes and the Flanagans," which struck me as a very
+delightful satire, and with a really interesting novel of New York
+called "Rosemary," by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a terribly
+blood-curdling story of the Carbonari in Italy, called "Lionello." After
+this I was wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh; "Natalie,"
+and "Bessie," and "Seven Years," I think were the principals. My father
+declined to read them; he thought they were too sentimental, but as the
+author had an Irish name he was inclined to regard them with tolerance.
+He thought I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom and Jerry; or
+The Adventures of Corinthian Bob," by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to
+this, 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 of
+Froissart for two dollars and a half at an old book stand on Fifth
+Street, near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world during the
+Christmas holidays. After breakfast, I saturated myself with the
+delightful battles in that precious book.
+
+My principal duty was to look after the front pavement. In the spring
+and summer, it was carefully washed twice a week and reddened with some
+kind of paint, which always accompanied a box of fine white sand for the
+scouring of the marble steps; but in the winter, this respectable
+sidewalk 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--or
+in the "square," as we Philadelphians called it. Now it became irksome;
+I neglected to dig the ice from between the bricks; I skimped my
+cleaning of the gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums." The boy next door
+became a mirror of virtue; he was quoted to me as one whose pavement was
+a model to all the neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the Mayor
+passing down our street, had stopped and admired the working of his
+civic spirit, while the result of my efforts was passed by with evident
+contempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart to my heart. Who would
+condescend to wield a broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward of
+ten cents in cash, when he could throw javelins and break lances with
+the knights of the divine Froissart? The end of my freedom came after
+this. The terrible incident of the Mayor's contempt, invented, I
+believe, by the boy next door, induced my mother to believe that I was
+not only losing my morals, but becoming too much of a book-worm. For
+many long weeks I was deprived of any amusing book except "Robinson
+Crusoe." After this interval, vacation came; I seemed to have grown
+older, and books were never quite the same again.
+
+In the vacation, however, when the days were very long and there was a
+great deal of leisure, I found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales"
+and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault, and I was even then very
+much struck by the difference. Of course I read Grimm from cover to
+cover, and went back again over the pages, hoping that I had neglected
+something. The homeliness of the stories touched me; it seemed to me
+that you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany. Madame
+Perrault was more delicate; her fairy tales were pictures of no life
+that ever existed, and there was a great dissimilarity between her
+"Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of "Aschenputtel." As I remember, the
+haughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among the
+ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seem
+smaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's
+slipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in
+_her_ fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no
+such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this
+vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy
+with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in
+Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I
+think I liked him best of all.
+
+That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in
+the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No
+doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of
+scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never
+discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were
+very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never
+was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the
+Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful
+experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be
+expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers
+coming 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 done
+something for his soul.
+
+There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be
+to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were
+persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one
+opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
+episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I
+preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
+devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered
+somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a
+fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was
+"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the
+stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he
+disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere
+prejudice.
+
+The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likes
+to read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myself
+one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon,
+and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale not
+so edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seized
+the book at once. My father was informed of what had occurred. He was
+little alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change the
+whole course of this boy's reading." "We shall have to change the boy
+first," my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At the
+proper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. The
+book was presented to him for destruction.
+
+"It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk about
+any of these stories to the other boys in school?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say much worse things, and I
+would probably have to tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all
+the people in the Boccaccio book were good Catholics, I suppose, as they
+were Italians, and I think, after all, when they caught the plague, they
+died good deaths."
+
+The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and gave me his blessing and
+dismissed me. And my mother seemed to think that I was sufficiently
+exorcised.
+
+After this the books I read were more carefully considered. I was given
+the "Tales of Canon Schmidt"--dear little stories of German children in
+the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, which went very well
+with another volume I found at this time called "Jack Halifax," not
+"John Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had already read to me--but a
+curious little tome long out of print. And then there sailed upon my
+vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish novelist, Hendrik
+Conscience, whose "Lion of Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and
+there were "Wooden Clara," and other pieces which made one feel as if
+one 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; but
+these were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may not have been
+much of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "The
+Virginians" or "Esmond." They were what my father called
+"classics"--things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" was
+quite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionary
+history, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. I
+recall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her
+thumb to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This is
+all that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neither
+Henry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemed
+to have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."
+
+After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through a
+book, 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 Henri
+de la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists,
+and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned the
+compliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayette
+a great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the beautiful Marie
+Antoinette!
+
+When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed, as the result
+of my reading, a great belief in all lost causes. I had become
+exceedingly devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor had
+sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an
+antidote to the lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather troubled
+to find so many "swear words" in it, but I made all the allowances that
+a real lover of literature is often compelled to make!
+
+
+_The Bible_
+
+The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, as
+a moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable
+value. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read it
+constantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version and
+the King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learned
+to recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King James
+version--which I always read when I went to one of my cousins--I found
+the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time I
+was limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as it
+was considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testament
+unexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raised
+for some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a great
+deal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and histories of the
+Old Testament. I soon discovered that it was impossible to understand
+the allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible.
+What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had never
+known the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field,
+permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume if
+one knew nothing about the Song of Solomon.
+
+Putting aside the question as to whether young readers should be let
+loose in the Old Testament or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
+justified in including ignorance as the supremest virtue, he who does
+not make himself familiar with Biblical ideas and phraseology finds
+himself in after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. It used
+to be said of the typical English gentleman that all he needed to know
+was to ride after the hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
+absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most moderns. To construe
+Horace, of course, meant that he should have at least a speaking
+acquaintance with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature, and this
+knowledge gave him a grip on the universal speech of all cultivated
+people. However useless his allusions to Chloë and to Mæcenas were in
+the business of practical life, he was at least able to understand what
+they meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the Latins stamped him
+as speaking the speech of a gentleman.
+
+Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is fitted with allusions that
+clarify and illuminate the ordinary speech. He may not have any
+technical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may be so great as to
+debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but
+his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a
+colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace.
+Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a
+measure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make life
+endurable.
+
+Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. Even the poets often now
+assume that Clytie is a name that requires an explanation and that
+Daphne and her flight through the laurel do not bring up immediate
+memories of Syrinx and the reeds. The Dictionary of Lamprière is covered
+with dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid without an answering
+glance of comprehension from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;
+it is only that, in the modern system, the old mythology is not taken
+very seriously.
+
+Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be a necessary part of a
+gentleman's education, there is no class of allusions from which we can
+draw to lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we turn to the
+Bible. This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders it
+rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young
+people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a
+rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a
+Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when
+he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost
+sure to speak of Jonah and the whale!
+
+It is disappointing to notice this gradual change that has taken place
+in the attitude of the younger generation toward the Sacred Book. The
+Sunday Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies of importance
+and to overload the memories of their little disciples with a multitude
+of texts, or to over-explain every allusion in the terms of physical
+geography, etc., may in a measure be responsible for this, but they
+cannot be entirely responsible. One must admit that diversities of
+interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a religious point of view
+will always be an obstacle to their use in schools where the children of
+Jews, of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian denominations
+assemble. But there is always the home, where the first impetus to a
+satisfactory knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. The decay
+of the practice of reading aloud in our homes is very evident in the
+lack of real culture--or, rather, rudiments of real culture--in our
+children. 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 gave
+me a background against which I could see the trend of the books I
+devoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them;
+besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for a
+boy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standard
+by which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expression
+of life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamations
+full of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love,
+in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple
+stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which
+has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting
+adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It
+is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and
+I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter
+writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Cæsar,
+and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They
+may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of
+their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more
+you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human
+he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes
+it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission
+has always been a great delight to me!
+
+Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phases
+of 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 seemed
+only natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination from
+God. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is a
+miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of a
+miracle 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 and
+plead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generally
+right. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who could
+speak to the Greeks in their own language.
+
+Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple of
+Huxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible
+which was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and with
+the 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 modern
+time, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretation
+of the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith which
+St. Paul preached.
+
+Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delight
+the letters of Madame de Sévigné, I put her second as a writer of
+letters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to his
+sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to Dead
+Authors," and a very great letter I found in an English translation of
+Balzac's "Le Lys dans la Vallée."
+
+It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with
+these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often
+reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take
+money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he
+worked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was very
+grateful to Phoebe for remembering that he was a hungry man and in
+need of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengers
+Aquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking them
+from Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able to
+make their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had not
+interfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked
+"Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesus
+were as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleased
+that his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. I
+always felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus would
+give him a better chance of supporting himself.
+
+That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries in his youth, one easily
+guessed. It was plain, too, that he had had the best possible
+instructors, and I liked to believe, when I was young, that his muscles
+had been well trained in the sports of gentlemen of his class.
+Altogether, so graphic were his descriptions and so potent his
+personality that, while Julius Cæsar and Brutus receded, he filled the
+foreground, and all the more because at this time I picked up an English
+translation of Suetonius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as I
+had 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, and
+I found St. Luke very good reading, though I often wished that, as I
+understood he had some reputation as an artist, he had adorned his
+writings with illustrations.
+
+It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote in
+English, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different from
+one another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great part
+of my time in classes where Nepos and Cæsar were translated by my dear
+young friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator,
+I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of the
+translators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had no
+interest whatever in the translations which we made daily for the
+impatient ears of our instructors!
+
+One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because he was such a good
+fighter. When he said he fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these
+beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons who persecuted and
+contradicted him. No obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too,
+although he called things by their right names and his denunciations
+were so vivid and mouthfilling that you knew his enemies must have been
+afraid to open their lips while he was near them, whatever they might
+have said behind his back.
+
+My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at school
+when discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended to
+conversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it came
+to my turn I answered "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
+Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander
+the Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I was
+looked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, and
+he asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, coming
+suddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought with
+beasts." This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dear
+comrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer for
+it as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they
+discovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next composition
+day, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "being
+filled with all iniquity," and other evil things which brought down a
+horrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such
+plain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I was
+only quoting St. Paul to the Romans.
+
+Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. Be that as it may, I
+regarded him as a very good friend indeed, for some of his "language,"
+quoted in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on one's
+enemies than any swear word that could be invented. I am not excusing my
+attitude toward the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected my
+youthful mind. There was something extremely romantic in the very
+phrase, "the tumult of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to mean a
+whole chapter of a novel in itself.
+
+And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have a
+sympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, on
+its way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiable
+barbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help liking
+the Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was a
+Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him of
+chastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given him
+by Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
+seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! He
+rendered unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. And one could easily
+imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered into
+the hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city!
+And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, through
+the 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 the
+King Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautiful
+Bernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finally
+they did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity and
+exquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paul
+went to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the very
+fineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment.
+"This man," I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set at
+liberty, if he had not appealed to Cæsar."
+
+It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet Micheas, who had
+previously 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 with
+the fulfilments of the New were interesting, and I found great pleasure
+in 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, by
+some reference or other in another book, to read the twenty-third psalm
+of David, in the King James version. It struck me as much more simple
+and 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 have
+looked on as dangerous any attempt to ally English literature with the
+Bible--I soon discovered that nearly everything I read owed something to
+the Bible. At first, the comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the
+King James version enraptured me so much that I began to find fault with
+the Latinized phrases of the Vulgate in English. It was the fashion in
+the early seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in the
+little group at school interested in English literature. Street cars at
+this time were comparatively new in Philadelphia, and I think we reached
+the last extremity of Saxonism in speech when we spoke of them as "folk
+wains." The tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred the Book
+of Job and the story of Ruth in the Latinized version, because the words
+were more mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to translate
+everything into a bald "early English medium", which for a time I had
+been 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 of
+Isaiah. The Latinized medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; and
+then, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes in the Douai version
+than in the King James. In both versions, some passages were so obscure
+that I often wondered how anybody could get any meaning out of them. I
+was often astonished to find in English novels that the old people in
+the cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great length, out of
+which 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 live
+book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at the same time--if anybody had
+asked me whether, being marooned on an island, I should have most
+preferred 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 Ancient
+Rome," would have suited me better, provided, of course, that I could
+have chosen only one book.
+
+It was borne in on me many times that no author could improve on the
+phrasing of the Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James versions
+there are passages which, leaving aside all question of doctrine, it is
+sacrilege to try to improve. The French translation of the Bible is, as
+everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that may account for the fact
+that, while regarded as a precious depository of doctrine, it is not a
+household book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations of Clement
+Marot--called hymns--naturally bored a people who, in their hearts,
+believe that God listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the
+language of the Academy! In their novels, dealing with the beginnings of
+Christianity--and there are many such novels in French unknown in other
+countries--it is hard for a French author not to be rhetorical, in the
+manner 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 words
+of 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 persons
+existing--happily, they have all gone to the great beyond--who thought
+that the "talented" author could have done better!
+
+
+_Essays and Essayists_
+
+I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerous
+reading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptist
+friends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading of
+Emerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parish
+never denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offered
+his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to these
+objections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading of
+my boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parents
+and guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain books
+made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so in
+words, 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 early
+edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts and
+to 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 close
+together, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did not
+get so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked the
+lessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when he
+mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I was
+amiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege of
+studying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on the
+subject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and,
+from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found out
+his mistake.
+
+Perhaps I might have been better engaged in reading the more practical
+books offered to boys in our own time, if we had had them. There were
+some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to the comprehension of
+the young; but not so many as there are now. One of my uncles
+recommended the works of Samuel Smiles--"Self-Help" I think was his
+favourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed to me. My small allowance,
+paid weekly, could not have been affected by "Thrift", and when my uncle
+quoted passages from this tiresome book I astounded him by replying, in
+a phrase I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, that if I had a
+quarter to spend instead of twelve cents, I would give half of it for a
+hyacinth! My miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed, and that
+Emerson had doubtless found it in that dangerous book, the Koran.
+
+I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays of
+Emerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be really
+American; in the second, and largely because of their quality, they
+offered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which had
+succeeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money and
+luxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, where
+simple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and moved
+away into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumour
+that some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagant
+expenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
+stopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of our
+old-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. For
+the first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as the
+principal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons were
+classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferous
+atmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As to
+his philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than the
+religious opinions of Julius Cæsar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged
+to read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay.
+
+By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. The inflation of his style
+did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis." That
+on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimately
+to the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto,
+"Tread the lilies under foot." I was for the Bourbons! The French
+Revolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (in
+Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had lived
+through the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probably
+the same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whose
+connections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk to
+Fabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list of
+the condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substituting
+in 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 of
+our family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up and
+down Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief,
+bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believed
+that he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
+We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in our
+neighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured
+every line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. It
+seemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out of
+my life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescued
+Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed
+impossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friends
+who went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie de
+Buxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whose
+letters lie before me as I write.
+
+In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul
+Richter, 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 an
+unreal and lurid book.
+
+Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had
+from 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, he
+reminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott's
+Catherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was an
+unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he
+seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
+which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I
+cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without
+believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So
+much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long
+thoughts 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 it
+only as the world? Give me the old volume of Montaigne and a loaf of
+bread--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 wild
+place! I did not, of course, know, in those early days, what in his
+flavour attracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the very flavour
+and essence of Old France. Carlyle's impressions of historical persons
+interested me, but Montaigne was the most actual of living persons who
+spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly his. To be sure, I read
+him in Florio's translation.
+
+I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modern
+writer, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who
+contributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazine
+called the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and
+Bismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that he
+wrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were so
+interesting and apparently so true that they really became part of my
+life. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of all
+modern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, I
+should have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le
+Sabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared to
+an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip's
+Church at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth.
+Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series of
+sketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like
+other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like
+those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and
+purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken
+out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with
+pleasure 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 the
+Mast." "Walden" I learned to like, but I much preferred Fenimore
+Cooper's description of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book of a man
+playing at out-of-doors, imagining his wildness, and never really liking
+to be too far from the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I
+discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that I began to see that nature
+had beauties in all weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature
+alone never appealed to me. A landscape without human beings seemed
+deadly dull; and I did not understand until I grew much older that I had
+really believed that good art was an improvement on nature.
+
+I have not the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see the
+works of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels
+recently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity and
+what one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as to
+the relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp." I recall
+vividly 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's
+studio and I knew so well from my experience in the drawing classes at
+school, how nature was neglected for artificial models, that I hailed
+these words with great joy.
+
+Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for the
+Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes the
+beginning of the æsthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It may
+seem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts in
+Godey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and an
+occasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of the
+chromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every
+self-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, very
+good casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. My
+father greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had been
+celebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it as
+almost "improper."
+
+Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia, wanted not exactly
+something better, but something more vivid. There were few sports; long
+walks and a little cricket supplied the place of the coming baseball and
+tennis.
+
+In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of his weekly walks with Mr.
+Edward Roth, the head of a military school and the author of "Christus
+Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an occasional row on the
+Schuylkill with him as the best part of my education. But this was
+later. All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, was to walk and
+talk and read.
+
+The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. The
+beginning 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 lately
+read "Jane Eyre." This added interest to the volume, and there came the
+details of the invention of the new hut, intended to be a shelter
+against all weathers, so that the artist might study nature on intimate
+terms. 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 the
+heather changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our pet place of
+beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or river if you like, was not the same
+every day in the year except when the ice bound it! This may seem a
+rather stupid state of mind; but it is the stupidity that is very
+common. I could understand how interesting it would be to be in
+snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton thus described his
+hut:
+
+     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 of
+the Clouds," and the little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset,
+Sept. 23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before struck me that Loch
+Awe was different on September 23, 1860, from what it was at other
+times, or--to carry the idea further--that the imperial Delaware had
+changed since that momentous time when George Washington crossed it, or
+the 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 at
+Rest." Hamerton, who is probably now very much out of fashion, taught me
+the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an accessory to Emerson, the
+philosophy of enjoying the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who,
+I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; and I still think that
+there can be no better introduction to a consideration of the relation
+of 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 passage
+in Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" that emphasized the need
+of 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 "The
+Intellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic,
+as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. For
+instance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty was
+unfavourable to the intellectual life! It was enlightening to know the
+reason why a man should wear evening dress after six o'clock, and why
+the sporting of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of the
+Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character!
+
+And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished
+Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful
+self-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 pages
+which were intensely stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they
+like; 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 this
+Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's Camp" ought to be
+included in every list of books.
+
+It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following of Christ," and she
+interested me in Saint Teresa, that illustrious woman so well compounded
+of mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, I could find no good
+"Life." But Thomas à Kempis was a revelation! He fitted into nearly
+every 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 came
+to understand that the counsel of perfection which Christ gave to the
+rich young man was not intended for the whole world, and many fine
+passages in À Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than my own.
+
+Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. I
+found him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with À Kempis. His
+philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a
+very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my
+English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he
+said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even
+philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the
+works of Marcus Aurelius!"
+
+It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little
+plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art
+of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a
+very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book
+itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always
+seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by
+Ruskin 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 "The
+Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to
+form 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, probably
+because it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find a
+copy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found one
+most unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discovered
+the copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just half
+of my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. I
+must have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for I
+had 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-felt
+want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No
+doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might
+have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and
+art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately
+tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.
+
+By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made
+apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double
+and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real
+violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a
+bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green
+ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the
+effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
+to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was
+artificial, 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 book
+happens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is a
+great temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that I
+think that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must
+be judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me to
+acquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art and
+life. 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 volumes
+that graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of the
+Cathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to being
+prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find
+some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and
+pigments before he began to paint with the pen.
+
+Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which
+we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little
+by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for
+those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which
+shock 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. These
+were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
+the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
+of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
+interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
+letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eugénie and her
+coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
+literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
+Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.
+
+One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile
+Library--now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
+size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as to
+its shelves--had an excellent collection of volumes in French.
+
+How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that
+library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
+Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided
+by the critics of the period. I found Amédée Achard as interesting as
+Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even
+"La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending
+her for her "vitality." I found Madame de Gérardin's "La Femme qui
+Déteste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not
+seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed
+to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest
+and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by
+Octave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne
+Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seiglière," by Jules
+Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of
+their predecessors.
+
+At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte de
+Chambord--Henry V., as a few of us preferred to call him. And this
+reminds me of my partisanship in things English--if I may turn for the
+moment 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 time
+attached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in England
+invariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, to
+indicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small and
+frugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host--he
+was an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant--insisted on waving
+his glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were
+drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water--whoever he might
+be--and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutal
+Hanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, might
+be still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of Mary
+Stuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary of
+Scotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!
+
+Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
+not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
+suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
+suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
+corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
+admirably correct.
+
+Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
+dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
+seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
+seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
+excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
+Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
+attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
+Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
+did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
+acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
+his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
+recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
+it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
+these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
+mentioned with rapt admiration.
+
+But to come to the poets!
+
+It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
+that I discovered Maurice de Guérin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
+from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Guérin on the ground
+of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
+account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
+looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
+negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
+Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
+find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
+Testament at times.
+
+Keats and Maurice de Guérin will be always associated in my mind. I
+discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
+eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
+considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
+whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
+intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural
+selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then
+all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Guérin.
+
+I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister
+Eugénie. 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 Marie
+Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
+calm life of Eugénie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to
+understand 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 me
+the 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 all
+my Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and
+all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not
+occur to me then--at least I did not know it--that the great Greek
+statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that
+glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure"
+seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with
+human emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of the
+opening? 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 de
+Guérin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sister
+together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate
+and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice
+loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read
+the Journals of the De Guérins, I had leisure. A period of ill health
+stopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days that
+could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring
+days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these
+two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought
+to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for
+quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing
+the impression that Maurice de Guérin made. It was a great surprise to
+find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt
+Whitman, 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--sketches
+which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any
+pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
+able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
+human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
+came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
+other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
+letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.
+
+As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
+world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
+pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eugénie de Guérin had a
+living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on
+Maurice de Guérin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
+sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
+written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
+sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
+piety should be sentimental, if Eugénie's sentiment can be characterized
+by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was evident that
+any one who read French literature at all must be aware that there were
+hundreds 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 even
+more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugénie, being
+less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
+sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
+sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
+the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
+sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
+charm of Eugénie de Guérin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
+landscape, 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 a
+little space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short
+outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in
+this; but Eugénie de Guérin exemplifies its value much more than any
+other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
+joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing
+this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to
+recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_
+which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent
+amusements.
+
+The devotion of Eugénie de Guérin to her brother resembles that of
+Madame de Sévigné for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George
+Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her
+characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the
+Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De
+Guérin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the reading
+of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now probably
+forgotten, and to go back to Keats.
+
+After Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek
+than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guérin,
+and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
+life; 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 is
+too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved,
+while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of
+a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for
+the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.
+When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was
+not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.
+The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal
+laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to
+study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry
+Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot
+have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected
+after his best verse had been written.
+
+Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in his
+religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director,
+Père de Lamennais--the "M. Féli" of the little paradise of la Chénie. To
+the delight of some of the more independent and emancipated of the
+literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice was
+becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to
+make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost
+equally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain, although it did not
+change 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 singing
+poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
+"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
+great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual.
+Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
+conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
+talk." Eugénie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
+enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
+Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Trébutien's
+"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guérin." It would be folly
+for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the
+atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
+delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
+Eugénie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
+feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
+beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"
+
+One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
+from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
+this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
+imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
+the 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 admirers
+of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
+secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
+Maurice de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
+common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
+the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
+his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
+this!--Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame de Sévigné,
+Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
+related.
+
+In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
+not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
+that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
+take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
+who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.
+
+The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the
+dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while
+they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite
+process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
+honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen
+in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this
+teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and
+obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman
+Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
+to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived
+and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
+Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make
+the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the
+Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted
+were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the
+glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!
+
+The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard
+work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guérin's "Centaure," to read
+joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While
+browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of
+Tourguéneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found
+Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has
+now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of
+Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these
+poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the
+hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from
+Oxford 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 he
+had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect,
+treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in
+merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
+poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases,
+very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and
+partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence
+Stedman 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 in
+English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
+in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
+swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
+delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
+degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
+extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
+against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
+the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
+silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
+Sicilian 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 chiselled
+sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
+the 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 he
+known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
+rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
+poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
+Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
+sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
+heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
+Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
+paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
+_enragé_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
+confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
+even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
+a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
+thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
+prairie.
+
+
+_Dante_
+
+A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may
+find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is
+dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous
+tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
+once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two
+conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.
+"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of
+reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On
+the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous
+books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the
+windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."
+
+Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the
+winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's
+"Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially in
+country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many
+journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have
+taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.
+Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably
+learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of
+this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good
+books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.
+
+The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
+proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
+talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
+enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
+height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
+capable 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 rimed
+translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
+growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
+are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
+the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
+wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
+order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
+one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
+necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
+enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
+the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
+valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
+occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
+"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
+contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
+English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
+Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
+translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
+the 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 death
+and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
+means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the
+green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was
+the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen
+souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific
+Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
+in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts
+of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on
+as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the
+"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any
+sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church
+Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that
+all 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 to
+that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the
+Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict
+Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their
+Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the
+merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and
+of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or
+sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in
+this world.
+
+And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant,
+among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and
+opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the
+Voltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in Hell!
+And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this
+Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the
+way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time,
+is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents of
+Constantine's donation were mediæval forgeries. Dante believed, however,
+that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being
+of 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 the
+Faithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as in
+the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the
+Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book,
+suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So
+may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming
+under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?
+
+Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor
+does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There
+is 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 the
+better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in
+modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added
+the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--the
+musical 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 Pope
+Gregory that saved Trajan.
+
+When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we
+find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The
+"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For
+instance, 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 his
+widow 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 may
+long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul
+in 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 the
+victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
+three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought
+guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
+says,
+
+    _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 his
+generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It
+is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great
+reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are
+hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever
+the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest
+in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his
+portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"
+with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace
+into something very beautiful, was new.
+
+We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson
+while we were not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures which
+he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They
+were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that
+the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our
+eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
+Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is
+the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality,
+a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and
+scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a
+Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The
+result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the
+man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary
+expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is
+of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
+they 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 Arthur
+Quiller-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 rapidly
+becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
+Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
+might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
+emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
+before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
+into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
+jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
+the 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 more
+splendid and appealing?
+
+The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
+itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
+were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
+requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
+is beyond the touch of time. The women in François Villon's "Ballade of
+Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
+beauty 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 it
+was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
+that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
+perhaps eternal.
+
+Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
+is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
+damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
+singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
+sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
+and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
+produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
+or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
+intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
+age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
+discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
+León; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
+attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
+revolutionists.
+
+The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a
+high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear
+for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the
+use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but
+they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she
+has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and
+even splendid. But there are others!
+
+It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read
+Coventry 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 the
+proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The
+Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and
+Sleep," 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 is
+a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each
+stanza. 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" is
+merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would
+be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent
+through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of
+rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of
+sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely
+accessory 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 of
+academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the
+slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real
+success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
+hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical
+poets 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, and
+even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
+Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
+tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
+Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
+masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
+fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
+of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
+Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
+Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
+rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
+hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
+action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
+the thought.
+
+But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
+perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
+poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
+some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
+outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
+Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
+compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
+unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
+neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
+her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
+throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
+on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.
+
+It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English
+Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the
+time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at
+all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the
+odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English
+Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has
+freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied
+charm, 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 the
+opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect
+expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the
+intangible "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 is
+not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.
+
+Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse
+which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
+imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
+been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
+indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
+repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
+is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
+of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
+established 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 time
+that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
+curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted
+the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that
+Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that
+"Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not
+detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons
+brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?
+
+And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
+Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
+been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
+ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
+young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
+Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
+much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
+Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
+of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
+Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
+Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
+devout 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 imitate
+him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
+easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
+dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
+with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
+poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some
+noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
+passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
+existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
+gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
+improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
+carved 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, though
+they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
+was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
+passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
+few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.
+
+Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could
+meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts
+in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us
+represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the
+Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another
+thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a
+marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.
+
+Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had
+a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after
+verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a
+breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across
+the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I
+wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or
+Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or
+even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the
+choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And
+there 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 beginning
+to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
+lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
+Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
+want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
+young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
+private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
+cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
+advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
+astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
+Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
+their aftermath, the æsthetic poets, really got more colour and
+amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
+of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blasé and cynical
+and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
+many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.
+
+Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights
+and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In
+England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than
+Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the
+English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they
+wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.
+
+I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
+Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
+never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
+_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
+for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
+"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
+amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
+closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
+obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
+"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
+Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
+cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
+trifle!
+
+    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 he
+hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans,
+Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo
+accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the
+New.
+
+When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully
+examined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue and
+explanations, 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 la
+Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as
+an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to
+say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his
+cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of
+modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about
+an old-fashioned aëroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
+centre of something interesting.
+
+The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear
+and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the
+very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the
+principle 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 appeal
+to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary
+to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw
+in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the
+poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good
+example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it
+is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not
+ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the
+expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is
+certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings
+of 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 her
+contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the
+professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and
+angry 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, but
+who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as
+an 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 character
+might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to
+ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all,
+when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the
+Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of
+Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse
+unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
+series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven
+of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
+Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.
+
+Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
+it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
+is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
+relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
+could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
+Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
+poets, 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 mediæval
+knights cut out of pasteboard.
+
+By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
+statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
+modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
+test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
+different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
+those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
+"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
+cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
+Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
+Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
+Kreymborg and others new--_chacun à son goût_--I feel that by comparison
+with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because
+they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.
+
+Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
+shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
+neither 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 than
+Shakespeare, in "Julius Cæsar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
+Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
+really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
+religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
+themselves.
+
+If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
+he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
+the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
+painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
+the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
+them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
+Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
+poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
+efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
+which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
+Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
+struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
+Christianity 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 a
+statuette of Leda and the Swan or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as a
+shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
+blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
+a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
+beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
+impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
+unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
+past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
+write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
+very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
+the pulsations of the hearts of others.
+
+Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
+shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
+believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
+to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
+Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
+Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
+manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
+illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.
+
+Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love
+in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be
+united with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.
+They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that
+ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the
+mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.
+
+Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but
+in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the
+search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the
+splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost
+fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of
+Saint 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 poets
+pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a
+corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious
+colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a
+pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.
+
+To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this
+seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;
+and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity
+did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante,
+in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that
+the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of
+gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when
+Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks
+were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers
+represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their
+lives.
+
+The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from
+despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome
+came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had
+children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any
+god 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 be
+united 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 a
+man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CERTAIN NOVELISTS
+
+
+My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens was an evolution rather than a
+discovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby," the
+book became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimes
+felt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not know
+him!
+
+Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and that
+chuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian guide
+introduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joys
+indeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind of
+humour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities of
+Artemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.
+Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages, my pleasure in the
+works 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 a
+time. 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 human
+interest, a lack of coarseness, which placed it immeasurably above that
+of Mark Twain.
+
+The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the
+greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens
+redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and
+deeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds
+apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I
+know persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they could
+in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as a
+masterpiece.
+
+It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests his
+narrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack of
+knowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for an
+appearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual.
+That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kind
+friend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many other
+authors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easily
+understood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain.
+
+Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very different
+causes. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of an
+understanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
+spirituality without which no great work can be effective. It was
+because Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his
+study of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from the
+point 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 new
+to him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel is
+nevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with a
+France that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as the
+mauve tints through which certain artists see their figures and
+landscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
+lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of a
+great power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without that
+training which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sources
+of French history.
+
+In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the power to reach the
+sources; it was an inability to understand the character of the woman
+whom he reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and an invincible
+ignorance of the character of her time. Mark Twain was modern; but
+modern in the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry Finn" and the
+other young Americans--whom our youth are expected to like, if not to
+imitate--are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those libraries who
+recommend typical books to eager juvenile readers. But let that pass for
+the moment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any man or woman of
+refinement who will hold a brief in defense of the vulgarity of "A
+Connecticut 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 world
+over--cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The average American
+reads Mark Twain only to be amused, or to recall the adventures of a
+time not far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, whether my
+compatriots are in the habit of looking into books for a philosophy or
+not, or of considering the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it
+does not follow that it is to their credit if they neglect an analysis
+which cultivated readers in other countries seldom omit.
+
+If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety
+which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but
+as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions,
+I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American
+reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has
+become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a
+time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all
+self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of
+culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's
+statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not
+think that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or of
+Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more
+pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of
+Autolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"
+
+"You who admire Don Quixote," said an infuriated Mark Twainite, "should
+not talk of coarseness. There are pages in that romance of Cervantes
+which I would not allow my son or daughter to read."
+
+One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side to
+show what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
+is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were not
+his. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not mean
+innocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admit
+that the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was no
+conspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness,
+however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither
+Cervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.
+
+To them, even the ordinary things of life have a certain sacerdotal
+quality; but Mark Twain abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors
+a vacuum. To say that he has affected the American spirit or the
+American heart would be to go too far--for Americans are irreverent only
+on the surface. It seems to me that they are the most reverent people in
+the world toward those essential qualities which make up the spiritual
+parts of life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is just at present
+the one author to whom all Europe and all outlanders point as the great
+typical American writer!
+
+That a delightful kind of American humour may exist without
+exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many
+joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that
+are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm
+and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the
+American 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, so
+pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the
+knowledge 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 was
+during 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 the
+maze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrived
+just when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was the
+only real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine as
+the sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed from
+the earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not be
+forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived.
+
+Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had in
+the past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one of
+the most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" was
+one of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a better
+novel 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 be
+forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
+professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
+succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
+pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
+talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
+memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
+remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phoebe Junior"--finds a slowly
+decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
+"Les Rois en Exilé" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
+literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
+"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
+to be unread.
+
+To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially
+bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series
+is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo
+books to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracy
+which the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes adapted to
+the subway is supposed to indicate, is a real menace when one discovers
+that "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!
+
+We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity, but it is my belief that
+Sodom and Gomorrah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of that
+time had made it possible to keep books like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" in
+general circulation!
+
+It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as long as English men and
+women of the upper and middle classes continued to exist, he might go on
+writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And the same thing might be
+said of Booth Tarkington in relation to his unique chronicles of
+youth--that is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal Soul. His
+types are American, but there are Americas and Americas. Usage permits
+us to use a term for our part of the continent to which our Canadian and
+South and Central Americans and Mexicans might reasonably object; but
+while 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 in
+Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances would have made him
+different. The consciousness of class distinction would have made him
+old before his time; and though he might be just as amusing--he would
+not have been amusing quite in the same way.
+
+And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. Tarkington's imaginative
+synthesis. He is individual and of his own soil; he knows very well that
+it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to invent; he has only to
+perceive with those rare gifts of perception which he possesses. It all
+seems so easy until you try to do it yourself!
+
+The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageant
+of the "Table Round," is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but
+no child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child has
+suffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainable
+hardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something or
+other prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parents
+are bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibres
+of his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrod
+has gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be so
+unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"
+Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real as
+those parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens is
+pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybody
+admits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
+to be pathetic.
+
+One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful situations which
+seem to ripple from the pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being
+the 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's
+entrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's best. Penrod is expected to
+find, according to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the
+cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young lady unengaged, who
+was Miss Rennsdale, aged eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his
+call.
+
+     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 have
+so conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
+gets it just right. He has created boy characters which will live
+because they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after Mark
+Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's "Child's
+History of England." The two books have various gross faults in common
+and these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
+says 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 do
+very 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 no
+reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
+papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
+defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
+for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
+fact 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, the
+more modern definition would have been very different from what the
+English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
+a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
+England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
+by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
+exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
+Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
+thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
+often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
+analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
+was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
+if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
+gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
+Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
+Weller. Why not?
+
+There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes,
+which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms
+of the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out,
+though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lower
+classes of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because they
+are satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Weller
+represents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's
+"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When one
+examines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
+lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the
+English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all
+conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be
+a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor
+Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say
+it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions as Dickens was.
+
+Dickens had the art of making insupportable bores most interesting. This
+was an art in which the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but
+Dickens's methods compared to hers are like those of a scene painter
+when compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times when
+Dickens is consciously "common," and then he is almost unbearable; but
+this objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers." This book is
+inartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not
+grow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They are
+spontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes
+to do--and all the world loves a lover who loves his work.
+
+There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate the
+romantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby." There are no really romantic
+qualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero,
+no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom
+suddenly as the branch in "Tannhäuser" bloomed. Even Dickens can work no
+miracle there.
+
+It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of those
+gentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as his
+predecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "Tristram
+Shandy," a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones," very
+tiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of
+eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was
+brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
+and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian
+Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
+analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance
+between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the
+adventures of the peerless Pickwick.
+
+If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, he
+ought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The Poor
+Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias," and others too
+numerous to mention.
+
+The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows older, perhaps becomes a
+student of Dickens, and is surprised to find that the development of
+Dickens is much more marked and easily noted than the development of
+Thackeray. In fact, Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier,
+sprang into the public light fully equipped and fully armed. Both these
+men had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportion
+before they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art and
+life and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
+begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither method nor proportion; and he
+who reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new and
+good perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically,
+it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks that
+flavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get such
+thorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens
+sacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in it
+that gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles
+or of 'Tilda Price.
+
+Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography," which ought to be a textbook
+in all those practical classes of literature that work to turn out
+self-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of a
+novel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot in
+the works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt to
+summarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
+
+Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
+read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
+an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
+and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
+thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
+1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
+Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
+Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
+find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
+and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
+was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
+almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
+read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
+winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
+bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
+had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
+a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
+chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!
+
+George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. No
+well-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
+Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. The
+heroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, but
+she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificiality
+of Kingsley's "Hypatia," which I read at almost the same time, made me
+admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth could
+ever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or Catherine
+Seton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring with
+Blackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholastic
+philosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consommé_ of St.
+Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemed
+truer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as
+_papier-maché_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of the
+time. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history,
+but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and
+as "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's reading
+of Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, of
+course. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and the
+scene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel,
+give me "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and probably fewer will
+read it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the genius
+of a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that it
+almost 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 that
+whenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. In
+a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. It
+is true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not
+very narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of the
+most pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all his
+life is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, or
+to preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommend
+unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature have
+undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools
+of critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; and
+the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval and
+condemnation. 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 it
+is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a
+book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint
+Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the
+relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of
+pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this
+charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal château, he
+never 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, or
+perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his
+friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could
+not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that
+the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back
+to 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. I
+can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as
+I read the "Letters" of Madame de Sévigné or the "Memoirs" of the Duc
+de Saint Simon.
+
+I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English
+translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--the
+interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon.
+Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
+think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to
+become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic
+author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without
+the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture
+of Mademoiselle de la Vallière looking hopelessly out of the window of
+her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the
+chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly,
+holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis
+XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?
+
+But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simon
+and Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
+and ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has his
+pet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age who
+gives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and
+"Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believe
+that? 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 he
+considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard to
+exist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in a
+number of the _Atlantic Monthly_ not so long ago there is a vivid,
+pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portion
+of 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. I
+might incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a direct
+question about books, one does incriminate oneself.
+
+However, to return to what I was saying--while I love the "Memoirs of
+Cardinal de Retz," I adore--to be a little extravagant--the "Letters of
+Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does not know the real story of the
+life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the
+brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really
+fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real
+reformer in the France of his time.
+
+Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of
+Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the
+contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the
+Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the
+worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good
+peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He
+earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de Sévigné, for which
+any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a lifetime. But
+even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he gives a
+picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is shamelessly
+true. No living man to-day in political office, although he might be as
+great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so interestingly
+shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if you read him
+in French, you discover that he knew how to make literature.
+
+The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so
+penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
+have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
+But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
+the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
+literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
+General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
+Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
+Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
+reputation 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 point
+of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in
+the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to
+an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where
+"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the
+clergymen 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 younger
+son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his
+faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his
+best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with
+Bassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois de
+Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the
+Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my
+duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the
+utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's
+destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."
+
+The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The
+Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less
+diffuse, and, not writing _feuilletons_, are not forced to be diffuse.
+The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can
+hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go
+directly to the sources of his romances.
+
+Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of
+Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
+were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more
+about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through
+certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that
+I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could
+be 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 as
+Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but,
+then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has
+never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood
+that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is
+sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it
+should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time
+the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim
+the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a
+young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a
+pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's
+translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
+fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
+reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
+them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
+Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _à la
+mode 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 before
+and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this,
+is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best
+One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five
+books.
+
+In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country
+efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to
+France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French
+people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his
+memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
+faults 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 a
+venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of
+contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the
+aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.
+
+His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of
+the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called
+"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in
+that class of systematic _roués_" who were astonished at the virtue of
+the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in
+that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have
+not yet found them.
+
+In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
+great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
+soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
+and Philippe Égalité were the most fascinating characters of the French
+Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy who was
+listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to exclaim
+suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about Judas!"
+
+To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quote
+a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness,"
+said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of
+Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the
+pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of human
+nature."
+
+This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for
+enlightening 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 Morris
+a hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "I
+may, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is the
+father 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 de
+Flahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelity
+of the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; De
+Launey's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered
+men lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is not
+disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock,
+to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock
+the Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in the
+belief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day,
+he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He is
+corroborated 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 to
+me that there is no more interesting and useful book on the French
+Revolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near De
+Tocqueville'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 be
+chosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of the
+House of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic,
+just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all the
+cold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles of
+government which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against
+Burr, 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 profound
+reverence, 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. Morris
+believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as
+Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of
+Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
+the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?
+
+I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many
+times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the
+Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the
+kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This
+autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
+authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is
+the 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 us
+an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels
+ever elaborated.
+
+What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American
+atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of
+doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself
+as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his
+caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
+self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he
+wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew
+he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of
+literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public
+servant.
+
+As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt.
+Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained
+leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the
+same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of
+sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashion
+in our day to declare that society is against us when we have to work
+unremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing,
+and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as applied
+to him--inspiring!
+
+In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice against
+Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans," as we were all
+taught to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all softened toward
+Dickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told story
+of the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his mother
+without believing that the recording angel in no way holds her
+responsible for her rather vulgar book.
+
+How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of the
+books written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! How
+he managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tell
+us. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of the
+pious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray," and
+although paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly because
+there was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "The
+Warden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aught
+in malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very good
+reading. 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 from
+a 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 professing
+Christians.
+
+     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 Georgia
+girl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a little
+volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find
+life 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 acquaintance
+who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!
+
+Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens
+to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de Sévigné
+when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad books ought to be
+preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost better for the
+young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is to gauge the
+value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity, after all, is
+not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a certain age is
+very desirable.
+
+While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and
+value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
+into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the
+subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
+Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn
+from 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 is
+not 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 on
+the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be
+our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of
+cheerfulness.
+
+Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant
+town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian
+industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.
+Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be
+very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that
+delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the
+really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be
+real he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhaps
+because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic
+sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters.
+But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright nor
+Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to
+assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
+had no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in their
+day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered
+to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be
+taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet
+which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene
+Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher
+philosophical 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 be
+shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or of
+the Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from the
+responsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors of
+the description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted by
+Madame de Sévigné or to revel among the groups of Italians who range
+through 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 be
+treated 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 be
+read nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as a
+model of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy,
+literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such passages
+as 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 beloved
+Pepys!
+
+One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn had been able to decipher
+some of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have written
+this 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 look
+on Charles II. as one of the weakest of English kings; but when we come
+to enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is much
+to be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England under
+difficult circumstances than conventional history has given him credit
+for.
+
+It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed to
+me as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you
+what 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 the
+tops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with an
+understanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, though
+it may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody finds
+in gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us
+know our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves--but perhaps
+more clearly--can never be rooted out of normal human nature.
+
+I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and I
+sat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, and
+by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there was
+always Madame de Sévigné. Much was hoped from the long-promised "Memoirs
+of Talleyrand." They came; they were disappointing.
+
+Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in a
+way with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. And
+this is "The Education of Henry Adams," and almost contemporaneously the
+"Letters of William James." It is easy to understand the delight with
+which intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams."
+Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about
+in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--that
+education consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, and
+regarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward in
+one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans
+are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which
+Samuel 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; it
+is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
+looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on
+them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The
+judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with
+horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry
+Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of
+Cardinal Newman!
+
+There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable
+and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while
+Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it,
+Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
+not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal
+Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much
+above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--but
+intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough
+to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but
+reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God that
+troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of
+pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a
+personal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, God
+Himself.
+
+Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in
+a personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others
+who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely
+negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without
+understanding 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. It
+is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our
+political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no
+other man that make his book supremely interesting.
+
+The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no
+longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know
+that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a
+"best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail
+the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that
+its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion,
+and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to
+purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed
+with a scornful wave of the hand.
+
+When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it
+was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as
+far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air of
+pathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it became
+the _Century_--of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the
+editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
+his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the
+heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.
+
+Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams
+lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
+by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty
+wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful.
+Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be
+good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal
+of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to
+struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern
+Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
+compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the
+enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can
+see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight
+that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is
+both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry
+Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of
+the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst
+of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no man
+more pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men are
+free, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does not
+always take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities of
+his book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with
+him, 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 "The
+Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More than
+that, 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 too
+strong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were not
+egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit or
+self-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public,
+"The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himself
+without writing about himself. This seems very much like a platitude.
+And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. If
+anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took a
+tone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below the
+average 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 delicate
+tint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions and
+such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! He
+is the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the
+discoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the real
+architecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song of
+Roland." How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem in
+comparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are so
+laboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glance
+with which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He has
+his limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects on
+the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, the
+half-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and English
+who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help giving
+grateful thanks for having found Henry Adams.
+
+To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems to
+be that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the military
+architecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with the
+beauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more
+receptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would have
+discovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture and
+the cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, have
+profited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that Henry
+Adams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize that
+he would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, and
+which many of them are sincerely grateful for.
+
+The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over
+again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books
+to 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 Best
+Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own
+shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts,
+soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are
+not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his
+critical vocation; Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey
+has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really
+good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little
+material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth
+while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background
+and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are
+many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood.
+Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who
+once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of
+cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into
+great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that
+half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!
+
+It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should
+appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the
+Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We
+had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman
+and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories;
+but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
+of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a
+state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.
+
+In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and
+Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the
+modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the
+novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which
+I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I
+found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is
+always "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 Walter
+Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever
+attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of
+enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted,
+so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical
+persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same.
+Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on
+without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly
+Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I
+rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine
+in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many
+magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's few
+pages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader--by a
+loving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books.
+
+You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento where
+Lady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine
+flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bring
+back to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius
+Cæsar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together with that
+group 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 James
+speak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the very
+beginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of the
+little circle about him. The conversation goes on--Mr. James never loses
+sight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the second
+part--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 already
+begun 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," that
+it _is_ the very essence of literature. _Scientia_ is truth, or
+conclusions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the personality
+of the speaker or writer. But literature, to be literature, must be
+personal. It is good literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
+accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader like myself does not,
+perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently with the philosophy of William
+James as represented in these "Letters." One has a languid interest in
+knowing what he thought of Bergson and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but
+for the constant reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and
+St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal
+impressions of both the little things and the big things of our
+contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you
+are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read
+the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may
+resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself
+so tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether young
+Henry 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 by
+drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated
+by 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 begun
+to 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 William
+James" too frivolously, told me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to
+counteract my mediæval philosophy and too cheerful view of life. Just as
+if I had not struggled with Mr. Wells, and irritated myself into a
+temperature in trying to get through his latest preachments! I am not
+quite 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 have
+said.
+
+     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 of
+my mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man of
+talent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man of
+genius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potent
+Deity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; but
+Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an education
+such as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
+bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians,
+are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms
+seriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us that
+the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not
+begin with--_Qui fit, Mæcenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authors
+of fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_,"--who
+insist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
+might have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much good
+taste 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 with
+the ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do you
+think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if he
+insisted 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 in
+his translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
+something as well as himself. It does not become me to recommend
+books--everybody to his own taste!--but I should like to say that for
+those 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 Marie
+Antoinette at Versailles, the translations of our dear Horatius by Lord
+Lytton is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the most charming
+and 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 other
+preachers, who ought to confine themselves to finer things, desired that
+Horace should have gone further and told us what kind of books we ought
+to read in our old age. His choice was naturally limited; it was
+impossible for him to buy a book every week, or every month. The
+publishers were not so active in those days. But he might have indicated
+the kind of book that old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
+have tried "Robinson Crusoe,"--the unequalled--and "Swiss Family
+Robinson"; but they seem too grown up for me now. I have taken to "King
+Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that perfect gem of
+excitement and illusion, "The Mutineers," by Charles Boardman Hawes. I
+read it, and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising bookseller
+will unblushingly compile a library for the old, and begin it with "The
+Mutineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the Near Old is that the
+fear of shocking the Young makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
+they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they express intense
+interest in new and ponderous books, in the presence of Youth--when they
+ought to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. But if the Old
+really want to save their faces, and at the same time enjoy glimpses of
+that fountain of youth which we long for at every age, let them acquire
+two books--Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded Man" and "The Quest of El
+Dorado," by Dr. J. A. Zahm, whose _nom de plume_ was H. J. Mozans. There
+you have the real stuff. Together, these two books are a combination of
+just what the Old need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke he
+cannot dream with any facility when he grows old; and if he has not
+possessed himself of these two volumes, he cannot have acquired that
+basis 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 when
+it deals with the El Dorado; it has all the most attractive qualities of
+a romance.
+
+But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob, Son of Battle," which the
+author of "Alice For Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest
+animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is nobly human, and the
+Black Killer devilishly human, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs,
+invented by clever writers. A great book! It is too thrilling; it
+reminds of "Wuthering Heights"; I shall, therefore, read this evening
+some of Henry Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with "Pride
+and Prejudice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BOOKS AT RANDOM
+
+
+Among nature books that gave me many happy hours on the banks of the
+Delaware--imperial river!--is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow."
+"Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the twelve labours of Hercules than
+attempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the area of an
+average ramble!" _Soit!_ And better than that, "to feel that whatever
+creature we may meet will prove companionable--that is, no stranger, but
+rather an amusing and companionable friend--assures both pleasure and
+profit whenever we chance abroad."
+
+Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his companion can forget the
+extracts from the diary of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
+the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced the number of wild ducks and
+geese, he says, even then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was often
+black 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 as
+frequently 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 skunk
+cabbage, 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 of
+raccoons. "Foolish creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning coons
+are forced to quest or die."
+
+For a stroll by the Thames--I mean the New England Thames--there is no
+book like Ik Marvel's "Dream Life," but for a day near the
+Delaware--imperial river!--give me "Upland and Meadow."
+
+And then with what assurance of satisfaction may one turn for
+refreshment to the continual charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby"
+and "Pepacton." Burroughs's opinions upon the problems of humanity are
+more tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
+him among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaring
+lark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, to
+look with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is to
+begin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no other
+author gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers of
+the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the English
+thrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades.
+
+There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but he
+might not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasant
+Englishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as he
+said, they were "so homely." In fact, they were rather pretty girls, and
+he had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
+with which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him
+at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully
+"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the
+refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
+in the eighties there were still _précieuses_. The truth is that his
+rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his
+style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the
+good soil of the country.
+
+Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I
+will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by
+Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame
+Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us
+an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's,
+like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character
+of 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 mental
+dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of
+"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find
+the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything
+more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is
+Madame 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 and
+the manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is more
+like an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ to
+which she would prefer to be compared.
+
+There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame de
+Boigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no real
+harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and gives
+the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a
+most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a
+writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully
+uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry
+VIII. But this is a digression.
+
+Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne as
+displaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr. Mencken
+cannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in his
+desire 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, Sir
+Thomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a little
+into the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modern
+novelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life is
+purely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
+writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, or
+his 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 leads
+an interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldom
+talks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art of
+meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful,
+is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how to
+cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
+Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his
+imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a
+book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points.
+For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the
+difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in
+this 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 of
+this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "I
+can't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous that
+human beings should exist who take this attitude toward Sir Thomas
+Browne, his "Urn Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems almost more
+miraculous that this attitude should be taken toward Montaigne, and that
+some folk should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the pleasant,
+curtailed edition of John Florio's translation, edited by Justin Huntly
+McCarthy! These small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot have
+the original French, or the leisure to browse over the big volume of
+Florio's old book as it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an
+agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It somehow or other reminds
+one of that appalling series of cutdown "Classics," so largely
+recommended to a public that is seduced to run and read. A condensed
+edition of Froissart may do very well for boys; but who can visualize
+the 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, to
+read whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and "The New
+Machiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay," will be remembered when "Mr.
+Britling"--by the way, what did Mr. Britling see through?--shall be
+forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn to Montaigne. It amazed me
+to hear Montaigne called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward the
+eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and he has fewer superstitions.
+It was his humanity and his love for religion that turned him from
+Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for Plato. He is a real
+amateur 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 by
+Brutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
+that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather know
+what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on
+the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He
+had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that
+keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to
+hear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpets
+that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing
+"jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out
+the 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'oeuvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the
+translation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis sive
+liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is a
+good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar
+to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself
+in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and
+he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute
+as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The
+discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns
+him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to
+his contemporaries on the subject.
+
+In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together
+in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy
+Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.
+
+"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life
+than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating
+Europe from the Middle Ages."
+
+It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de
+Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the
+precious sentences of Thomas à Kempis. They are foils; at first sight
+there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel
+de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with
+Thomas à Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being
+Montaignes, Thomas à Kempis would have written for God alone. He would
+have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had
+erected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitely
+carved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
+toward the people and not the side toward the Presence of God, it was
+entirely plain and unornamented!
+
+The friendship of Thomas à Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson might
+easily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
+supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling might
+exist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be as
+nothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellous
+guide to life. The translations of Thomas à Kempis into English vary in
+value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of À Kempis in
+deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing
+Thomas à Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of
+his 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 during
+the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul
+and divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas à Kempis
+would never have written "The Following of Christ." The Bible, even the
+New Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul's
+Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what better interpretation of the
+doctrines of Christ as applied to everyday life can there be found than
+in this precious little book?
+
+You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather what comfort you can from the
+philosophy of Thoreau's "Walden"--which might, after all, be more
+comfortable if it were more pagan. The Pan of Thoreau was a respectable
+Pan, 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 in
+Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with every day. And George
+Eliot was a remarkable example of this, for, in spite of her habitual
+reverence, she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox dogmas. Another
+paradox seems to be in the fact that Thomas à Kempis appeals so directly
+and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to those who have secluded
+themselves from the world. At first, I must confess that I found this a
+great obstacle to my joy in having found him.
+
+If Montaigne frequently drove me to À Kempis, À Kempis almost as
+frequently in the beginning drove me back to Montaigne. It was not
+until I had become more familiar with the New Testament that I began to
+see that À Kempis spoke as one soul to another. In this world for him
+there were only three Facts--God, his own soul, and the soul to whom he
+spoke.
+
+It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many of my friends who looked
+on the Last Supper as a mere symbol of love and hospitality, should
+cling to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. Even the example
+of an intellectual friend of mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in
+Italy, could not make it clear. He often asserted that he did not
+believe in God; and yet he was desolate if on a certain day in the year
+he did not pay some kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
+Padua!
+
+I have known him to break up a party in the Adirondacks in order to
+reach the nearest church where it was possible for him to burn a candle
+in honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious anniversary! As long
+as he exists, as long as he continues to burn candles--_les chandelles
+d'un athée_--I shall accept without understanding the enthusiasm of so
+many lovers of À Kempis, who cut out the mystical longings for the
+reception 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 poignantly
+than even David, in that great cry of the heart and soul, the De
+Profundis:
+
+     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, the
+only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the
+sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect
+are worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
+never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knew
+their hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedy
+so effective as that which À Kempis offers.
+
+It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fear
+of hurting or offending the Beloved.
+
+The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War and
+on 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 the
+state traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriously
+combatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versailles
+and Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles which
+guided 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 on
+November 12, 1921, would have dared to assert these unmoral principles,
+accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, in
+principle? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholy
+novelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life of
+the Middle Ages.
+
+There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was kept
+alive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's
+world, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A better
+understanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton less
+autocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaire
+less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic lately
+named a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and of
+Catherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir Thomas
+Browne 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 Sir
+Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the
+politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of
+either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth
+century, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together.
+
+Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and
+one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.
+This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears
+in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told
+that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his
+family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that
+he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is,
+therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The
+American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in
+our universities are those which concern themselves with written and
+spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools
+and 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 so
+constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into
+which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language
+which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us
+that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
+throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
+the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true
+in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was
+fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles
+which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal
+Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln
+himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than
+the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten
+almost 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; and
+then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of
+English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of
+the 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 or
+of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote
+Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with
+correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
+read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant
+White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The
+Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of
+writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"
+was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or
+the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is
+not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in
+the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and
+nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them
+with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved
+as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a
+good deal.
+
+The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of
+Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class of
+Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the
+matter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord
+Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several
+examples of this.
+
+"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's
+Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all
+its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who
+habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as
+an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious
+over what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis," which he said
+a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have
+known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of
+the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody," Mr. Mencken
+shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
+convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on
+the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
+can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word
+"consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in the
+First Baptist Church at high noon"!
+
+In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" is
+better than "elevator," and "station" better than "dépot." Though these
+are departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often when
+our critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. I
+have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated English
+traditions 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 one
+occasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," for
+those "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; and
+he spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such composition
+really existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seen
+approaching with an unmistakable "pie," the kind supposed by the readers
+of advertisements to be made by "mothers," and ordered hastily because
+of the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest tried
+to 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 London
+visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that
+"muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when
+I 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 always
+provided with little dishes, like butter plates, for the discarded cups.
+His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learning
+who laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary,
+and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an education
+in himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when he
+came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell from
+grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my
+search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask
+him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape
+from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not
+lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!
+
+Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in
+England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
+Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches
+of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used by
+Mr. 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 go
+very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in
+Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a
+little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was
+because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The
+little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel
+Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus
+ventris 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 regard
+to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
+quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language,
+another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
+tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of
+strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably
+precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this
+usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted
+at 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 more
+than a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy French
+preacher who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" as "pluff" had
+much excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluer
+de lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How many
+conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!
+
+There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or
+more 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 for
+odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a
+precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify
+the quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thick
+flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner is
+announced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!
+
+It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of English
+grammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
+and of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner in
+which Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
+Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir
+Conan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, let
+them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. Mencken's statements on the
+growth of the English language! In my time we were expected to take
+Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt that
+his principles have been repeated by every writer on style, including
+Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition," since Mr.
+Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principles
+reminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he met
+Beatrice.
+
+There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as a
+science and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while he
+provokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in Robert
+Louis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications in
+style in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.
+
+And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a little
+volume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the
+terrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It is
+Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." And if one wants to know
+how to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does not
+come by nature--there is "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville, the close
+friend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken must
+love him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _flâneur_--the
+chief business of a _flâneur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in old
+Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows;
+but the _flâneur_ among books finds none of his shop-windows
+unrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of a
+word that sounded something like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every
+Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and they
+often did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you
+should never say "druggist." I trust that it is no breach of confidence
+to repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modern
+Philadelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languages
+in his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for the
+boys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
+lad 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 New
+York City, at least the beginning of one American language--the language
+of the street.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I have
+often asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure and
+even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. For
+the plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although I
+believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to a
+really good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Of
+memoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Créquy have
+always 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 the
+Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and
+even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth
+returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so
+admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all
+atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now
+comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries
+including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth
+living!
+
+I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David
+whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
+me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise
+Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am
+surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its
+splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious
+visions of truth at a white heat.
+
+Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a
+picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
+didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no
+great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
+preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never
+could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a
+great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see
+that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a
+cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh
+the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the
+first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's
+Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of
+the passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for a
+poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for
+us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the
+philosophies of Wordsworth.
+
+To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their
+power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own
+faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of
+raising 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 works
+of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers
+of this consoling art to "_filles de joie_." He doubtless meant that
+these goddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave us
+visions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without being
+sensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels,
+like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which are joyous and serious at once. Or
+take "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."
+
+Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads
+them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say
+that 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 of
+the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found
+all 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 a
+severe sense of duty!" he said.
+
+Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility and failed, though she
+gained in the end a greater title. Her works are insufferably and
+complacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings with
+respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her first
+volume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress of
+Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have been
+nourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St.
+Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the most
+practical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the form
+of letters. Next comes Fénelon's and--I know that I shall shock those
+who regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his power
+of stimulation, Emerson.
+
+It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that these
+confessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them I
+have had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind but
+simply of relieving my own, by button-holing the reader who happens to
+come my way. I should like to add that what is called the coarseness of
+the eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than the
+nasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lack
+of talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts.
+Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common with
+the process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles," to use
+Charles Reade's phrase.
+
+If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmness
+and patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
+for thanking God is that Americans have produced a literature--the
+continuation of an older literature with variations, it is true,--that
+has added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mention
+only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," and I am glad to end my book by
+writing the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, or
+with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, are
+no longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
+writes of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a title to
+his discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It
+is an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough for
+smiles.
+
+It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is
+rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature
+and assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don
+Marquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippingly
+as any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is nobody writing in the
+daily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they do
+it. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention to
+what they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Will
+they live? Of course not. Is Émile de Girardin alive? Or all the clever
+ones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One still
+reads the "Portraits de Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
+something 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, or
+as 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 by
+an American--since Mrs. Wharton's "Valley of Decision"--proved him to be
+a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better psychologically than
+Mrs. Wharton, but here there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
+she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent and insular at long
+intervals.
+
+"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 for
+himself!
+
+"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern essay. Strangely
+enough, 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 that
+with new delight between certain paragraphs in Brooks's paper "On
+Finding a Plot." Why is not "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth
+edition? Or why has it no _claque_? The kind of _claque_ that is so
+common now--which opens suddenly like a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls
+of Theocritus"? After all, your education must have been well begun
+before 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 is
+much 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 Theodore
+Roosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the
+other 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 in
+his youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
+with you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in
+whom he had not much interest, since he was a _gourmet_ and did not
+regard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents and
+ascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales--and
+her scales were smoother than Patti's.
+
+Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," and "The Ancient Irish
+Sagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";
+and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before
+Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love.
+It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and
+how 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 of
+the 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 retained
+as 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.
+The oe ligature has been replaced with just oe in Phoebe and
+hors d'oeuvres]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Confessions of a Book-Lover, by 
+Maurice Francis Egan
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions of a Book-Lover, by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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+
+Title: Confessions of a Book-Lover
+
+Author: Maurice Francis Egan
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2007 [EBook #24003]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elaine Walker, Janet Kegg and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>CONFESSIONS OF A<br/>
+BOOK-LOVER</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/titlepage.png" width="330" height="600" alt="Anchor with a flower" title="Anchor with a flower" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">GARDEN CITY&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NEW YORK</p>
+
+<p class="center">DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &amp; COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center">1922
+</p>
+<hr class="short"/>
+
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY</p>
+
+<p class="center">DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &amp; COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center">ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION<br/>
+INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN</p>
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES<br/>
+AT<br/>
+THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
+</p>
+<hr class="short"/>
+
+
+<p class="center">IN MEMORY OF</p>
+
+<h4>THEODORE ROOSEVELT</h4>
+
+<p class="center">A MAN OF ACTION
+IN LOVE WITH BOOKS
+</p>
+<hr class="short"/>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<p><b>CHAPTER</b></p>
+
+<ol class="uc-roman">
+  <li><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">My Boyhood Reading</a></span>
+    <ul class="nostyle">
+       <li><a href="#Page_1">Early Recollections.</a></li>
+       <li><a href="#Page_37">The Bible.</a></li>
+       <li><a href="#Page_55">Essays and Essayists.</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+
+  <li><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Poets and Poetry</a></span>
+    <ul class="nostyle">
+       <li><a href="#Page_76">France&mdash;Of Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin.</a></li>
+       <li><a href="#Page_97">Dante.</a></li>
+       <li><a href="#Page_106">English and American Verse.</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Certain Novelists</a></span></li>
+  <li><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs</a></span></li>
+  <li><span class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">Books at Random</a></span></li>
+</ol>
+<p><!-- Page 1 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span>
+</p>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONFESSIONS_OF_A" id="CONFESSIONS_OF_A"></a>CONFESSIONS OF A<br/>BOOK-LOVER</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">My Boyhood Reading</span></h3>
+
+<h4><i>Early Recollections</i></h4>
+
+
+<p>To get the best out of books, I am convinced
+that you must begin to love these perennial friends
+very early in life. It is the only way to know all
+their "curves," all those little shadows of expression
+and small lights. There is a glamour
+which you never <i>see</i> if you begin to read with a
+serious intention late in life, when questions of
+technique and grammar and mere words begin to
+seem too important.</p>
+
+<p>Then you have become too critical to feel through
+all Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes and
+woods, or the wild fervour of romance beneath dear
+Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable
+flavour of books. A friend you may<!-- Page 2 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+irretrievably lose when you lose a friend&mdash;if you
+are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend&mdash;for
+even the memories of him are embittered; but no
+great author can ever have done anything that
+will make the book you love less precious to you.</p>
+
+<p>The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves,
+I know, of miscellaneous reading, and no
+modern moralist will agree with Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; that "bad books are better than no books
+at all"; but Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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 when I was young, I read several
+books which I was told afterward were very bad
+indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody
+told me! The youthful mind must possess something
+of the quality attributed to a duck's back!
+I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau"
+was snatched suddenly away from me by a careful
+mother just as I had begun to think that Jean
+Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as
+queer as some of the people I knew. I believe
+that if I had been allowed to finish the book, it
+would have become by some mental chemical process
+a very edifying criticism of life.<!-- Page 3 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed
+to read it by a pious aunt, whom I was visiting,
+because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown
+of Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than
+"Eric, or Little by Little," for which I dropped
+it. I remember, too, that I was rather shocked
+by some things written in the Old Testament; and
+I retorted to my aunt's pronouncement that she
+considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a dangerous
+book," by saying that the Old Testament was the
+worst book I had ever read; but I supposed "people
+had put something into it when God wasn't looking."
+She sent me home.</p>
+
+<p>At home, I was permitted to read only the New
+Testament. On winter Sunday afternoons, when
+there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
+attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to
+the conclusion that nobody could tell a short story
+as well as Our Lord Himself. The Centurion was
+one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be
+such a good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not
+worthy," flashes across my mental vision every
+day of my life.</p>
+
+<p>In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel
+is read every Sunday, and carefully interpreted.<!-- Page 4 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+This always interested me because I knew in advance
+what the priest was going to read. Most
+of the children of my acquaintance were taught
+their Scriptures through the International Sunday-school
+lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged
+in the geography of Palestine and other tiresome
+details. For me, reading as I did, the whole of
+the New Testament was radiant with interest,
+a frankly human interest. There were many passages
+that I did not pretend to understand, sometimes
+because the English was obscure or archaic,
+and sometimes because my mind was not equal to
+it or my knowledge too small. Whatever may be
+the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading
+of the New Testament in the simplicity of
+childhood, with the flower of intuition not yet
+blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental
+experiences. In my own case, it gave a glow to
+life; it caused me to distinguish between truth and
+fairy tales, between fact and fiction&mdash;and this is
+often very difficult for an imaginative child.</p>
+
+<p>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<!-- Page 5 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+will be "something in Heaven for children to do!"
+As to distractions, the modern child is surrounded
+by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions
+of the present system of instruction not
+to leave to a child any moments of leisure for the
+indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering
+the example of my childhood for imitation by
+the modern parents.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There
+were no "movies" in those days, and the theatre
+was only occasionally permitted; but on long
+afternoons, after you had learned to read, you
+might lose yourself in "The Scottish Chiefs" to
+your heart's content. It seems to me that the
+beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that
+you had time to visualize everything, and you felt
+the dramatic moments so keenly, that a sense of
+unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time.
+It was not necessary for you to be told that Helen
+Mar was beautiful. It was only necessary 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 holiday afternoons,
+especially as the copy I read had been so misused<!-- Page 6 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+that I had to spend precious half hours in putting
+the pages together. It was worth the trouble,
+however.</p>
+
+<p>Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy
+days to sit at my mother's knee and listen to what
+<i>she</i> read. I am happy to say that she never read
+children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to
+my youthful misunderstanding. She read aloud
+what she liked to read, and she never considered
+whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline.
+At first, I looked drearily out at the soggy
+city street, in which rivulets of melted snow made
+any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible.
+There is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon
+in a city when the heavy snows begin to
+melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
+of what happened outside of the house.
+At two o'clock precisely&mdash;after the manner of the
+King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"&mdash;she
+waved her wand. After that, all that I was
+expected to do was to make no noise.</p>
+
+<p>In this way I became acquainted with "The
+Virginians," then running in <i>Harper's Magazine</i>,
+with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and
+"Richard III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas<!-- Page 7 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+Nickleby" and "Valentine Vox"&mdash;why "Valentine
+Vox?"&mdash;and other volumes when I should
+have been listening to "Alice in Wonderland."
+But when I came, in turn, to "Alice in Wonderland,"
+I found Alice's rather dull in comparison
+with the adventures of the Warrington brothers.
+And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo carrying in the
+soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
+of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have
+lived through the tournament of Ashby de la
+Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of
+the queer creatures that surrounded the inimitable
+Alice.</p>
+
+<p>There appeared to be no children's books in the
+library to which we had access. It never seemed
+to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
+Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's
+books; they were not so treated by my
+mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up
+to Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine
+eagerness, to buy the latest number of a Dickens
+serial. I think the name of the shop&mdash;the shop of
+Paradise&mdash;which sold these books was called Ashburnham's.
+It may be asked how the episode in
+"Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little Em'ly"<!-- Page 8 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember,
+the child mind was awed and impressed, by
+a sense of horror, probably occasioned as much by
+the force of the style, by the suggestions of an unknown
+terror, as by any facts which a child could
+grasp.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious thing that my mother, who had
+remarkably good taste in literature, admired Mrs.
+Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired
+Queen 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 was difficult to discover
+where my mother drew the line between what
+was "proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare
+she seemed to regard as eminently proper,
+and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when
+she came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It
+seems strange now that I never rated Mrs. Henry
+Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or
+Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some
+imperceptible difference which my mother never
+explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;
+and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was<!-- Page 9 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+read, I placed him above Mrs. Henry Wood, but
+not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray.</p>
+
+<p><i>Harper's Magazine</i>, in those days, contained
+great treasure! There, for instance, were the delightful
+articles by Porte Crayon&mdash;General Strothers,
+I think. These one listened to with pleasure;
+but the bane of my existence was Mr. Abbott's
+"Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to me
+as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously
+before me as that other fearful process
+which appalled my waking days&mdash;the knowledge
+that all my life I should be obliged to clean my
+teeth three times a day with powdered charcoal!</p>
+
+<p>After a time, I began to read for myself; but the
+delights of desultory reading were gloomed by the
+necessity of studying long lessons that no emancipated
+child of to-day would endure. Misguided
+people sometimes came to the school and told
+childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which
+even the most illiterate despised. To have known
+George Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in
+the society of George Washington, to remember
+the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
+stairs&mdash;I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties
+of that delightful book&mdash;to have seen the old<!-- Page 10 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges in the
+privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish
+little tales about over-industrious bees and robins
+which seemed not even to have the ordinary common
+sense of geese!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic.
+The scene changed. On one unhappy Sunday
+afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched
+from my entranced hands. Dumas was on the
+list of the "improper," and to this day I have
+never finished the episodes in which I was so
+deeply interested. Now the wagon of the circulating
+library ceased to come as in the old days.
+The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school
+books, taken from the precious store of the
+Methodist Sunday School opposite 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 honest villain like Brian de Bois
+Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes were
+very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were
+gay compared to them. I concluded that if anything
+on earth could make a child hate religion,
+it was the perusal of these unreal books. My
+mother saw that I had Alban Butler's "Lives of<!-- Page 11 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were
+equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended,
+were quite as uninspiring as the little
+volumes from the Protestant library. They were
+generally translated from the French, without
+vitality and without any regard for the English
+idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down
+one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of
+Saint Rose of Lima." As it concerned itself with
+South America, it seemed to me that there might
+be in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody
+might cut off the ear 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</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>In that book I read no more that day!</p>
+
+<p>But I discovered a volume I have never forgotten,
+which probably after "The Young Marooners,"
+had the greatest influence on me for a
+short period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal
+Wiseman. There was good stuff in it; it made me<!-- Page 12 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills;
+and it taught a lot about the arch&aelig;ology of Rome,
+for it was part of that excellent story. I have always
+looked on "Fabiola" as a very great book.
+Then at Christmas, when my father gave me
+"The Last Days of Pompeii," I was in a new
+world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but
+in some way supplementary to it. This gift was
+accompanied by Washington Irving's "Tales of
+the Alhambra." <i>Conspuez les livres des poup&eacute;es!</i>
+What nice little story books, arranged for the
+growing mind, could awaken such visions of the
+past, such splendid arabesques and trailing clouds
+of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it
+makes the pomegranate and the glittering crescents
+live forever, and creates a love for Spain and
+a romance of old Spain which can never die.</p>
+
+<p>After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was
+given "Les Enfants des Bois," by Elie Berthet in
+French, to translate word for word. It was a
+horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and
+the laborious research in the dictionary prevented
+me from enjoying the adventures of these infants.
+I cannot remember anything that happened to
+them; but I know that the book gave me an ever-<!-- Page 13 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>enduring
+distrust of the subjunctive mood in the
+Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy
+of a French romance called "Les Aventures de
+Polydore Marasquin." It was of things that
+happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It
+went very well, with an occasional use of the
+dictionary, until I discovered that the gentleman
+was about to engage himself to a very attractive
+monkeyess. I gave up the book in disgust, but
+I have since discovered that there have been lately
+several imitators of these adventures, which I think
+were written by an author named L&eacute;on Gozlan.</p>
+
+<p>About this time, the book auction became a
+fashion in Philadelphia. If your people had respect
+for art, they invariably subscribed to a publication
+called the <i>Cosmopolitan Art Magazine</i>,
+and you received a steel engraving of Shakespeare
+and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh very much
+in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed
+doublet and very well-fitting hose, and another
+steel engraving of Washington at Lexington. If
+your people were interested in literature, they frequented
+the book auctions. My father had a great
+respect for what he called "classical literature."
+He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely<!-- Page 14 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+classical; it was beautifully bound, and he never
+read it. One day he secured a lovely edition of
+the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore." It had
+been a subject of much competition at the auction,
+and was cherished accordingly. The binding was
+tooled. It was put on the centre table and adored
+as a work of art. Here was richness!</p>
+
+<p>Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed
+at present as belonging to those old and faded
+gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake,"
+by Lady Blessington, once flourished; but
+if I could only recall the pleasure I had in the reading
+of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet
+of Korhasson," I think I should be very happy.
+And the notes to "Lalla Rookh" and to Moore's
+prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"
+was not much of a novel, but the notes were
+full of amazing Egyptian mysteries, which seemed
+quite as splendid as the machinery in the "Arabian
+Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled
+of roses, and I remember as a labour of love copying
+out all the allusions to roses in these notes with the
+intention of writing about them when I grew up.
+My mother objected to the translations from Anacreon;
+she said they were "improper"; but my<!-- Page 15 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+father said that he had been assured on competent
+authority that they were "classic," and of course
+that settled it. There was no story in them, and
+they seemed to me to be stupid.</p>
+
+<p>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
+city boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each
+year at the most on the arid New Jersey seacoast,
+fell upon "Our Village." It became an incentive
+for long walks, in the hope of finding some country
+lanes and something resembling the English primroses.
+I read and reread "Our Village" until I
+could close my eyes at any time and see the little
+world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to
+read her tragedy, "The Two Foscari." A tragedy
+had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic
+for some offense against the conventionalities demanded
+of a Philadelphia child, with no book but
+Miss Mitford's, I spent my time looking up all the
+references to roses in her tragedies. These I combined
+with the knowledge acquired from Tom
+Moore, and made notes for a paper to be printed
+in some great periodical in the future. Why
+roses? Why Miss Mitford and roses? Why Tom<!-- Page 16 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+Moore and roses? I do not know, but, when I
+was sixteen years of age, I printed the paper in
+<i>Appleton's Journal</i>, where it may still be found.
+My parents, who did not look on my literary
+attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with
+favour, suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as
+I had no time to look up the meaning of the word
+in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me
+as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which
+every honest artist must be content to accept.</p>
+
+<p>My mother, evidently fearing the influence of
+"classical" literature, gave me one day "The
+Parent's Assistant," by Miss Edgeworth. I think
+that 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 string
+that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself
+to the imitation of this economic child, and was
+very highly praised for getting the best out of a
+good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo
+a very tough knot.</p>
+
+<p>It was a far cry from the respectable Miss
+Edgeworth to a series of Beadle's "Dime Novels."
+I looked on them as delectable but inferior.
+There was a prejudice against them in well-<!-- Page 17 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>brought-up
+households; but if you thoughtfully
+provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which
+concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page,
+you were very likely to escape criticism. I never
+finished "Osceola, the Seminole," because my
+aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous
+account of a real fight, in which somebody
+kicked somebody else violently in the abdomen.
+My aunt reported to my mother that the book was
+very "indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime
+Novels" were absolutely forbidden. At school,
+we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was
+a moral leper; but as most of us concluded that
+leper had something to do with leaper, the effect
+was not very convincing.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to
+Beadle's, for all the youngsters knew that there
+was nothing really wrong in them, but I happened
+to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's
+"Abbot," where Edward Glendenning wades into
+the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from leaving
+Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and
+devoured everything of Sir Walter's except "Saint
+Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of the
+great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne<!-- Page 18 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+of Geierstein" were rather tough reading, and
+"Count Robert of Paris" might have been written
+by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary
+of Sir Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak"
+and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
+again and again dazzled and consoled me until I
+discovered "Nicholas Nickleby."</p>
+
+<p>"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of
+me. In the rainy winter afternoons, when nothing
+could occur out of doors which a respectable city
+boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I
+was expected to work. Boys worked hard at their
+lessons in those days. There was a kitchen
+downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the
+winter. There it was easy to build a small fire
+and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas Nickleby"
+after one had rushed through the required
+tasks, which generally included ten pages of the
+"Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you never read
+"Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you
+cannot possibly know 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 dignified manner of standing with her head
+on a spear!<!-- Page 19 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed
+to me. It was necessary to skip that.
+When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike,
+they became great bores. But what young reader of
+Dickens can forget the hostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick,
+great-uncle of the little Miss Kenwigses, when
+Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As
+one grows older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda
+give one less real delight; but think of the first discovery
+of them, and it is like Balboa's&mdash;or was it
+Cortez's?&mdash;discovery of the Pacific in Keats's
+sonnet. "Nicholas Nickleby" was read over and
+over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found
+"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby
+Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" seemed to be
+rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough
+for my taste, yet better than anything else that
+anybody had written. My later impressions of
+Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions.</p>
+
+<p>One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green
+volumes, as I remember, and I began to read
+"Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and read
+it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that
+a dislike for good novels was "Puritan" and she,
+shocked by the implied reproach, took again to<!-- Page 20 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel
+Dobbin and Amelia very much. Becky Sharp
+pleased me beyond words; I don't think that the
+morality of the case affected my point of view at
+all. I was delighted whenever Becky "downed"
+an enemy. They were such a lot of stupid people&mdash;the
+enemies&mdash;and I reflected during the course
+of the story that, after all, Thackeray had said
+that poor Becky had no mother to guide her footsteps.
+When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on
+the forehead with the diamonds, I thought it
+served him right; but I was unhappy because poor
+Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book
+with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my
+mother said severely, "That is what always happens
+to bad people!" But in my heart I did not
+believe that Becky Sharp was a bad person at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas
+Nickleby," to "David Copperfield." I respected
+Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that
+I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later&mdash;it
+was on one June afternoon I think&mdash;when the
+news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed to me
+that for a while all delight in life had ended.<!-- Page 21 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One of those experts in psychology who are always
+seeking questions sometime ago wrote to me
+demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced
+me, and whether I thought they were good reading
+for the young. Our "Plutarch" was rather appalling
+to look at. It was bound in mottled cardboard,
+and the pages had red edges; but I attacked
+it one day, when I was about ten years of age, and
+became enthralled. It was "actual." My mother
+was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper,
+with Southern tendencies called the <i>Age</i>; my
+father belonged to the opposite party, and admired
+Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the
+famous Vallandigham. Between the two, I had
+formed a very poor opinion of American statesmen
+in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were
+of a very different type.</p>
+
+<p>Julius C&aelig;sar interested me; but Brutus filled me
+with exaltation. I had not then read Shakespeare's
+"Julius C&aelig;sar." It seemed to me that
+Brutus was 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 prevent
+me from hating the big bully of the school, who
+made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a<!-- Page 22 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+perpetual torment. How we suffered, no adult
+human tongue can tell&mdash;and our tongues never
+told because it was a convention that tales should
+not be told out of school. One of the pleasant
+tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the
+little boys after school in the winter and bury them
+until they were almost suffocated in the snow which
+was piled up in the narrow streets. It was not
+only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It
+happened that I had been presented with a penknife
+consisting of two rather leaden blades covered
+with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl
+handle. The bully wanted this knife, and I knew
+it. Generally, I left it at home; but it occurred to
+me on one inspired morning, after I had read
+"Plutarch" the night before, that I would display
+the knife open in my pocket, and when he threw
+the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill
+him at once, by an upward thrust of the knife.</p>
+
+<p>This struck me as a good deed entirely worthy
+of Brutus. Of course, I knew that I should be
+hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a
+last dying speech, and, besides, the school would
+have a holiday. On the morning preceding the
+great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the small<!-- Page 23 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+boys, distributed my various belongings to friends
+who were about to be bereaved, and predicted a
+coming holiday. I was looked on as rather "crazy,"
+but I reflected that I would soon be considered
+heroic, and my friends gladly accepted the gifts.</p>
+
+<p>The fatal afternoon came. I displayed the penknife.
+The chase began. The bully and his
+chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The
+moment had come; 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 to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he
+was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening
+at home uttering dire predictions which were incomprehensible
+to the members of my family, and
+reread Brutus, in the "Lives."</p>
+
+<p>The next morning I went to school with lessons
+unstudied and awaited events. The mother of
+the bully appeared, and entered into an excited
+colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher.
+I announced to the boy 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's coat,<!-- Page 24 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+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 total
+depravity; 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 good Christian
+child.</p>
+
+<p>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 bully let
+me alone. Besides, my murderous intention,
+which had leaked out, gave me such a reputation
+that I became a dictator myself, and made terms
+for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which
+were sometimes rather despotic.</p>
+
+<p>It was also during these days that I remember
+carrying confusion into the family when a patronizing,
+intellectual lady called and said, "I hope
+that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo
+books?" "No," I answered quickly and indiscreetly,
+"I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by
+Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie
+Collins until I read "The Moonstone." It seemed
+that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased<!-- Page 25 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "classics."</p>
+
+<p>My father generally arrived at home late in the
+afternoon, when he read the evening paper. After
+a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long
+horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him,
+generally from the novels of George Eliot, or from
+certain romances running through the New York
+<i>Ledger</i> by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally
+stories of the times of the Irish Kings, in
+which gallowglasses and lovely and aristocratic
+Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother,
+after her conversion, disapproved of the New York
+<i>Ledger</i>. In fact, there were families in Philadelphia
+whose heads regarded it with real horror!
+In our house, there was a large stack of this interesting
+periodical, which, with many volumes of
+Godey's <i>Lady's Book</i>, were packed in the attic.</p>
+
+<p>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 he was about to die. He sent over a messenger
+asking my father for the back numbers
+of the New York <i>Ledger</i> containing a long serial
+story by Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember,<!-- Page 26 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+it was a story of the French Revolution, and the
+last number that I was allowed to read ended with
+a description of a dance in an old ch&acirc;teau, when
+the Marquise, who was floating through the minuet,
+suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
+glove of her right hand! I was never permitted
+to discover where the blood came from; I should
+like to find out now if I could find the novel. I
+remember that my mother was terribly shocked
+when my father sent the numbers of the New York
+<i>Ledger</i> to the apparently dying man. "It's a
+horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any
+Christian person reading the New York <i>Ledger</i> at
+the point of death." The young man, however,
+did not die; and I rather think my father attributed
+his recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of
+his favourite stories.</p>
+
+<p>There were certain other serial stories I was
+ordered to read; they were stories of the Irish
+Brigade in France. My mother, I remember, disapproved
+of them because Madame de Pompadour
+was frequently mentioned, and she thought that
+my father regarded the lady in question too tolerantly.
+These romances were, I think, written by
+a certain Myles O'Reilly who was in some way con<!-- Page 27 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>nected
+with the army. This procedure of reading
+aloud was not always agreeable, as my father
+frequently went to sleep in the middle of a passage
+and forgot what I had already read. The
+consequence was that I was obliged to begin
+the same old story over again on the following
+evening.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I forget the exact title of
+the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived
+in Para; I tried to manufacture an imitation of
+the Urari poison with a view to exterminating rats
+in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
+had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced,
+at intervals, a thrilling novel, with the
+glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a background.
+I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I
+had ever read. He held possession of my imagination,
+until he was forced out by a Mr. Jerningham
+who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany.
+Saint Malo became the only town for me;
+I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and the Stuarts,
+whom I had learned to love at the knees of
+Sir Walter Scott, were displaced by the Vend&eacute;ans.<!-- Page 28 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel,
+my father asked me to parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages."
+I found the volumes cold and repellent.
+They gave me a rooted prejudice against the
+North Pole which even the adventure of Doctor
+Cook has never enabled me to overcome.</p>
+
+<p>About this time, my mother began to feel that
+I needed to read something more gentle, which
+would root me more effectively in my religion.
+She began, I think, with Cardinal Newman's
+"Callista" in which there was a thrilling chapter
+called "The Possession of Juba." It seemed to
+me one of the most stirring things I had ever
+read. Then I was presented with Mrs. Sadlier's
+"The Blakes and the Flanagans," which struck
+me as a very delightful satire, and with a really
+interesting novel of New York called "Rosemary,"
+by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a
+terribly blood-curdling story of the Carbonari
+in Italy, called "Lionello." After this I was
+wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh;
+"Natalie," and "Bessie," and "Seven Years," I
+think were the principals. My father declined to
+read them; he thought they were too sentimental,
+but as the author had an Irish name he was in<!-- Page 29 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>clined
+to regard them with tolerance. He thought
+I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom
+and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian Bob,"
+by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to this, and
+substituted "Lady Violet; or the Wonder of Kingswood
+Chace," by the younger Pierce Egan, which
+she considered more moral.</p>
+
+<p>My father was very generous at Christmas, and
+I bought a large volume of Froissart for two dollars
+and a half at an old book stand on Fifth Street,
+near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world
+during the Christmas holidays. After breakfast,
+I saturated myself with the delightful battles in
+that precious book.</p>
+
+<p>My principal duty was to look after the front
+pavement. In the spring and summer, it was carefully
+washed twice a week and reddened with some
+kind of paint, which always accompanied a box
+of fine white sand for the scouring of the marble
+steps; but in the winter, this respectable sidewalk
+had to be kept free from snow and ice.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto my battle with the elements had been
+rather a diversion. Besides, I was in competition
+with the other small boys in the block&mdash;or in the
+"square," as we Philadelphians called it. Now<!-- Page 30 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+it became irksome; I neglected to dig the ice from
+between the bricks; I skimped my cleaning of the
+gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums." The boy
+next door became a mirror of virtue; he was quoted
+to me as one whose pavement was a model to all the
+neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the
+Mayor passing down our street, had stopped and
+admired the working of his civic spirit, while the
+result of my efforts was passed by with evident
+contempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart
+to my heart. Who would condescend to wield a
+broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward of
+ten cents in cash, when he could throw javelins
+and break lances with the knights of the divine
+Froissart? The end of my freedom came after
+this. The terrible incident of the Mayor's contempt,
+invented, I believe, by the boy next door,
+induced my mother to believe that I was not only
+losing my morals, but becoming too much of a
+book-worm. For many long weeks I was deprived
+of any amusing book except "Robinson
+Crusoe." After this interval, vacation came; I
+seemed to have grown older, and books were never
+quite the same again.</p>
+
+<p>In the vacation, however, when the days were<!-- Page 31 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+very long and there was a great deal of leisure, I
+found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales"
+and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault,
+and I was even then very much struck by the difference.
+Of course I read Grimm from cover to
+cover, and went back again over the pages, hoping
+that I had neglected something. The homeliness
+of the stories touched me; it seemed to me that
+you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany.
+Madame Perrault was more delicate; her
+fairy tales were pictures of no life that ever existed,
+and there was a great dissimilarity between
+her "Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of
+"Aschenputtel." As I remember, the haughty sisters
+in the story of the beautiful girl who lived
+among the ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order
+to make her feet seem smaller and left bloody marks
+on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's slipper
+was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such
+brutality in <i>her</i> fairyland. But, except Hans
+Christian Andersen's, there are no such gripping
+fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During
+this vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun,"
+the little Irish fairy with the hammer.
+He was not at all like the English fairies in Shake<!-- Page 32 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>speare's
+"Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving
+out Ariel, I think I liked him best of all.</p>
+
+<p>That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer
+Night's Dream" in the attic. The print
+was exceedingly fine, but everything was there.
+No doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues
+in favour of scrupulously studying Shakespeare's
+plays; but if you have never discovered
+"As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's
+Dream" when you were very young, you will
+never know the meaning of that light which never
+was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds
+us in the "Ode to the Nightingale." The
+love interest did not count much. In my youthful
+experience everybody either married or died,
+in books. That was to be expected. It was the
+atmosphere that counted. One could see the
+troopers coming 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 done something for his soul.</p>
+
+<p>There was a boy who lived near us called<!-- Page 33 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+Lawrence Stockdale&mdash;peace be to his ashes where-ever
+he rests! His father and mother, who were
+persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but
+we were not of one opinion on any subject. He
+was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
+episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe
+that Dumas was "wrong." I preferred Sir Walter
+Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
+devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day,
+however, I discovered somewhere, under a pile of
+old geometries and books about navigation, a fat,
+red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said
+that "Boccaccio" was "wronger" than Dumas,
+and that his people had warned him against the
+stories of this Italian. As we lived near an
+Italian colony, and he disliked Italians, while I
+loved them, I attributed this to mere prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and
+large. For a boy who likes to read, a fat book is
+very tempting, and just as I had seated myself
+one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the
+story of the Falcon, and having finished it with
+great pleasure, dipped into another tale not so
+edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale
+with horror, and seized the book at once. My<!-- Page 34 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+father was informed of what had occurred. He
+was little alarmed, I think. My mother said:
+"We shall have to change the whole course of
+this boy's reading." "We shall have to change
+the boy first," my father said, with a sigh. But
+this was not the end. At the proper time I was
+led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor.
+The book was presented to him for destruction.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I
+hope you didn't talk about any of these stories to
+the other boys in school?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say
+much worse things, and I would probably have to
+tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all
+the people in the Boccaccio book were good
+Catholics, I suppose, as they were Italians, and I
+think, after all, when they caught the plague, they
+died good deaths."</p>
+
+<p>The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and
+gave me his blessing and dismissed me. And my
+mother seemed to think that I was sufficiently exorcised.</p>
+
+<p>After this the books I read were more carefully
+considered. I was given the "Tales of Canon<!-- Page 35 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+Schmidt"&mdash;dear little stories of German children
+in the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts,
+which went very well with another volume I found
+at this time called "Jack Halifax," not "John
+Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had already
+read to me&mdash;but a curious little tome long
+out of print. And then there sailed upon my
+vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish
+novelist, Hendrik Conscience, whose "Lion of
+Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and
+there were "Wooden Clara," and other pieces
+which made one feel as if one lived in Flanders.</p>
+
+<p>Just about this time I read in Littell's <i>Living
+Age</i> a novel called "The Amber Witch," and some of
+Fritz Reuter's Low German stories; but these were
+all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may
+not have been much of a novel. I did not put it
+to the touch of comparison with "The Virginians"
+or "Esmond." They were what my father called
+"classics"&mdash;things superior and apart; but "The
+Quaker Soldier" was quite good enough for me.
+It opened a new view of American Revolutionary
+history, and then it was redolent of the country of
+Pennsylvania. I recall now the incident of the
+Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her thumb<!-- Page 36 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry
+soldier. This is all that I can recall of those delectable
+pages. But, later, neither Henry Peterson's
+"Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh
+Wynne" seemed to have the glory and the fascination
+of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."</p>
+
+<p>After this, I fell under the spell of the French
+Revolution through a book, given to me by my
+mother, about <i>la Vend&eacute;e</i>. It was a dull book, but
+nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim
+the heroism of Henri de la Rochejaquelein for me,
+and I became a Royalist of the Royalists, and held
+hotly the thesis that if George Washington had
+returned the compliment of going over to France
+in '89, he would have done Lafayette a great service
+by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the
+beautiful Marie Antoinette!</p>
+
+<p>When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed,
+as the result of my reading, a great belief
+in all lost causes. I had become exceedingly
+devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor
+had sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His
+Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an antidote to the
+lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather
+troubled to find so many "swear words" in it, but<!-- Page 37 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+I made all the allowances that a real lover of literature
+is often compelled to make!</p>
+
+
+<h4><i>The Bible</i></h4>
+
+<p>The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which
+rather prejudiced me, as a moral child, against the
+Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable value.
+Of course the New Testament was always open
+to me, and I read it constantly as a pleasure. The
+language, both in the Douai version and the King
+James version, was often very obscure. Although
+I soon learned to recognize the beauty of the 23rd
+Psalm in the King James version&mdash;which I always
+read when I went to one of my cousins&mdash;I found
+the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting.
+For a time I was limited to a book of
+Bible stories given us to read at school, as it was
+considered unwise to permit children to read the
+Old Testament unexpurgated. After a while,
+however, the embargo seemed to be raised for
+some reason or other, and again I was allowed to
+revel with a great deal of profit in the wonderful
+poems, prophecies, and histories of the Old Testament.
+I soon discovered that it was impossible
+to understand the allusions in English literature<!-- Page 38 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+without a knowledge of the Bible. What would
+"Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader
+who had never known the beauty of the story
+of Ruth? And the lilies of the field, permeating
+all poetical literature, would have lost all their
+perfume if one knew nothing about the Song of
+Solomon.</p>
+
+<p>Putting aside the question as to whether young
+readers should be let loose in the Old Testament
+or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
+justified in including ignorance as the supremest
+virtue, he who does not make himself familiar with
+Biblical ideas and phraseology finds himself in
+after-life with an incomplete medium of expression.
+It used to be said of the typical English gentleman
+that all he needed to know was to ride after the
+hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
+absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most
+moderns. To construe Horace, of course, meant
+that he should have at least a speaking acquaintance
+with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature,
+and this knowledge gave him a grip on
+the universal speech of all cultivated people.
+However useless his allusions to Chlo&euml; and to
+M&aelig;cenas were in the business of practical life,<!-- Page 39 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+he was at least able to understand what they
+meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the
+Latins stamped him as speaking the speech of a
+gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is
+fitted with allusions that clarify and illuminate
+the ordinary speech. He may not have any technical
+knowledge, or his technical knowledge may
+be so great as to debar him from meeting other
+men in conversation on equal grounds; but his
+reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a
+background, a colour, a metaphorical strength,
+which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike
+the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience
+and he is in a measure left out of much of that
+conversation which helps to make life endurable.</p>
+
+<p>Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion.
+Even the poets often now assume that Clytie is a
+name that requires an explanation and that Daphne
+and her flight through the laurel do not bring up
+immediate memories of Syrinx and the reeds.
+The Dictionary of Lampri&egrave;re is covered with
+dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid
+without an answering glance of comprehension
+from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;<!-- Page 40 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+it is only that, in the modern system, the old
+mythology is not taken very seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be
+a necessary part of a gentleman's education, there
+is no class of allusions from which we can draw to
+lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we
+turn to the Bible. This deprives conversation of
+much of its colour and renders it rather commonplace
+and meagre. Unfortunately, among many
+of our young people, the Bible seems to be a book
+to be avoided or to be treated in a rather "jocose"
+manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage,
+a Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and
+the weary comedian, when he is at a loss to get a
+witty speech across the footlights, is almost sure
+to speak of Jonah and the whale!</p>
+
+<p>It is disappointing to notice this gradual change
+that has taken place in the attitude of the younger
+generation toward the Sacred Book. The Sunday
+Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies
+of importance and to overload the memories of
+their little disciples with a multitude of texts, or
+to over-explain every allusion in the terms of
+physical geography, etc., may in a measure be
+responsible for this, but they cannot be entirely<!-- Page 41 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+responsible. One must admit that diversities of
+interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a
+religious point of view will always be an obstacle
+to their use in schools where the children of Jews,
+of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian
+denominations assemble. But there is always the
+home, where the first impetus to a satisfactory
+knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given.
+The decay of the practice of reading aloud in our
+homes is very evident in the lack of real culture&mdash;or,
+rather, rudiments of real culture&mdash;in our
+children. But there is no use in declaiming against
+this. Other times, other manners; accusatory
+declamation is simply a luxury of Old Age!</p>
+
+<p>Personally, my desultory reading of the Old and
+the New Testaments gave me a background against
+which I could see the trend of the books I devoured
+more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment
+of them; besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard.
+It was easy even for a boy to discover that
+the morality of the New Testament was the
+standard by which not only life, but literature,
+which is the finest expression of life, should be
+judged. If there are great declamations, declamations
+full of dramatic fire, which nearly every<!-- Page 42 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+boy at school learns to love, in the Old Testament,
+there are the most moving, tender, and simple
+stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to
+the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to
+look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures,
+the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing
+episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth
+to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned
+that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of
+letter writers, but as a figure of history more
+interesting than Julius C&aelig;sar, and certainly more
+modern. Young people delight in human documents.
+They may not know why they delight
+in these documents, but it is because of their humanity.
+Now who can be more human than St.
+Paul? And the more you read his epistles, and
+the more you know of his life, the more human he
+becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not,
+and the way he "takes it out" of those unreasonable
+people who would not accept his mission has
+always been a great delight to me!</p>
+
+<p>Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure
+to pick out the phases of his history&mdash;a history
+that even then seemed to be so very modern, and to
+a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real.<!-- Page 43 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+It seemed only natural that he should be converted
+by a blast of illumination from God. It is not
+hard for young people to accept miracles. All life
+is a miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun
+was to me no more of a miracle 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 and plead and weep and denounce;
+and he made you feel that he was generally
+right. And then he was a tentmaker who
+understood Greek and who could speak to the
+Greeks in their own language.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the seventies when nearly every student
+I knew was a disciple of Huxley and Tyndal and
+devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible which
+was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St.
+Paul, and with the 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 modern time, could very well afford
+to accept the new geological interpretation of the
+story of Genesis without destroying in any way
+the faith which St. Paul preached.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and<!-- Page 44 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+with increasing delight the letters of Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute;, I put her second as a writer of letters to the
+great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield
+to his sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew
+Lang's "Letters to Dead Authors," and a very great
+letter I found in an English translation of Balzac's
+"Le Lys dans la Vall&eacute;e."</p>
+
+<p>It must not be understood that I put St. Paul
+in the same category with these mundane persons.
+Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often reasonably
+mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker
+rather than take money from his clients,
+and one could imagine him as preaching while he
+worked. He frankly made collections for needy
+churches, and he was very grateful to Ph&oelig;be for
+remembering that he was a hungry man and in
+need of homely hospitality. He was interested in
+his fellow passengers Aquilla and Priscilla whom he
+met on board the ship that was taking them from
+Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they
+had not been able to make their salt in Corinth,
+where, however, their poverty had not interfered
+with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent
+marked "Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale
+anywhere. The tents from Ephesus were as<!-- Page 45 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St.
+Paul was pleased that his two disciples should have
+a chance of being more prosperous. I always felt,
+too, that, in his practical way, he knew that
+Ephesus would give him a better chance of supporting
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries
+in his youth, one easily guessed. It was plain, too,
+that he had had the best possible instructors, and
+I liked to believe, when I was young, that his
+muscles had been well trained in the sports of
+gentlemen of his class. Altogether, so graphic were
+his descriptions and so potent his personality that,
+while Julius C&aelig;sar and Brutus receded, he filled
+the foreground, and all the more because at this
+time I picked up an English translation of Suetonius,
+just by chance one dark winter day, and as I
+had not yet discovered that Suetonius was a
+"yellow" gossip, my idols, some of the Roman
+heroes, received a great shock.</p>
+
+<p>The constant reading of St. Paul led me to the
+Acts of the Apostles, and I found St. Luke very
+good reading, though I often wished that, as I
+understood he had some reputation as an artist,
+he had adorned his writings with illustrations.<!-- Page 46 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a great shock to discover that none of
+the Apostles wrote in English, for it seemed to me
+that their styles were as different from one another
+as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a
+great part of my time in classes where Nepos and
+C&aelig;sar were translated by my dear young friends,
+had very little confidence in the work of any translator,
+I came to the conclusion that God had taken
+special care of the translators of the Bible, for I
+could not help believing that He had no interest
+whatever in the translations which we made daily
+for the impatient ears of our instructors!</p>
+
+<p>One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because
+he was such a good fighter. When he said he
+fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these
+beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons
+who persecuted and contradicted him. No
+obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too, although
+he called things by their right names and
+his denunciations were so vivid and mouthfilling
+that you knew his enemies must have been afraid
+to open their lips while he was near them, whatever
+they might have said behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute
+one Friday at school when discipline was<!-- Page 47 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+relaxed, and the teacher condescended to conversation.
+We were asked who was our favourite
+hero, and when it came to my turn I answered
+"St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham
+Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General
+Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great, had
+walked in procession before I produced my hero,
+I was looked on as rather weakminded. The
+teacher, too, seemed astonished, and he asked me
+on what grounds I founded my worship. This
+question, coming suddenly, petrified me for a moment,
+and I answered, "He fought with beasts."
+This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my
+dear comrades with whom I had had altercations,
+and I was made to suffer for it as much as these
+dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they
+discovered that I had "language" on my side, for
+on the next composition day, when we read aloud
+the work of our brains, I accused them of "being
+filled with all iniquity," and other evil things
+which brought down a horrified remonstrance
+from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such
+plain English, but he was knocked high and dry
+by the proof that I was only quoting St. Paul to
+the Romans.<!-- Page 48 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul.
+Be that as it may, I regarded him as a very good
+friend indeed, for some of his "language," quoted
+in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on
+one's enemies than any swear word that could be
+invented. I am not excusing my attitude toward
+the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected
+my youthful mind. There was something extremely
+romantic in the very phrase, "the tumult
+of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to
+mean a whole chapter of a novel in itself.</p>
+
+<p>And there was the good centurion&mdash;Christ always
+seemed to have a sympathy for soldiers&mdash;who
+was willing to save Paul when the ship, on its way
+to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita
+where the amiable barbarians showed him no
+small courtesy. And one could not help liking the
+Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix,
+whose wife was a Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted
+when the Apostle spoke to him of chastity
+and of justice to come, yet hoped that money
+would be given him by Paul, and frequently sent
+for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
+seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a
+Roman citizen! He rendered unto C&aelig;sar the<!-- Page 49 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+things that were C&aelig;sar's. And one could easily
+imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa
+and Bernice entered into the hall of audience with
+the tribunes and principal men of the city! And
+one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself
+nobly, through the nobility of a Roman law:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not
+to signify the things laid to his charge,</p></div>
+
+<p>and Agrippa's answer, after Paul's apologia:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian!</p></div>
+
+<p>But the story did not end then. I rehearsed
+over and over again what the King Agrippa
+might have said to his sister, the noble and
+beautiful Bernice&mdash;I knew nothing of the lady's
+reputation then&mdash;and how finally they did become
+Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity
+and exquisite grace were added to the external
+beauty of religion; and Paul went to Rome protected
+by the law of the Romans. And yet the
+very fineness of his attitude was the cause of his
+further imprisonment. "This man," I often repeated
+with Agrippa, "might have been set at
+liberty, if he had not appealed to C&aelig;sar."</p>
+
+<p>It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet<!-- Page 50 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+Micheas, who had previously struck me as of no
+importance at all, and I read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>And back again to St. Matthew&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>These exercises in completing the prophecies of
+the Old Testament with the fulfilments of the New
+were interesting, and I found great pleasure in
+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, by
+some reference or other in another book, to read
+the twenty-third psalm of David, in the King
+James version. It struck me as much more
+simple and appealing than the version in the
+Douai Bible, which begins in Latin "<i>Dominus
+regit me</i>." It runs:<!-- Page 51 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing.</p>
+
+<p>2 He hath set me in a place of pasture.</p>
+
+<p>He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment:</p>
+
+<p>3 He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths
+of justice, for his own name's sake.</p>
+
+<p>4 For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of
+death, I fear no evils, for thou art with me.</p>
+
+<p>Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me.</p>
+
+<p>5 Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that
+afflict me.</p>
+
+<p>Thou hast anointed my head with oil: and my chalice which
+inebriateth me how goodly is it.</p>
+
+<p>And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life.</p>
+
+<p>And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, unto length
+of days.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the Douai version this psalm was called the
+twenty-second.</p>
+
+<p>Without any special guidance&mdash;I think most of
+my teachers would have looked on as dangerous
+any attempt to ally English literature with the
+Bible&mdash;I soon discovered that nearly everything
+I read owed something to the Bible. At first, the
+comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the King
+James version enraptured me so much that I began
+to find fault with the Latinized phrases of the Vulgate
+in English. It was the fashion in the early<!-- Page 52 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in
+the little group at school interested in English
+literature. Street cars at this time were comparatively
+new in Philadelphia, and I think we
+reached the last extremity of Saxonism in speech
+when we spoke of them as "folk wains." The
+tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred
+the Book of Job and the story of Ruth in
+the Latinized version, because the words were more
+mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to
+translate everything into a bald "early English medium",
+which for a time I had been 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"&mdash;"Can'st thou hook
+the Leviathan" which made me revel in "Job."</p>
+
+<p>Something Meg Merrilies said bore me on
+toward the roaring storm of Isaiah. The Latinized
+medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; and
+then, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes
+in the Douai version than in the King James.
+In both versions, some passages were so obscure
+that I often wondered how anybody could get any
+meaning out of them. I was often astonished to
+find in English novels that the old people in the<!-- Page 53 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great
+length, out of which I could make nothing, so I
+limited myself to the Douai version, which I
+found more illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>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
+live book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at
+the same time&mdash;if anybody had asked me whether,
+being marooned on an island, I should have most
+preferred 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 Ancient Rome,"
+would have suited me better, provided, of course,
+that I could have chosen only one book.</p>
+
+<p>It was borne in on me many times that no
+author could improve on the phrasing of the
+Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James
+versions there are passages which, leaving aside
+all question of doctrine, it is sacrilege to try to improve.
+The French translation of the Bible is, as
+everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that
+may account for the fact that, while regarded as a<!-- Page 54 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+precious depository of doctrine, it is not a household
+book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations
+of Clement Marot&mdash;called hymns&mdash;naturally bored
+a people who, in their hearts, believe that God
+listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the
+language of the Academy! In their novels, dealing
+with the beginnings of Christianity&mdash;and there
+are many such novels in French unknown in
+other countries&mdash;it is hard for a French author
+not to be rhetorical, in the manner 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 words of the King
+James version. What young heart can ponder over
+these words, without a thrill, St. John XIX
+(Douai version: 1609; Rheims; 1582):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When Jesus therefore had seen his Mother and the disciple
+standing whom he loved, he saith to his Mother: Woman,
+behold thy son.</p>
+
+<p>After that, he saith to the disciple, Behold thy mother.
+And from that day the disciple took her to his own.</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished,
+that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said: I
+thirst.</p>
+
+<p>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.<!-- Page 55 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And Jesus therefore when he had taken the vinegar, said,
+it is consummated, and bowing his head, gave up the ghost.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Marie Corelli became a popular author,
+there were persons existing&mdash;happily, they have
+all gone to the great beyond&mdash;who thought that
+the "talented" author could have done better!</p>
+
+
+<h4><i>Essays and Essayists</i></h4>
+
+<p>I am aware that many persons look on Emerson
+as somewhat dangerous reading for a boy of sixteen.
+The mothers and fathers of my Baptist friends and
+the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the
+reading of Emerson because of his Unitarianism;
+but, as the rector of our parish never denounced
+Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently
+offered his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid
+no attention whatever to these objections. I trust
+that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading
+of my boyhood; I do not recommend this course
+to the approval of parents and guardians; I am
+simply expressing the impression that certain books
+made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though
+I never said so in words, the books I liked were
+always nearer to my heart than to my mind. I
+owe a great debt to Emerson.<!-- Page 56 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 early
+edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to
+think great thoughts and to 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 close together, reminded
+me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs
+did not get so near to my actual life as the essays
+of Emerson. I liked the lessons that he drew from
+the lives of great men. I was shocked when he
+mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath
+as Christ; but I was amiably tolerant, for I felt
+that he had never had the privilege of studying the
+Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him
+on the subject. But somebody told me that he
+was an "American Classic" and, from that, I concluded
+he was dead, and had doubtless already
+found out his mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I might have been better engaged in
+reading the more practical books offered to boys
+in our own time, if we had had them. There were
+some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to<!-- Page 57 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+the comprehension of the young; but not so many
+as there are now. One of my uncles recommended
+the works of Samuel Smiles&mdash;"Self-Help" I think
+was his favourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed
+to me. My small allowance, paid weekly,
+could not have been affected by "Thrift", and
+when my uncle quoted passages from this tiresome
+book I astounded him by replying, in a phrase
+I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson,
+that if I had a quarter to spend instead of twelve
+cents, I would give half of it for a hyacinth! My
+miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed,
+and that Emerson had doubtless found it in that
+dangerous book, the Koran.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot imagine any other author doing for me
+just what the essays of Emerson did. In the first
+place, they seemed to me to be really American;
+in the second, and largely because of their quality,
+they offered an antidote to the materialism in the
+very air, which had succeeded the Civil War. At
+this time there was much talk of money and luxury
+everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood,
+where simple living was the rule, many
+had burst into ostentation, and moved away into
+newer and more pretentious quarters, and there<!-- Page 58 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+was a rumour that some of these sought unlimited
+opportunities for extravagant expenditure.
+We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
+stopping before the white doors and
+the green window-shutters of our old-fashioned
+colonial houses. They had made money through
+the war. For the first time in our lives we boys
+heard of money making as the principal aim of
+life. The fact that these successful persons were
+classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of
+the auriferous atmosphere about us. Emerson
+was a corrective to this materialism. As to his
+philosophy or theology, that did not concern me
+any more than the religious opinions of Julius
+C&aelig;sar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged to
+read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of
+essay.</p>
+
+<p>By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle.
+The inflation of his style did not deter me from
+thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis."
+That on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite.
+It introduced me intimately to the French Revolution.
+I disliked this great charlatan for his
+motto, "Tread the lilies under foot." I was for
+the Bourbons! The French Revolution, as a fact,<!-- Page 59 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+was very near to me. My mother had been born
+(in Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and
+my grandfather had lived through the French Revolution.
+There was a legend, moreover&mdash;probably
+the same legend exists in every family of Irish
+descent whose connections had lived in France&mdash;that
+one of them had been a clerk to Fabre d'Eglantine,
+and had spent his time in crossing off the
+list of the condemned the names of the Irish-French
+aristocrats and substituting in their place
+others that did not happen to belong to Celts!</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the Little Catechism and the uplifting
+influence of Emerson, I looked on this
+probably mythical gentleman as one of the glories
+of our family. And then there was an old man&mdash;very
+old&mdash;who walked up and down Sixth Street
+with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief,
+bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of
+the neighbourhood believed that he was Sanson, the
+executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
+We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of
+his existence in our neighbourhood, all the same.
+After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured every
+line on the subject of the French Revolution I
+could find. It seemed to me that I would have<!-- Page 60 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+been willing to give five years out of my life to
+have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to
+have rescued Marie Antoinette and the Princess
+Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed impossible
+in our time; and yet I have since lived very near
+to friends who went through even greater horrors
+in Russia&mdash;the Baroness Sophie de Buxhoevenden,
+second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance,
+whose letters lie before me as I write.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced
+me to dip into Jean Paul Richter, of whose writings
+I remember only one line,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I love God and little children,</p></div>
+
+<p>I did not get very far into his "French Revolution."
+It seemed then an unreal and lurid book.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an
+old edition which I had from 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, he reminded
+me of my favourite heroine in literature,
+Sir Walter Scott's Catherine Seton! Later, I read
+with astonishment that Montaigne was an un<!-- Page 61 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>believer,
+a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely
+indignant; he seemed to me to be a very
+pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
+which I seldom found in professedly pious books;
+and to this day I cannot hear Montaigne talked
+of as a precursor of Voltaire without believing
+that there is something crooked in the mind of the
+talker. So much for the impressions made in youth,
+so much for the long, long thoughts of which Longfellow
+sings.</p>
+
+<p>Who is more amusingly cheerful than Montaigne,
+who more amusingly wise, who so well bred
+and attractive, who knew the world better and
+took it only as the world? Give me the old volume
+of Montaigne and a loaf of bread&mdash;no Victrola
+singing to me in the wilderness!&mdash;a thermos bottle,
+and one or two other things, and I can still spend
+the day in any wild place! I did not, of course,
+know, in those early days, what in his flavour attracted
+me. Afterward, I found that it was the
+very flavour and essence of Old France. Carlyle's
+impressions of historical persons interested me, but
+Montaigne was the most actual of living persons
+who spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly
+his. To be sure, I read him in Florio's translation.<!-- Page 62 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered
+a very modern writer, who charmed me
+very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who contributed
+a series of sketches of great men of the
+day to a magazine called the <i>Galaxy</i>. He "did"
+Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and Bismarck,
+and many other of the worthies of the
+times. Nothing that he wrote before or after this
+pleased me at all; but these sketches were so interesting
+and apparently so true that they really
+became part of my life. If I had been asked at
+this time who was my favourite of all modern
+authors, and what the name of the composer I
+admired most, I should have said Justin McCarthy
+and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le Sabre" in
+"La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to
+be compared to an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi,
+which was often sung in St. Philip's Church at the
+Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is
+the truth. Although I have not been able to
+find Justin McCarthy's series of sketches, they
+still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps,
+like other masterpieces that one loves in youth,
+one would now find them like those beautiful
+creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion<!-- Page 63 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+and purple and gold under the waves, but are
+drab and ugly things when taken out of the water.
+This applies to some books that one reads with
+pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, how
+they were endured!</p>
+
+<p>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 the Mast." "Walden" I learned to like,
+but I much preferred Fenimore Cooper's description
+of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book
+of a man playing at out-of-doors, imagining his
+wildness, and never really liking to be too far from
+the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I
+discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that
+I began to see that nature had beauties in all
+weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature
+alone never appealed to me. A landscape without
+human beings seemed deadly dull; and I did
+not understand until I grew much older that I
+had really believed that good art was an improvement
+on nature.</p>
+
+<p>I have not the slightest idea in what light the
+modern critics see the works of Philip Gilbert
+Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels re<!-- Page 64 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>cently,
+and failed; but let me say that, allowing
+for receptivity and what one may call temperament,
+I know of no book more revealing as to the
+relations of nature and art than "A Painter's
+Camp." I recall vividly the words of the beginning
+of the preface to the first edition:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>I had seen so many pictures that seemed to be
+"made up" in the artist's studio and I knew so
+well from my experience in the drawing classes
+at school, how nature was neglected for artificial
+models, that I hailed these words with great
+joy.</p>
+
+<p>Everything in life was rather conventional, rather
+fixed, for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia,
+to which our country owes the beginning of
+the &aelig;sthetic awakening, had not yet taken place.
+It may seem strange to this generation that we
+were limited to the wood-cuts in Godey's <i>Lady's
+Book</i>, the illustrations in <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, and
+an occasional picture in some short-lived periodi<!-- Page 65 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>cal.
+The reign of the chromo had just begun.
+Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every self-respecting
+house, though I am glad to say, in my
+own family, very good casts of the Clytie and the
+Discus-thrower filled their place. My father greatly
+admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had
+been celebrated in the <i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i>; but
+my mother regarded it as almost "improper."</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia,
+wanted not exactly something better, but
+something more vivid. There were few sports;
+long walks and a little cricket supplied the place
+of the coming baseball and tennis.</p>
+
+<p>In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of
+his weekly walks with Mr. Edward Roth, the head
+of a military school and the author of "Christus
+Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an
+occasional row on the Schuylkill with him as the
+best part of my education. But this was later.
+All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure,
+was to walk and talk and read.</p>
+
+<p>The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun
+to be developed. The beginning of "A Painter's
+Camp" was most attractive to my thirsty soul.
+Mr. Hamerton says:<!-- Page 66 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Hamerton opened his book in Jane Eyre's country;
+our family had lately read "Jane Eyre."
+This added interest to the volume, and there
+came the details of the invention of the new hut,
+intended to be a shelter against all weathers, so
+that the artist might study nature on intimate
+terms. 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 the heather
+changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our
+pet place of beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or
+river if you like, was not the same every day
+in the year except when the ice bound it! This
+may seem a rather stupid state of mind; but<!-- Page 67 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+it is the stupidity that is very common. I could
+understand how interesting it would be to be in
+snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton
+thus described his hut:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>The chapters on "Concerning Moonlight in Old
+Castles," "The Coming of the Clouds," and the
+little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset, Sept.<!-- Page 68 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before
+struck me that Loch Awe was different on September
+23, 1860, from what it was at other times,
+or&mdash;to carry the idea further&mdash;that the imperial
+Delaware had changed since that momentous time
+when George Washington crossed it, or the Schuylkill
+since Tom Moore looked upon it.</p>
+
+<p>To quote further:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>And:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Realise this picture as well as you may be able, and then
+put in the final touch. Between the dull calms and the<!-- Page 69 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+glassy calms there are drawn thin threads of division burning
+with scarlet fire.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Then there was a delightful and illuminating
+chapter called "A Stream at Rest." Hamerton,
+who is probably now very much out of fashion,
+taught me the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an
+accessory to Emerson, the philosophy of enjoying
+the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who,
+I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks";
+and I still think that there can be no better introduction
+to a consideration of the relation of 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 passage in
+Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City"
+that emphasized the need of beauty.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 signifi<!-- Page 70 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>cance
+as we feel the poetry and significance of "Sir Galahad"
+or "The Idylls of the King."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>There are some humorous and perhaps even
+comic passages in "The Intellectual Life"; these
+passages are unconsciously humorous or comic, as
+Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no
+sense of humour. For instance, it was a great surprise
+to me to discover that poverty was unfavourable
+to the intellectual life! It was enlightening
+to know the reason why a man should wear evening
+dress after six o'clock, and why the sporting
+of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of
+the Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character!</p>
+
+<p>And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said
+that a Certain Distinguished Painter was Half-educated,"
+was a useful antidote to youthful<!-- Page 71 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+self-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 pages which were intensely
+stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they
+like; 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 this
+Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's
+Camp" ought to be included in every list of books.</p>
+
+<p>It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following
+of Christ," and she interested me in Saint Teresa,
+that illustrious woman so well compounded of
+mysticism and common sense, of whom, however,
+I could find no good "Life." But Thomas &agrave; Kempis
+was a revelation! He fitted into nearly every
+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 came to understand
+that the counsel of perfection which Christ
+gave to the rich young man was not intended
+for the whole world, and many fine passages in
+&Agrave; Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than
+my own.<!-- Page 72 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Somebody at this time presented me with a
+copy of Marcus Aurelius. I found him dull,
+stale, and unprofitable in comparison with &Agrave; Kempis.
+His philosophy of life seemed to lead to
+nothing except the cultivation of a very high
+opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one
+of my English friends, who objected to my uncharted
+course of reading, and he said, "A person like
+you who finds nothing humorous or even philosophical
+in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected
+to like the works of Marcus Aurelius!"</p>
+
+<p>It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely
+staked off little plots, each with its own date.
+The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous
+reading which every normal man ought to
+cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for
+the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps
+hands with a thousand other books. It has always
+seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies"
+would not have been conceived by Ruskin 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 "The Stones of
+Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves
+obliged to form clubs, and to divide the expense,<!-- Page 73 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+if they were of moderate means, in order to get
+what was good out of him. But somehow or
+other, probably because it appealed more to everybody,
+it was always possible to find a copy of "Sesame
+and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think
+I found one most unexpectedly at Leary's in
+Philadelphia, where I also discovered the copy of
+Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me
+just half of my father's Christmas present that
+year, which was five dollars. I must have managed
+to get the Ruskin volume out of some other
+fund, for I had many things to buy with the other
+two and one half dollars!</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to
+fill that "long-felt want" which we, the young of
+the sixties and seventies, admitted. No doubt
+he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped
+when he might have been very simple in his raiment.
+He was a priest in literature and art; and
+he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with
+a stately tread, and yet he stooped to the single
+violets by the wayside.</p>
+
+<p>By the way, I often wished when I was reading
+Ruskin, who once made apple blossoms fashionable,
+that he had led a crusade against the double and<!-- Page 74 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation
+of the real violet. What can be more repellent
+to the lovers of simplicity than a bunch of
+these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark
+green ribbon, and with all their leaves removed?
+"Sesame and Lilies" had the effect of sending me
+back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
+to admire the <i>camellia japonica</i> or any other thing
+that was artificial, or distorted from beauty or
+simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances have a great deal to do with our
+affection for books. Propinquity, they say, leads
+very frequently to marriage, and if a book happens
+to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there
+is a great temptation to develop an affection for it.
+All I can say is that I think that "Sesame and
+Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must be
+judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin,
+and helped me to acquire a reverence for art
+and to estimate the relations of art and life. 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<!-- Page 75 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+include in their volumes that graphic description,
+so carefully modulated in tone, of the Cathedral of
+St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near
+to being prose poetry; and discriminating readers
+who ponder over it will find some epithets possible
+only to a writer who was an artist in lines and pigments
+before he began to paint with the pen.</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some
+aspects of life which we, the young, did not know;
+for the young after all learn very little by intuition.
+They must be taught things. This is perhaps an
+excuse for those vagaries in youth, those seemingly
+inexplicable adventures which shock the old who
+have forgotten what it is to be young.<!-- Page 76 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Poets and Poetry</span></h3>
+
+<h4><i>France&mdash;Of Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin</i></h4>
+
+
+<p>In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on
+a few great names. These were generally the
+names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans
+during the Franco-Prussian War had been
+with France, and during the latter days of the
+French Empire, before the war, Americans had
+been much more interested in France than in any
+other part of the world. There were letters from
+Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eug&eacute;nie
+and her coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of
+Offenbach, and the gossip about literary magnets
+of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
+Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.</p>
+
+<p>One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia;
+and the Mercantile Library&mdash;now dreadfully
+shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
+size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy<!-- Page 77 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+of access as to its shelves&mdash;had an excellent collection
+of volumes in French.</p>
+
+<p>How often in later life I blessed the discriminating
+collectors of that library! Nothing worth
+while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
+Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was
+not always guided by the critics of the period. I
+found Am&eacute;d&eacute;e Achard as interesting as Octave
+Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get
+through even "La Petite Fadette," although the
+critics were constantly recommending her for her
+"vitality." I found Madame de G&eacute;rardin's "La
+Femme qui D&eacute;teste Son Mari" one of the cleverest
+plays I had yet read. I have not seen it since; but,
+outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed to
+me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and
+the human interest and the suspense were so admirably
+kept up. There were some plays by
+Octave Feuillet&mdash;"Redemption" was one and "Le
+Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre," which divided
+my admiration with the management of
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle
+de la Seigli&egrave;re," by Jules Sandeau. The
+French playwrights of to-day have not even the
+technique of their predecessors.<!-- Page 78 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated
+partisan of the Comte de Chambord&mdash;Henry V.,
+as a few of us preferred to call him. And this reminds
+me of my partisanship in things English&mdash;if
+I may turn for the moment from things French&mdash;and
+of a little incident not without humour. I
+was ardently devoted to the cause of the Stuarts,
+and was for a time attached to the White Rose Society,
+whose correspondents in England invariably
+sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside
+down, to indicate their contempt for the Guelf
+dynasty. But when, at a small and frugal reunion
+at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia,
+our host&mdash;he was an American Walsh of the family
+of de Serrant&mdash;insisted on waving his glass of beer
+over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were
+drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water&mdash;whoever
+he might be&mdash;and another member suggested
+that, if it were not for the brutal Hanoverians
+on the throne of England, we, in the British
+Colonies, might be still enjoying the blessedness of
+being ruled by a descendant of Mary Stuart, I
+resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine
+Mary of Scotland; but I would not have her
+mixed up in American politics!<!-- Page 79 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance.
+Some of his people were not above reproach&mdash;notice
+the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
+suddenly converted to a belief in God because her
+twenty-fifth lover is suddenly restored to her. I
+thought that, though he was somewhat corrupted
+by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially
+so admirably correct.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This
+went by me as an idle dream, for I could never
+understand why anybody should take a man
+seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when
+Renan's "Life of Jesus" seems almost forgotten, it
+is strange to recall the fury of interest it excited in
+the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much
+more than Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because
+I understood that he had attacked the
+Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les
+Odeurs de Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted
+me almost beyond bounds. I did often
+wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot
+could have acquired such un-Christian use of
+language. When he announced that if his wife
+wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate
+to recognize her children, it seemed to me that<!-- Page 80 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+he had gone too far&mdash;still it was a pleasant thing to
+shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting these
+trenchant words when the novels of the lady in
+question were mentioned with rapt admiration.</p>
+
+<p>But to come to the poets!</p>
+
+<p>It was, I think, through the reading of the
+"Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve that I discovered
+Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin. He almost drove my beloved
+Keats from my mind. Somebody warned me
+against Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin on the ground of his
+pantheism. I had been warned against the poems
+of Emerson on account of their paganism; but as
+I had been brought up on Virgil, I looked on pantheism
+and paganism as rather orthodox compared
+to Renan's negation and the horrors of Calvinism.
+And, after all, the Catholic Church had retained
+so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was
+sure to find myself almost as much at home among
+the pagans as I was in the Old Testament at times.</p>
+
+<p>Keats and Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin will be always
+associated in my mind. I discovered them about
+the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
+eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the
+only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare,
+and that Keats had no intellectual value what<!-- Page 81 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>ever.
+But I was not looking for intellectual value.
+I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific
+jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and
+the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which
+was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted
+myself to De Gu&eacute;rin.</p>
+
+<p>I had already found great pleasure in the
+"Journal" of his sister Eug&eacute;nie. 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 Marie Bashkirtseff or Sarah
+McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
+calm life of Eug&eacute;nie at La Cayla when I found it
+necessary, in order to understand the allusions,
+to plunge again into the journals, letters, and
+poems of Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin. Thus it happened
+that I had fallen upon "Le Centaure" first. It
+is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me
+the most appealing poem I had ever read.</p>
+
+<p>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 all
+my Greek reading had been filtered through professors
+and textbooks; and all my Greek seeing had<!-- Page 82 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+been centred on pale white statues. It did not
+occur to me then&mdash;at least I did not know it&mdash;that
+the great Greek statues were not colourless,
+and that at Delphi there were statues that
+glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say,
+though "Le Centaure" seemed to me to be Greek
+in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with human
+emotion. Who that has read it can forget the
+simplicity of the opening? Says the Centaur:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<!-- Page 83 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the
+writings of Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin and her brother&mdash;I
+inevitably think of this brother and sister together.
+There always lingers about the genius of these two
+delicate and sensitive beings a certain perfume of
+the white lilac which Maurice loved. It happened
+that through the amiability of my father, when I
+read the Journals of the De Gu&eacute;rins, I had leisure.
+A period of ill health stopped my work&mdash;I had
+begun to study law&mdash;and there were long days
+that could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount
+Park in the early spring days, when it seems most
+appropriate to associate one's self with these two
+who ought to be read in the mood of the early
+spring, and they ought to be read slowly and even
+prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for quoting
+a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late
+'seventies showing the impression that Maurice
+de Gu&eacute;rin made. It was a great surprise to find
+part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings"<!-- Page 84 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+of Walt Whitman, who very rarely quoted any
+verse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unseen by others; to him maidenhair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And waxen lilacs, and those birds that rise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A-sudden from tall reeds at slight surprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brought charm&egrave;d thoughts; and in earth everywhere<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He, like sad Jacques, found a music rare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till earth and heaven met within his breast;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if Theocritus in Sicily<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had come upon the Figure crucified<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lost his gods in deep, Christ given rest.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which
+Hamerton had corroborated, in Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin's
+little sketches of outdoor scenery&mdash;sketches
+which always have a human interest. I had not
+yet begun to take any pleasure in Wordsworth;
+and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be able to
+enjoy nature for itself&mdash;nature unrelieved or unimproved
+by human figures&mdash;had no attractions for
+me. And here the dear Edward Roth came in, and
+confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments
+with other clever Philadelphians, Doctor<!-- Page 85 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+Nolan, the scientist who loved letters, and that
+amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.</p>
+
+<p>As for Pope and his school, they seemed to
+represent an aspect of the world as unreal as the
+world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
+pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of
+Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin had a living charm. At this
+time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on
+Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin, and I did not know that any
+appreciation of his sister had been written in English.
+I had seen a paragraph or two written by
+some third-rate person who objected to her piety
+as sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon"
+world! That her piety should be
+sentimental, if Eug&eacute;nie's sentiment can be characterized
+by that term, seemed to me to be questionable;
+and it was evident that any one who read
+French literature at all must be aware that there
+were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases
+which the average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it
+impossible to comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>The beloved home of Eug&eacute;nie, La Cayla, was not
+a gay place. It was even more circumscribed than
+Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eug&eacute;nie, being less
+"Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more<!-- Page 86 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+sentiment and a more sensitive perception of the
+meaning of nature&mdash;though, when it comes to
+sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who
+often masquerades under the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism,"
+is as sentimental as the most sentimental
+of sentimentalists. This is what I mean
+by the landscape charm of Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin, and
+yet the picture in this case is not a landscape, but
+the interior of a room:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div><p><!-- Page 87 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And again:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite
+beauties in a little space&mdash;untold joys within
+a day&mdash;and he asks us to take short outlooks.
+Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before
+him in this; but Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin exemplifies its
+value much more than any other modern writer.
+Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
+joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country,
+we are losing this faculty which the best of
+the later New Englanders tried to recover. It
+is a pity because it deprives us of the real <i>joie de
+vivre</i> which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless
+emotions or violent amusements.</p>
+
+<p>The devotion of Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin to her brother
+resembles that of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; for her
+daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George Sand
+who discovered the genius of that brother, though<!-- Page 88 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+her characterization of the qualities of his genius
+did not please the Christian soul of his sister. It
+was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De Gu&eacute;rin's place
+in French literature; and I recall now that the
+reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems
+of David Gray, now probably forgotten, and to go
+back to Keats.</p>
+
+<p>After Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin's "Le Centaure" I
+found Keats even less Greek than I thought he
+was, because he was less philosophical than De
+Gu&eacute;rin, and because he did not concern himself
+with the gravest questions of life; but, after all,
+Keats is the poet for the poets!</p>
+
+<p>My dear friend, Edward Roth&mdash;whom James
+Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"&mdash;named
+Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser
+is too hard to read&mdash;even harder than Chaucer,
+and certainly more involved, while no poets that
+ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full
+of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later,
+it seemed absurd for the French poets of a certain
+<i>genre</i> to call themselves symbolists. When
+Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because
+he felt. It was not necessary for him to search
+laboriously for the colour of a word. The thing<!-- Page 89 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+itself coloured the word&mdash;and Keats, working hard
+in a verbal laboratory, would have been an anomaly.
+It was not necessary for him to study carefully
+the music of his verse as Campion did or
+Coventry Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed
+to have done&mdash;though one cannot have suspected
+that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory
+was erected after his best verse had been written.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin, a very Christian soul, was
+probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by
+the defection of his old friend and director, P&egrave;re
+de Lamennais&mdash;the "M. F&eacute;li" of the little paradise
+of la Ch&eacute;nie. To the delight of some of the
+more independent and emancipated of the literary
+circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice
+was becoming more pantheistic than Christian.
+He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an
+altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost
+equally adored, and this gave Eug&eacute;nie great pain,
+although it did not change her love or make a rift
+in her belief in him.</p>
+
+<p>De Gu&eacute;rin is a singing poet in a language which
+is used by few singing poets for serious themes.
+There are few lyric poems in French, like the
+"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It<!-- Page 90 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found
+the verse of De Gu&eacute;rin somewhat too unusual.
+Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine
+reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all
+the little turns of an intimate talk." Eug&eacute;nie
+complains that "it sings too much and does not
+talk enough." However, one of the most charming
+of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's
+seems almost "common," is that preceding Tr&eacute;butien's
+"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice
+de Gu&eacute;rin." It would be folly for me to try to
+permeate the mind of any other person with the
+atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I
+think of the first delight of reading at leisure the
+poems of Maurice and the letters of Eug&eacute;nie. I
+might just as well attempt to make a young man of
+our time feel the thrill that came when we were
+young and first heard the most beautiful of all
+love songs&mdash;"Come into the Garden, Maud!"</p>
+
+<p>One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior
+giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich
+Villagers if they did me the honour to read
+this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better
+taste and is not so imitative&mdash;and paraphrases of
+this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of<!-- Page 91 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
+Tennyson, like De Gu&eacute;rin, had bent the
+old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly
+help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
+of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that
+Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical
+verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice
+de Gu&eacute;rin and Tennyson, who have superficial
+characteristics in common, send us back to
+Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
+the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who
+wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to
+all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this!&mdash;Maurice
+and Eug&eacute;nie de Gu&eacute;rin, Keats, Madame
+de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan
+Campion&mdash;and yet they are all related.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read
+any good book that was not related intimately to
+at least a score of other books. It is true that in
+a measure a book gives to us what we take to it;
+and we can only take much out of it when we approach
+the group of ministering authors who alone
+make life both cheerful and endurable.</p>
+
+<p>The received methods of "teaching" the classics
+in what people call "the dead languages"<!-- Page 92 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul,
+while they may develop certain hidden abilities of
+the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues
+very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
+honestly believed that the Roman Empire had
+risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin
+language might live! The logical result of this
+teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical,
+ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover
+something about the Roman Empire, in order that
+it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
+to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious
+Empire had lived and died in order to produce
+an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
+Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists,
+managed to make the Romans interesting in
+conversation; he always impressed one that the
+Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets,
+which he admitted were full of colour and life,
+were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and
+aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to
+describe them!</p>
+
+<p>The impossibility of getting anything out of the
+study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had
+read Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin's "Centaure," to read<!-- Page 93 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in
+French. While browsing I found on the shelves
+of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourgu&eacute;neff
+in the same language. This delayed me a little.
+I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the
+Bohn Edition, which I think has now become
+the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled!
+The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been discovered,
+but some of the dialogues in these poems
+contained all the best of their essences. My friends
+among the hard workers at the "Classics" scorned
+me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford 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 he had composed
+himself from various great authors, that we were
+perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no
+difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to
+saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
+poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to
+Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the
+original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly
+from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr.
+Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too paraphrastic.
+It is from the "Cyclops":<!-- Page 94 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O Galatea, swan-nymph of the sea!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vain is my longing, worthless are my words;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why do you come in night's sweet dreams to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when I wake, swift leave me, as in fear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lambkin hastens when a wolf is near?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why did my mother on a dark-bright day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring you, for hyacinths, a-near my cave?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I was the guide, and through the tangled way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I thoughtless led you; I am now your slave.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Peace left my soul when you knocked at my heart&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come, Galatea, never to depart!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Though I am dark and ugly to the sight&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Cyclops I, and stronger there are few&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of you I dream through all the quick-paced night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And four young bears: O rise from grots below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Soft love and peace with me forever know!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Swam in the sea and saw you singing there:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I gave you lilies and your grotto filled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the sweet odours of all flowers rare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And reddest poppies from my richest land.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, brave the restless billows of your world:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In vine-crowned &AElig;tna, of pure-running rills!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills!<!-- Page 95 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O Galatea, listen to my prayer:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For you alone can bring her from the deep.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And Galatea, in her cool, green waves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to the wind his love-lorn story tells:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forget, as poets do, his pain in song.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus,
+even when interpreted in English prose, without
+feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
+in life. His human nature is of the kind that
+makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope
+dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious
+ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption
+which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated,
+but we must remember, as an extenuation
+of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi
+protested against them. The cyprus plains of
+Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada,
+and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of
+Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some<!-- Page 96 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets
+did not entice us to hear their echoes.</p>
+
+<p>But to how many links of a long chain does
+Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin lead us! Here is another link&mdash;Jos&eacute;
+de Her&eacute;dia, and his jewelled and chiselled
+sonnets&mdash;the "Antique Medal" with its peerless
+sestette, which combines the essential meanings of
+Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i2">Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre m&ecirc;me s'use.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;<br /></span></i>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i2">Et seul le dur m&eacute;tal que l'amour fit docile<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Garde encore en sa fleur, aux m&eacute;dailles d'argent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">L'immortelle beaut&eacute; des vierges de Sicile."<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A translation of which reads:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the hard metal guards through all the days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Silver grown docile unto love's own use,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I always felt that Dante would have been less
+devoted to Virgil had he known Theocritus. The
+artificial Roman seems faded when one compares
+his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the
+first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus<!-- Page 97 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
+Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good
+guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was
+a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart.
+It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that
+one reads Theocritus in English rather than in
+Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic;
+but, although my classical friends, or rather my
+friends <i>enrag&eacute;</i> of the "Classics," honestly despise
+me for making this confession, I shamelessly enjoy
+Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even
+using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text
+rather than begin a course of Grecian philology
+and to lose the perfume of the crushed thyme or
+the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
+prairie.</p>
+
+
+<h4><i>Dante</i></h4>
+
+<p>A constant reader is one who always returns to
+his first loves. He may find them changed because
+he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead
+who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the
+thrill of the famous tournament or to discover
+whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
+once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age,<!-- Page 98 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+divided between two conflicting opinions. "There
+is no leisure in this country," I am told. "A great
+change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed
+the art of reading, and, as for the good old
+books&mdash;nobody reads them any more." On the
+other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they
+read only frivolous books which follow one another
+like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of
+Mr. Child's restaurants."</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In
+the first place, the winter is the time for reading&mdash;I
+recall Robert Underwood Johnson's "Winter
+Hour" when I think of this&mdash;and the motor car,
+especially in country places, does not function
+violently in the winter time. Many journeys
+from Boston, through New England, to the
+Middle West have taught me that folk are reading
+and discussing books more than ever. Whatever
+may be said of the mass of American people, who
+are probably learning slowly what national culture
+means, there are at the top of this mass thousands
+of Americans who love good books, who possess
+good books, and who return each year to the loves
+of their youth.</p>
+
+<p>The celebration of the sixth centenary of the<!-- Page 99 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+death of Dante Alighieri proves this. It is true
+enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
+talked about in English-speaking countries than
+read, and when the enthusiasm awakened in honour
+of the great Florentine reached its height, there were
+found many people in our country who were quite
+capable of asking why Dante should be read.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back I found it easy to answer this
+question myself, for, perhaps, beginning with a
+little gentle aversion to the English rimed translations
+of the "Divine Comedy," my love for
+Dante has been a slow growth. The Dante
+specialists discourage us with their learning. There
+are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose
+the foundations of the educations of Dante
+to us without frightening us by the sight of a wall
+of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot
+approach Dante in order to begin an education
+in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
+one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled
+by Dante it is not necessary to be erudite.
+In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual enlightenment,
+the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures
+of the erudite, are frequently wrong.
+Even Israel Gollancz, in his three valuable volumes<!-- Page 100 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes occasionally.
+And by the way, for all amateurs in the
+reading of the "Divine Comedy" nothing can be
+better than this Temple Edition, which contains the
+Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
+English on the next. As I grew older I grew more
+and more enamoured of Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets,
+but not of his translation, for all rime translations
+must be one half, at least, the author and
+the other half the translator. Gollancz is best for
+anybody who does not enjoy poetic <i>tours de force</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In his note on the most popular lines in the
+"Divine Comedy,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i12">Nessun maggior dolors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">che ricordarsi del tempo felice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">nella miseria;<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Gollancz says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Although these words are translated literally from Bo&euml;thius,
+and although we know that Dante had made a special
+study of Bo&euml;thius, yet we cannot well identify the <i>dottore</i>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two
+years after Virgil's death and drew certain souls<!-- Page 101 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
+means certain that Virgil was happier on earth
+than he was "upon the green enamel" (<i>verde
+smalto</i>) in this place of quiet leisure which was
+the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which,
+to some chosen souls, had already been a vestibule
+to the Palace of the Beatific Vision. If Dante
+had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
+in Scotland and New England, his tolerance
+of the pagans who found parts of Hell not
+entirely uncomfortable would have caused him
+to be looked on as a corruptor of the faith. But
+what would they have said to the "Paradiso"
+which I have always found more full of consolation
+than any sermon that was ever preached? Let us
+take the description of the Church Triumphant in
+Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of
+the heresy that all children unbaptized by material
+water are doomed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Dunque, senza merce di lor costume,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">locati son per gradi differenti,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">sol differendo nel primiero acume.<br /></span></i>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Bastava si nei secoli recenti<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">con l'innocenza, per aver salute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">solamente la fede dei parenti;<!-- Page 102 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span><br /></span>
+</i></div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">poiche le prime etadi fur compiute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">convenne ai maschi all' innocenti penne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">per circoncidere, acquistar virtute.<br /></span></i>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Ma poichee il tempo della grazia venne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">senza battesmo perfetto di Cristo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">tale innocenza laggiu si ritenne.<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then remembering the innocence of the
+little children Dante turns to that face "which is
+most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the
+Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all
+children. If the strict Calvinists had known the
+"Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their
+Old Testament, their theology might have found
+more adherence among the merciful, for the "Paradiso"
+is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and
+of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely
+hoped in, or sought, the truth, even if the
+truth were not crowned in its fullness in this world.</p>
+
+<p>And Dante, put by Raphael without protest
+from the Church Militant, among the Doctors
+of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and
+opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way,
+the falsity of the Voltairean <i>mauvais mot</i>, that all
+the people worth meeting are in Hell! And Dante
+sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks<!-- Page 103 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+that this Emperor's donation of territory was an
+evil gift. Dante, who, by the way, was nearer to
+the old records and this tradition of the older time,
+is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that
+the documents of Constantine's donation were
+medi&aelig;val forgeries. Dante believed, however,
+that the donation was invalid, because the successor
+of St. Peter, being of 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 the Faithful in the
+United States console themselves by assuming that,
+as in the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science,"
+this the method of the Sacred Congregation
+is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book,
+suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur"
+in English! So may "The Three Musketeers"
+and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as
+coming under the ban in the original, but as tolerated
+in the translation?</p>
+
+<p>Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made
+no rift in his creed, nor does it seem to have made<!-- Page 104 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+him less respected by the Roman Court. There
+is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the
+poet's faith&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Cos&igrave; spir&ograve; di quell' amore acceso;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">indi soggiunse: "Assai bene &egrave; trascorsa<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">d'esta moneta gi&agrave; la lega e il peso;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa."<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa."<br /></span></i>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Appresso usci della luce profonda,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">che li splendeva; "Questa cara gioia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">sopra la quale ogni virt&ugrave; si fonda,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">dello Spirito Santo, ch' &egrave; diffusa<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia,<br /></span></i>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">&Egrave; sillogismo, che la mia ha conchiusa<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">acutamente si, che in verso d' ella<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa."<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to
+other books, so much the better. Aristotle is
+worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in
+modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo,
+with new harmonies added the Wagner to Aristotle's
+Mozart. No&mdash;that is going too far!&mdash;the
+musical comparison fails. "If thou should'st
+never see my face again, pray for my soul," is<!-- Page 105 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of Pope
+Gregory that saved Trajan.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the
+"Paradiso" too neglected, we find much that illuminates
+our minds and touches our hearts. The
+"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is
+certainly very human. For instance, 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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When he came near to me I said to him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">that I have seen thee here and not in Hell.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 his widow
+should desire to marry</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 may long for
+once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a<!-- Page 106 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one
+may mightily well</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>know how short a time love may last in woman, if the eye
+and the touch do not keep it alive.</p></div>
+
+<p>One must admit that there is an element of
+humour&mdash;not for the victim&mdash;in the "Inferno,"
+when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
+three and a half years before he died! Nicholas
+III., whom Dante thought guilty of the unpardonable
+sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
+says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">la riverenza delle somme chiavi,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">che tu tenesti nella vita lieta<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">l' userei parole ancor pi&ugrave; gravi&mdash;<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But for consolation, there is no great poem so
+good as the "Paradiso."</p>
+
+
+<h4><i>English and American Verse</i></h4>
+
+<p>Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled
+the youths of his generation were when the new
+poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It is
+difficult for the young of to-day to believe this.
+There is no great reigning poet to-day; there are<!-- Page 107 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as
+crown princes by the groups that gather about
+them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good
+sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry
+is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair
+Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the
+old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott," with its
+pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of
+commonplace into something very beautiful, was
+new.</p>
+
+<p>We who succeeded Stedman by some years
+loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were
+not especially struck by those medi&aelig;val lay figures
+which he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad"
+and "Sir Percival." They were too much
+like what the English people at that time insisted
+that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot
+would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the
+fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
+Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now
+as it was then. It is the desire for "independence,"
+the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that
+calls itself audacity, which brushes away the
+delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply
+because he does not represent a Movement. And<!-- Page 108 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+yet all these new movements are very old movements.
+The result of the education given me by
+books was to convince me that the man of culture
+proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any
+literary expression as really new and if he cannot
+enjoy the old, when the old is of all time. The
+beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
+they 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
+Arthur Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading."
+He is writing of the Bible, which is never old:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;great Saul&mdash;by the tent-prop with the jewels in his
+turban:<!-- Page 109 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at
+heart."</p>
+
+<p>Or consider&mdash;to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous
+procession&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping
+behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go,
+return. And he returned."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David,
+Michal, Saul's daughter"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mark the three words&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr.
+Maxwell, who are rapidly becoming too old-fashioned
+for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
+Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in
+sympathy with what they might conceive to be
+the trend of present emotion; for it is with the emotions
+and not with the mind or the will that the<!-- Page 110 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+novelist of the day before yesterday mostly deals.
+If Mr. James Huneker had translated this into
+the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with
+minutely carved jewels, glowed with a perfume
+and colour of crushed roses, and choked the 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 more splendid
+and appealing?</p>
+
+<p>The old is new, and the new is old in art and
+literature&mdash;in life itself, and the man who scorned
+Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti were new;
+or who scorns Browning&mdash;the best of Browning&mdash;lacks
+the first requisite of true cultivation which
+is founded on the truth that beauty is beyond the
+touch of time. The women in Fran&ccedil;ois Villon's
+"Ballade of Dead Ladies" are gone, but their
+beauty remains in that song. This beauty might
+be none the less beautiful if expressed in <i>vers libre</i>;
+its beauty might take a new flavour from our time.
+The fact only that it was of our time and treated
+in the manner of our time, could not give it that
+essential and divine something which is perennial,
+universal, and perhaps eternal.</p>
+
+<p>Much affectionate reading of poetry&mdash;and poetry<!-- Page 111 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+read in any other way is like the crackling of small
+sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day&mdash;leads
+one to consider the structure of verse and to
+ask how singing effects are best produced. This
+inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger
+poets to throw aside the older conventions, and,
+imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even
+newer composers, to produce that "free verse"
+which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or
+the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating
+to the intolerant to find writers, young
+in experience if not always young in age, talking of
+themselves as discoverers&mdash;brave or audacious discoverers&mdash;as
+adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or
+Cortez, or Ponce de Le&oacute;n; and then, to hear some
+of the old and conventional violently attacking
+these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
+revolutionists.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that <i>vers libre</i> has its place, and it
+ought to have a high place; but the writer who attempts
+it must have a very perfect ear for the
+nuances of music and great art in his technique
+applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples
+of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few.
+Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or<!-- Page 112 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+not, she has the fine art of producing musical
+effects, delicate and various and even splendid.
+But there are others!</p>
+
+<p>It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or
+Campion that led me to read Coventry 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 the proverbial sayings
+of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found
+"The Unknown Eros" and a little later "The
+Toys," and then his "Night and Sleep," one of the
+most musical poems in our language.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How strange at night the bay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of dogs, how wild the note<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of cocks that scream for day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In homesteads far remote;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How strange and wild to hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The old and crumbling tower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amid the darkness, suddenly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take tongue and speak the hour!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not
+dependent upon the rime, it is plain&mdash;as the form
+of poetry appeals to the ear&mdash;that the rime is a
+gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and
+seventh lines of each stanza. The real musical<!-- Page 113 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+charm of the poem&mdash;only one stanza, of four, is
+given here&mdash;lies in the management of the rhythm.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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,</p></div>
+
+<p>says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical
+Law,"</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this
+lovely "Night and Sleep" is merely accessory, a
+lightly played accompaniment to a song which
+would be as beautiful a song without it, yet which
+gains a certain accent through this accompaniment;
+and that the real questions in verse are of
+rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even
+in the use of sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny,
+often proves the merely accessory value of rime,
+but in no instance more fully than in<!-- Page 114 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tears from the depth of some divine despair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In looking on the happy autumn fields,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thinking of the days that are no more.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is every reason why the modern reader
+should have become tired of academic poetry.
+When poetry divorced itself from music and became
+the slave of fixed rules of metre which could
+not be imitated with any real success in English,
+it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
+hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed
+the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion,
+and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised
+Shakespeare for his vulgarisms.</p>
+
+<p>The truth that poetry was primarily written to
+be sung is forgotten, and even in France the chant
+of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
+Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation.
+For myself, I tried to get to the root of the
+matter by reading Thomas Campion&mdash;Charles
+Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
+masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen&mdash;as an antidote
+to Walt Whitman. In fact, my acquaintance
+with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his<!-- Page 115 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+use of what is to-day called <i>vers libre</i> resembled
+somewhat Carlyle's Teutonic contortions of style.
+It was impossible to get from the "Good Gray
+Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that
+he looked on rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step,
+a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a hurried dash, or
+a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on
+the action of the heart, the acceleration of the
+pulse, or the movement of the thought.</p>
+
+<p>But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's
+poems can fail to perceive that there were
+times when he understood thoroughly that poetry,
+expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a
+great pity that some of our newer poets do not
+understand this. In their revolt from the outworn
+academic rules, they have gone the length of the
+most advanced Cubists, and do not realize that
+no amount of splendid visualization compensates
+for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies.
+It is unfortunate, too, that the imitators of
+Amy Lowell, many of whom have neither her feeling
+for colour, her great power of concentration,
+nor her naturally good ear, should imagine that
+<i>vers libre</i> means the throwing together of words in
+chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded on<!-- Page 116 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+carefully considered rules; his discords are not
+accidents.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's
+"Science of English Verse" would suppress the art
+of expression, even in a genius. By the time he
+learned how to write verse he would be too old to
+write verse at all! There are less intricate books.
+I learned from the theories and the odes of Coventry
+Patmore and the "Observations in the Art
+of English Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his
+practice that the best <i>vers libre</i> has freedom,
+unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently
+unstudied charm, 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
+the opera sings, because he had acquired his
+method of almost perfect expression through
+science and art. And, if one wants an example
+of the intangible "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 is not <i>vers libre</i>. If it were,
+its intangible appeal would not exist.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every versifier who disregards those<!-- Page 117 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+models of form in verse which include rime, or
+whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
+imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young,
+Walt Whitman seemed to have been established
+as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
+indecencies were his principal stock in trade.
+Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had
+its effect, and the very respectable&mdash;that is, gentlemen
+of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church
+in New York of his time&mdash;looked on him with
+horror. He had, it seems, attacked established
+religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn
+<i>Eagle</i> on that eminently important body.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had
+been broken by the time that I had begun to read
+poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
+curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt
+Whitman just as I accepted the musical Wagner.
+At that time we had not yet learned to know that
+Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet
+discovered that "Lohengrin," for instance, was
+woven of many melodies, for they were not detached
+and made into arias. What could be expected
+of young persons brought up on "The
+Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?<!-- Page 118 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And yet we soon found out without any help
+from the critics that Walt Whitman was essentially
+a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
+been deliberately adopted as the best possible
+form in which to clothe ideas which were not conventional,
+and to attract attention. Most of the
+young at that time thought that he had as much
+right to do this as Browning had to be wilfully
+inarticulate. The critics did not concern us much.
+There was always a little coterie of students at the
+University of Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College,
+or young men under the influence of Mr. Edward
+Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was
+a brilliant Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur
+Henry, who died young; Daniel Dawson, whose
+"Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He
+was a devout 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 imitate him. At this time,
+I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
+easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight
+help from the dictionary, were entrancing! I
+could never understand, being enraptured with<!-- Page 119 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should
+have chosen such a poor medium for lyrical expression
+or such a rude utterance for some noble
+ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech
+sensual dreams or passing shadows of evil thoughts
+astonished us no more than the existence of the
+photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of
+the gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame,
+or the strange and very improper representations
+of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
+carved 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, though they might whisper of
+their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
+was no point whatever in putting them into print.
+But the great passages&mdash;there are very many&mdash;and
+the noble complete poems&mdash;there are a few&mdash;of
+Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware
+River, and one could meet him almost at any
+time in a street car or lounging about his haunts in
+Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he<!-- Page 120 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+did not for us represent anything essentially new.
+When Swinburne and Rossetti and the Preraphaelites,
+however, came into our possession, it was
+quite another thing! There was no Whitman
+movement among our young. There was a marked,
+but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.</p>
+
+<p>Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did
+not mean that a young man had a depraved mind
+because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse
+after verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne.
+It simply meant that a breath of rich, sensuous
+odours from an exotic island had swept across the
+conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens
+of his life. I wonder if any young man feels to-day,
+in reading Masefield's poems, or Walter de la
+Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert
+Frost's, or even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that
+stirred us when we heard the choruses in "Atalanta
+in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"?
+And there was William Morris and "The Earthly
+Paradise!"</p>
+
+<p>The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled
+the old thrills of "new" poets, but of late,
+though the prospects of poetry are beginning to<!-- Page 121 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+revive, no very modern poet seems to have become
+a part of the daily lives of the young, who declare
+that the world is changed, and that the Old
+hold no torches for them by which they can discover
+what they really want! The more things
+change, the more they remain the same! And
+the young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously
+and smoked a cigarette in private now
+reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs
+at a cigarette in public whenever she feels like it.
+She is really no more advanced than the girl of
+the period of the eighties, and not any more astonishing.
+It's the same old girl! And the young
+men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and
+who were rather bored by the thinness of their
+aftermath, the &aelig;sthetic poets, really got more
+colour and amazement and delight out of the
+flashing of the meteors than the youth of to-day
+seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas&eacute;
+and cynical and bored with life; but nobody was
+really bored because there were too many amusing
+and delightful things in the world&mdash;as there are
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and
+burning Southern lights and his intensities and his<!-- Page 122 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+simulated passion, did not last long. In England
+he was looked on as a typical American poet, more
+decent than Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with
+the charm Whitman had for the English&mdash;that no
+Englishman could ever be like him! In England
+they wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with
+a savage flavour about them.</p>
+
+<p>I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of
+Edith Thomas, of Robert Underwood Johnson&mdash;whose
+"Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter
+Hour" can never be forgotten&mdash;and certain verses
+of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But <i>les jeunes</i>
+prefer the new verse makers. There is even a
+kind of cult for the Imagists. A spokesman for
+the Imagists tells us briefly that "free verse" is a
+term that may be attached to all that increasing
+amount of writing whose cadence is more marked,
+more definite, and closer knit than that of prose,
+but which is not so violently or so obviously accented
+as the so-called "regular verse." Richard
+Aldington's "Childhood" is a very typical example
+of <i>vers libre</i>. It is also an Imagist poem.
+It will be remarked that it is so free that there is
+no cadence that any musician could find. It is a
+pretty little joyful trifle!<!-- Page 123 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There was nothing to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing to do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing to play with,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Except that in an empty room upstairs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was a large tin box<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the Declaration of Independence,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There were also several packets of stamps,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Indians and Men-of-war<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the United States,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the green and red portraits<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of King Francobollo<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Italy.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I don't believe in God<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I do believe in avenging gods<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who plague us for sins we never sinned<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But who avenge us.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That's why I'll never have a child,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only
+sometimes musical, but he hammers in his images
+with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans,
+Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly
+heard banjo accompaniment, are the most fascinating
+and least tiresome of all the New.<!-- Page 124 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When one has wallowed for a time with the
+Imagists and carefully examined the <i>vers librists</i>,
+with the aid of a catalogue and explanations, one
+turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la
+Mare. Come, now! Listen to this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When slim Sophia mounts her horse<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And paces down the avenue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It seems an inward melody<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">She paces to.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Each narrow hoof is lifted high<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beneath the dark enclustering pines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A silver ray within his bit<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And bridle shines.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">His eye burns deep, his tail is arched,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And streams upon the shadowy air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The daylight sleeks his jetty flanks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">His mistress' hair.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her habit flows in darkness down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Upon the stirrup rests her foot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her brow is lifted, as if earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">She heeded not.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Tis silent in the avenue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The sombre pines are mute of song,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blue is dark, there moves no breeze<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The boughs among.<!-- Page 125 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When slim Sophia mounts her horse<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And paces down the avenue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It seems an inward melody<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">She paces to.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is difficult for the simple minded to understand
+why Walter de la Mare, who is a singer with
+something to sing about, cannot be classed as an
+Imagist. He uses the language of common speech
+and tries always to say exactly what he means; he
+suits his mood to his rhythm, and his cadences to
+his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic
+value of modern life; but he does not seem to see
+why he should not write about an old-fashioned
+a&euml;roplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
+centre of something interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry
+that is hard and clear and never blurred or indefinite,
+and he holds that concentration is the
+very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for
+"free verse" as for the principle 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 appeal to the mind or the heart or the
+imagination, why should it be necessary to fight
+for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make<!-- Page 126 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+men of straw in order "to fight" for them; but all
+the world loves a poet, if the poet once touches
+its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a
+good example of what "free verse" ought to be.
+But it is not free because it is lawless; its freedom
+is the freedom of all true art which does not ignore,
+which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern
+the expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's
+"Daisy" is certainly a less appealing poem
+than that one in which Swinburne sings of the lady
+who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!</p>
+
+<p>Jos&eacute; de Her&eacute;dia, in "Les Troph&eacute;es," is both an
+Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration
+and the science of the Sibyl without her contortions.
+It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude
+of the professional makers of "free verse"
+should have arrayed a small and angry 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, but who seem as if they were. Tennyson's
+"Owl," which is looked on to-day as an example of
+Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S.
+Eliot's "Cousin Nancy":<!-- Page 127 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Miss Nancy Ellicott<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strode across the hills and broke them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rode across the hills and broke them&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The barren New England hills&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Riding to hounds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the cow-pasture.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And danced all the modern dances;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But they knew that it was modern.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the glazen shelves kept watch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The army of unalterable law.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and
+this glimpse of character might be uttered in one
+sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to ornamentation
+might have made the poem at least decorative.
+After all, when one has emerged from the
+rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist,
+and the <i>vers librist</i>, one swims into the splendours
+of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge
+from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees,
+in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
+series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent
+from the heaven of Crashaw and the places
+of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
+Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.<!-- Page 128 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and
+his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me
+that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide
+on the position of a poet among poets, or of
+a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak
+modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the
+taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
+Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all
+the modern English poets, deserve to be classed
+indiscriminately together as "inspiring." And I
+cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson
+is <i>demod&eacute;</i> because his heroines are in crinoline
+and conventional, and his medi&aelig;val knights
+cut out of pasteboard.</p>
+
+<p>By comparison with the original of the "Idylls
+of the King" this statement seems to be true.
+Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies&mdash;by
+modern standards they would hardly be called
+"ladies"&mdash;do not bear the test of even the most
+elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
+different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's
+"Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
+But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
+"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite
+lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities,<!-- Page 129 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory
+with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning
+and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic
+over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and
+others new&mdash;<i>chacun &agrave; son go&ucirc;t</i>&mdash;I feel that by
+comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets
+are not rich. They are poor because they seem to
+leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.</p>
+
+<p>Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because
+he could not escape the shadow of the Crucifixion.
+Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
+neither 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 than Shakespeare, in "Julius C&aelig;sar,"
+could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor
+Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites
+be really out of their time, for they could not
+understand the essentially religious qualities of
+the times into which they tried to project themselves.</p>
+
+<p>If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with
+those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily
+see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the<!-- Page 130 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+originals; they are not even paraphrases&mdash;to turn
+again from painting to literature. They are fine
+in themselves, and the critics of the future, more
+reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will
+give them their true place. As for Browning, it is
+only necessary to read the Italian writers of the
+Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
+poems that touch on that period. He is always
+modern. With all his efforts he cannot understand
+that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
+which made the Renascence possible. He seems
+to assume that the Catholic Church in the time of
+the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
+struggled with Christianity. The fact is that
+paganism had melted into Christianity and Christianity
+had given it a new light and a new form.</p>
+
+<p>It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence
+to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan
+or Dana&euml; and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of
+gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was
+nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a
+pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin.
+It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
+beautiful and essentially poetical, even when
+he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life<!-- Page 131 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory,
+as almost all modern poets, when they interpret
+the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may
+look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson,
+with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that very
+often they mistake the beating of their own hearts
+for the sound of the pulsations of the hearts of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be
+orthodox are sometimes shocked when they are
+told that Saint Peter, for example, did not believe
+that a man might not be both circumcised and
+baptized. According to a common belief, the two
+could not exist together among the converted
+Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to
+think that paganism and Christianity were at
+odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
+manifestations of religion, before the Reformation,
+would dissipate an illusion which spoils so much
+fine modern poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Another point, in applying my canons of criticism
+to poets whom I love in spite of this defect,
+is that I find that they have no desire to be united
+with God&mdash;you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or
+Lord, to quote Pope. They are, as a rule, without<!-- Page 132 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+mysticism and constantly without that ecstasy
+which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest
+of all the mystical poets writing in English, Francis
+Thompson, so satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as
+Emerson certainly was, but in different ways they
+made their search for the Absolute, and the search,
+especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent.
+Neither had the splendours, the ecstasies of that
+love that casteth out fear, the almost fierce and
+violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse
+of Saint 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
+poets pale before him. He sees life as a glory as
+Baudelaire saw it as a corpse. After a reading of
+"The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious colour,
+its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to
+me to be a pale mauve by comparison to its flaming
+gold and crimson.</p>
+
+<p>To many of my friends who love modern poets
+each in his degree, this seems unreasonable and
+even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;
+and all literature which assumes to treat our lives
+as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satis<!-- Page 133 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>factory
+quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon,
+in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It
+is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern
+poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is
+a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion
+when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts.
+This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times
+and joyous at times, but if their philosophers represent
+them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential
+points of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>The highest cultivation of its time could not
+save Athens from despondency and destruction,
+and when the leaders in the city of Rome came to
+believe so little in life that only the proletariat had
+children, it was evident that their very tolerant
+system of adopting any god 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 be united 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 a man who loves only the poetry
+that appeals to him.<!-- Page 134 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Certain Novelists</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens
+was an evolution rather than a discovery. Once
+having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas
+Nickleby," the book became not so much a book
+but a state of mind&mdash;and, as is sometimes felt
+about a friend&mdash;it is hard to remember a time
+when we did not know him!</p>
+
+<p>Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping
+Frog of Calavaras" and that chuckling scene in
+"Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian
+guide introduces Christopher Columbus to the
+American travellers, were joys indeed. These were
+more delightful and satisfying than the kind of
+humour that preceded them&mdash;they seemed better
+than the whimsicalities of Artemus Ward, and not
+to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.
+Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages,
+my pleasure in the works of Mark Twain
+faded more and more as I came to the age of rea<!-- Page 135 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>son,
+which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was
+hard to laugh at Mark after a time. 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 human interest, a lack of coarseness, which
+placed it immeasurably above that of Mark Twain.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale
+of Two Cities." And the greatest failure of Mark
+Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens redeemed
+himself in a hundred ways, while Mark
+Twain sank deeper and deeper into coarseness and
+pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds apparently
+the national American author, it is heresy
+to say this; and I know persons who have assumed
+an air of coldness as long as they could in my
+presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of
+Arc" as a masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy
+of life, it suggests his narrow and materialistic
+point of view, and makes plain his lack of knowledge
+of the perspectives of history. It is all the
+worse for an appearance of tenderness. Mark
+Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual. That<!-- Page 136 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+does not mean that he was not a good husband and
+father, a kind friend and a man very loyal to all
+his engagements. There are many other authors
+who had not all these qualities, but who would
+have more easily understood the character of Joan
+than did Mark Twain.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was
+from very different causes. It was not through a
+failure of tenderness, a lack of an understanding
+of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
+spirituality without which no great work can be
+effective. It was because Dickens relied very
+largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his study
+of the historical atmosphere of that novel&mdash;the
+best, from the point 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 new to him, he had to guide his steps very
+carefully. The novel is nevertheless a failure because
+it is untrue; it concerns itself with a France
+that never existed seen through as artificial a
+medium as the mauve tints through which certain
+artists see their figures and landscapes. It was
+not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
+lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception<!-- Page 137 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+or the absence of a great power of feeling. It was
+pure ignorance. He was without that training
+which would have enabled him to go intelligently
+to the sources of French history.</p>
+
+<p>In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the
+power to reach the sources; it was an inability to
+understand the character of the woman whom he
+reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and
+an invincible ignorance of the character of her
+time. Mark Twain was modern; but modern in
+the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry
+Finn" and the other young Americans&mdash;whom
+our youth are expected to like, if not to imitate&mdash;are
+looked on as sacred by the guardians of those
+libraries who recommend typical books to eager
+juvenile readers. But let that pass for the moment.
+To take a case in point, there is hardly any
+man or woman of refinement who will hold a brief
+in defense of the vulgarity of "A Connecticut
+Yankee at the Court of King Arthur."</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that the average reader of Mark
+Twain's books&mdash;that is, the average American
+reader&mdash;for Mark Twain is read the world over&mdash;cares
+nothing for his philosophy of life. The
+average American reads Mark Twain only to be<!-- Page 138 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+amused, or to recall the adventures of a time not
+far away when we were less sophisticated. Still,
+whether my compatriots are in the habit of looking
+into books for a philosophy or not, or of considering
+the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it
+does not follow that it is to their credit if they
+neglect an analysis which cultivated readers in
+other countries seldom omit.</p>
+
+<p>If I thought that any words of mine would deprive
+anybody of the gaiety which Mark Twain
+has added to life, I should not write these words;
+but as this little volume is a book of impressions,
+and sincere impressions, I may be frank in the full
+understanding that the average American reader
+will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain,
+since he has become an integral part of American
+literature. There may perhaps come a time when
+his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on
+all self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with
+pride as a proof of culture, and never read. They
+will perhaps one day be the Rogers's statuettes of
+literature. But that day is evidently far off. I
+do not think that any jester of the older day&mdash;the
+day of Touchstone or of Rigoletto, with a rooted
+sorrow in his heart, could have been more pessi<!-- Page 139 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>mistic
+and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To
+change the words of Autolycus&mdash;"For the life to
+come, I jest out the thought of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"You who admire Don Quixote," said an infuriated
+Mark Twainite, "should not talk of
+coarseness. There are pages in that romance of
+Cervantes which I would not allow my son or
+daughter to read."</p>
+
+<p>One should give both sides of an argument, and
+I give this other side to show what may be said
+against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
+is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern
+ideas of purity were not his. Ignorance in those
+days&mdash;the days of Cervantes&mdash;did not mean innocence.
+Even the fathers of the Church were
+quite willing to admit that the roots of water
+lilies were in the mud, and there was no conspiracy
+to conceal the existence of the mud.
+Mark Twain's coarseness, however, is more than
+that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither Cervantes
+nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.</p>
+
+<p>To them, even the ordinary things of life have
+a certain sacerdotal quality; but Mark Twain
+abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors
+a vacuum. To say that he has affected the Amer<!-- Page 140 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>ican
+spirit or the American heart would be to go
+too far&mdash;for Americans are irreverent only on the
+surface. It seems to me that they are the most
+reverent people in the world toward those essential
+qualities which make up the spiritual parts of
+life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is
+just at present the one author to whom all Europe
+and all outlanders point as the great typical
+American writer!</p>
+
+<p>That a delightful kind of American humour may
+exist without exaggeration, or the necessity of
+debasing the moral currency, many joyous books
+in our literature show. There are a few, of course,
+that are joyous without self-consciousness; but for
+real joyousness and charm and innocent gaiety,
+united to a knowledge of the psychology of the
+American youth, none so far has equalled Booth
+Tarkington's "Penrod," or, what is better, "Seventeen."</p>
+
+<p>Now nobody has yet done anything so delightful,
+so mirth provoking, so pathetic, in a way, as
+"Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of
+the knowledge of this book, for when I swam into
+the tide of literature, Booth Tarkington was in
+that world from which Wordsworth's boy came,<!-- Page 141 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+bringing rainbows, which moved to all the music
+of the spheres. It was during 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 the maze
+and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the
+North Sea. It arrived just when the world seemed
+altogether upside down; when death was the only
+real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the
+daily routine as the sunshine, and when joy seemed
+to have been inexplicably crushed from the earth,
+because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could
+not be forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen"
+arrived.</p>
+
+<p>Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs
+in future, as he has had in the past. "The Gentleman
+from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one
+of the most tiresome books ever invented, while
+"Monsieur Beaucaire" was one of the most fascinating,
+charming. You can hardly find a better
+novel of American life than "The Turmoil," unless
+it is Judge Grant's "Unleavened Bread."</p>
+
+<p>But the best novels of American life seem to be
+written in order to be forgotten. Who reads<!-- Page 142 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+"The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
+professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue
+and I"? Or that succession of Mrs. Harriet
+Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as pictures
+of a section of our life, each of which better
+expresses her talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?
+The English and the French have longer memories.
+Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"&mdash;some
+of us remember "Miss Majoribanks"
+or "Ph&oelig;be Junior"&mdash;finds a slowly decreasing
+circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost
+forgotten, "Les Rois en Exil&eacute;" and "Jack" are
+still parts of current French literature. But
+"Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of
+Theron Ware" or "Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe
+Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as to be
+unread.</p>
+
+<p>To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's
+stories perennially bloom. And, for some strange
+reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series is found
+under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody
+gives the Rollo books to anybody. Why? One
+may begin to believe that that degeneracy which
+the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes
+adapted to the subway is supposed to in<!-- Page 143 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>dicate,
+is a real menace when one discovers that
+"Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!</p>
+
+<p>We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity,
+but it is my belief that Sodom and Gomorrah
+would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of
+that time had made it possible to keep books like
+"Penrod" and "Seventeen" in general circulation!</p>
+
+<p>It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as
+long as English men and women of the upper and
+middle classes continued to exist, he might go on
+writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And
+the same thing might be said of Booth Tarkington
+in relation to his unique chronicles of youth&mdash;that
+is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal
+Soul. His types are American, but there are
+Americas and Americas. Usage permits us to use
+a term for our part of the continent to which our
+Canadian and South and Central Americans and
+Mexicans might reasonably object; but while 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 in
+Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances
+would have made him different. The<!-- Page 144 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+consciousness of class distinction would have made
+him old before his time; and though he might be
+just as amusing&mdash;he would not have been amusing
+quite in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr.
+Tarkington's imaginative synthesis. He is individual
+and of his own soil; he knows very well
+that it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to
+invent; he has only to perceive with those rare
+gifts of perception which he possesses. It all
+seems so easy until you try to do it yourself!</p>
+
+<p>The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being
+prepared for the pageant of the "Table Round," is
+inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but no
+child can look on it as entirely amusing, because
+every child has suffered more or less, as Penrod
+suffered, from the unexplainable hardness of heart
+and dullness of mind of older people. Something
+or other prevents the most persecuted boy from
+admitting that his parents are bad parents because
+they force impositions which tear all the fibres of
+his soul and make him helpless before a jeering
+world. When Penrod has gone through horrors,
+which are nameless because they seem to be so
+unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "<i>Well, hasn't this<!-- Page 145 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+been a day!</i>" Because of the humour in "Penrod"
+there is a pathos as true and real as those parts in
+the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens
+is pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive
+for pathos. Everybody admits now that Dickens
+becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
+to be pathetic.</p>
+
+<p>One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful
+situations which seem to ripple from the
+pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being the
+scene between the hero and his mother when that
+<i>esprit terrible</i>, 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's entrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's
+best. Penrod is expected to find, according
+to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the
+cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young
+lady unengaged, who was Miss Rennsdale, aged
+eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his call.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Penrod Schofield!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs.<!-- Page 146 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" she wailed. "I just knew it would be him!"</p>
+
+<p>The decorous maid's composure vanished at once&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I thu-thank you fu-for your polite invu-invu-invutation;
+and I ac&mdash;&mdash;" 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!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no!" said the governess, and whispered urgently,
+whereupon Miss Rennsdale was able to complete her acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again.</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you for your polite acceptance," he murmured<!-- Page 147 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+hurriedly; "and I trust&mdash;I trust&mdash;I forget. Oh, yes&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Why couldn't it be anybody but him!"</p></div>
+
+<p>Dickens would not have done the scene quite
+this way; he could not have so conceived it, and he
+might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
+gets it just right. He has created boy characters
+which will live because they are alive. One of the
+most detestable books, after Mark Twain's "Yankee
+at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's
+"Child's History of England." The two books
+have various gross faults in common and these
+faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert
+Chesterton says that one of Dickens's is due to</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div><p><!-- Page 148 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that if all the works of Dickens
+were lost we might do very well with the "Pickwick
+Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby." To
+these, one is tempted to add "Our Mutual Friend."</p>
+
+<p>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 no reason given for this censure. It
+was presumed that the authors of the papers meant
+an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my
+knowledge, ever defined what an English gentleman
+or lady was. When one considers that for a long
+period an English gentleman's status was determined
+by the fact 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, the more modern definition would
+have been very different from what the English
+of the olden time would have called a gentleman.
+Even now, when a levelling education has rather
+blurred the surface marks of class in England, it
+might be difficult for an American to define what
+was meant by this criticism of Dickens. It seems
+to me that no one could define exactly what was<!-- Page 149 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+meant. The convention that makes the poet in
+Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon
+were peopled by thrushes, or orchestrated
+by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him often
+to borrow words from the English vocabulary of
+England without analyzing their exact meaning.
+There can be no doubt that Don Quixote was a
+gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional
+sense. And, if he was a gentleman, why
+are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller gentlemen?
+An interesting thesis might be written on the
+application of Cardinal Newman's definition of a
+gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.
+Why not?</p>
+
+<p>There is a truth about the English people, at
+least the lower classes, which Mr. Chesterton in
+his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms of
+the Works of Charles Dickens"&mdash;one of his best
+books&mdash;brings out, though he does not accentuate
+it sufficiently: this is that the lower classes of the
+English are both witty and humorous. Witty because
+they are satirical and humorous because they
+are ironical. Sam Weller represents a type&mdash;a
+common type&mdash;more exactly than Samuel Lover's
+"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish<!-- Page 150 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+characters. When one examines the foundation
+for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
+lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies
+and gentlemen, in the English sense, are deadly
+dull. It is very probable that all conventional
+ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never
+ceased to be a cockney, though he became the
+most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson
+was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical
+to say it, not so greatly impressed by class
+distinctions as Dickens was.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens had the art of making insupportable
+bores most interesting. This was an art in which
+the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but Dickens's
+methods compared to hers are like those of a
+scene painter when compared to those of an etcher
+in colours. There are times when Dickens is consciously
+"common," and then he is almost unbearable;
+but this objection cannot be made to the
+"Pickwick Papers." This book is inartistic; it is
+made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not
+grow; they change. But all this makes no difference.
+They are spontaneous. You feel that
+for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes to do&mdash;and
+all the world loves a lover who loves his work.<!-- Page 151 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are doubtless some people still living who
+can tolerate the romantic quality in "Nicholas
+Nickleby." There are no really romantic qualities
+in the "Pickwick Papers"&mdash;thank heaven!&mdash;no
+stick of a hero, no weeping willow of a heroine.
+The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom suddenly
+as the branch in "Tannh&auml;user" bloomed. Even
+Dickens can work no miracle there.</p>
+
+<p>It increases our admiration of him to examine
+the works of those gentlemen who are set down in
+the textbooks of literature as his predecessors.
+Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's
+"Tristram Shandy," a very dull and tiresome
+narrative; and "Tom Jones," very tiresome, too,
+in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of eighteenth-century
+life. And later, Pierce Egan's
+"Tom and Jerry." I was brought up to consider
+the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
+and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or
+The Adventures of Corinthian Bob" as part of
+the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
+analysis of a German research-worker to find any
+real resemblance between the artificial dissipations
+of "Tom and Jerry" and the adventures of the
+peerless Pickwick.<!-- Page 152 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing
+disciples, he ought to have induced his
+son to produce something better than "The Poor
+Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias,"
+and others too numerous to mention.</p>
+
+<p>The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows
+older, perhaps becomes a student of Dickens, and
+is surprised to find that the development of
+Dickens is much more marked and easily noted
+than the development of Thackeray. In fact,
+Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier,
+sprang into the public light fully equipped and
+fully armed. Both these men had wide experience
+and a careful training in form and proportion before
+they attempted to write seriously. They were
+educated in art and life and letters. The education
+of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
+begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither
+method nor proportion; and he who reads "Barnaby
+Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a
+new and good perspective and proportion, and
+even self-restraint. Artistically, it is the best of
+all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks
+that flavour which we find in the earlier books.
+I could not get such thorough enjoyment from it as<!-- Page 153 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens sacrificed
+too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment
+in it that gives us the joy of the discovery of
+Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles or of 'Tilda Price.</p>
+
+<p>Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography,"
+which ought to be a textbook in all those practical
+classes of literature that work to turn out self-supporting
+authors, tells us that the most important
+part of a novel is the plot. This may be true,
+but the inefficiency of the plot in the works of
+Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt
+to summarize any of them, except "The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood."</p>
+
+<p>Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot
+even in old age begin to read him over and over
+again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
+an American book over and over again? Hawthorne
+never wearies the elect, and one may go
+back to Henry James, in order to discover whether
+one thinks that he means the same thing in 1922
+one thought he meant in 1912. But who makes it a
+practice in middle age to read any novel of Mrs.
+Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's
+or Mr. Booth Tarkington's at least once a
+year? There are thousands of persons who find<!-- Page 154 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy
+perennials; and during the war, when life in the
+daytime became a nightmare, there was a large
+group of persons who read Trollope from end to
+end! This is almost incredible; but it is true.
+And I must confess that if I do not read Miss
+Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily
+in the winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart&mdash;whose
+chronicle takes the bad taste of
+Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory&mdash;I
+feel as if I had had an ill-spent year. It makes me
+seem as slothful as if I omitted a daily passage
+from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a
+weekly chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!</p>
+
+<p>George Eliot I had known even before the time
+I had begun to read. No well-brought-up child
+could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
+Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola"
+attracted me most. The heroine is perhaps
+a little too good for human nature's daily food,
+but she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect
+that the artificiality of Kingsley's "Hypatia,"
+which I read at almost the same time, made me
+admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast.
+No youth could ever love Romola as<!-- Page 155 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or
+Catherine Seton. But as it happened that just
+at this time I was labouring with Blackstone
+(Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of
+scholastic philosophy "on the side"&mdash;I think it
+was Jourdain's <i>consomm&eacute;</i> of St. Thomas Aquinas
+in French&mdash;Romola was a decided relief, and she
+seemed truer and more interesting in every way
+than Hypatia, who was as <i>papier-mach&eacute;</i> as her
+whole environment is untrue to the history of the
+time. An historical novel ought not necessarily
+to be true to history, but it ought to be illuminating
+and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and as
+"Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether
+George Eliot's reading of Savonarola is correct or
+not, though it ought to be correct, of course.
+Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous
+Tito! and the scene in the barber shop! And if
+you want a good, mouth-filling novel, give me
+"Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and
+probably fewer will read it in the future. It is
+nevertheless a great monument to the genius of a
+woman who had such an infinite quality for taking
+pains, that it almost defeated the end for which
+she worked.<!-- Page 156 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>Some of us have acquired a state of mind which
+helps us to believe that whenever a man mentions
+a book he either condemns or approves of it. In
+a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism
+of the book at once. It is true that books are
+criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not very
+narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books;
+but one of the most pleasant qualities of a reader
+who has lived among books all his life is that he
+does not attempt always to recommend books to
+others, or to preach about them. Besides, it is
+too dangerous to recommend unreservedly or to
+condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature
+have undertaken the recommendation of books for
+the young; there are schools of critics who spend
+their time in approving of them for the old; and
+the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task
+of disapproval and condemnation. That lets me
+out, I feel.<!-- Page 157 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 it is
+entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for
+them. For me, it is a book of edification and a
+guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint Francis
+himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual
+matters or the relations of spiritual matters to
+life, are to me a constant source of pleasure. I
+remember reading aloud to a friend the passage
+in which this charming Bishop writes that, when
+he slept at his paternal ch&acirc;teau, he never 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, or perhaps of the moat, around
+the castle, so that the seigneur and his friends
+might sleep peacefully. My friend was very
+much bored and could not see that it represented a
+social point of view, which showed that the Saint
+was much ahead of his time! It did not bring
+old France back to him; he could not see the old
+ch&acirc;teau and the water in the moonlight, or conceive
+how glad the peasants were to be relieved
+of their duty. I can read the "Letters" of Saint
+Francis de Sales over and over again, as I read the<!-- Page 158 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+"Letters" of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; or the "Memoirs"
+of the Duc de Saint Simon.</p>
+
+<p>I think I first made acquaintance of Saint
+Simon in an English translation by Bayle St.
+John. If you have an interest in interiors&mdash;the
+interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces&mdash;you
+must like Saint Simon. Most people to-day read
+these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
+think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn
+French in order to become an understanding companion
+of this malicious but very graphic author.
+To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty
+desert without the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon.
+Else, how could anybody realize a picture of Mademoiselle
+de la Valli&egrave;re looking hopelessly out of
+the window of her little room just before the birth
+of her child? Or what would the chapel be without
+a memory of those devout ladies who knelt
+regularly, holding candles to their faces, at the
+exercises in Lent, after Louis XIV. had become
+devout, in order that he might see them?</p>
+
+<p>But because I love to linger in the society of
+the Duc de Saint Simon and Cardinal de Retz, it
+does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
+and ingenuous youth to the society of these<!-- Page 159 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+gentlemen. Each man has his pet book. I still
+retain a great affection for a man of my own age
+who gives on birthdays and great feasts copies
+of "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy" to
+his grandchildren and their friends! Could you
+believe that? 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 he considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral
+book! Now, I find it very hard to exist without
+at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the
+way, in a number of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> not so
+long ago there is a vivid, pathetic, and excellently
+written piece of literature. It is "A Portion of the
+Diurnal of Mrs Eliz^th Pepys" by E. Barrington.</p>
+
+<p>If anybody asks me why I like Pepys, I do not
+feel obliged to reply. I might incriminate myself.
+Very often, indeed, by answering a direct question
+about books, one does incriminate oneself.</p>
+
+<p>However, to return to what I was saying&mdash;while
+I love the "Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz,"
+I adore&mdash;to be a little extravagant&mdash;the "Letters
+of Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does
+not know the real story of the life of Saint Vincent
+de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the<!-- Page 160 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century.
+This Frenchman really fought with beasts for the
+life of children, and was the only real reformer in
+the France of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a
+time the preceptor of Cardinal de Retz that I
+find the Cardinal so delightful! On the contrary!
+I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle,
+the Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type
+of the polite, the worldly, and the intriguing gentleman
+of his time. He died a good peaceful death,
+as all the gay and the gallant did at his time.
+He earned the deepest affection and respect of
+Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, for which any discerning
+man might have been willing to spend half a lifetime.
+But even that is beside the point. He lives
+for me because he gives a picture of the French
+ruling classes of his time which is shamelessly true.
+No living man to-day in political office, although
+he might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal,
+would dare to be so interestingly shameless. That
+is a great charm in itself. And, then, if you read
+him in French, you discover that he knew how
+to make literature.</p>
+
+<p>The only wonder in my mind has always been<!-- Page 161 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+how a man who became so penitent during the last
+years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not have
+been forced by his confessor to destroy his book
+of revelations. But one must remember that
+the confessors of his period&mdash;the period of the
+founding of the French Academy&mdash;had a great
+respect for mere literature. His father was Philip
+Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni, General of the
+Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the
+Holy Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live
+among the Fathers of the Oratory. There he
+entered into holy orders, and there he died, with
+the reputation of a mightily pious man, on June
+29, 1662, aged eighty-one.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<!-- Page 162 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is not at all what is called "edifying," but,
+from the moral point of view, it shows what Saint
+Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in the
+Church of France; and the position of Paul de
+Gondi in relation to an established church was just
+as common in contemporary England, where
+"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where
+the methods of the clergymen highly placed were
+neither so intellectual nor so romantic.</p>
+
+<p>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
+younger son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal
+de Retz, with all his faults, had a saving
+grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did
+his best to escape the priesthood. He fought his
+first duel with Bassompierre behind the Convent<!-- Page 163 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+of the Minims, in the Bois de Vincennes; but it
+was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry
+of the Attorney General, "and so I remained in
+my cassock notwithstanding my duel." His next
+duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it
+the utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no
+use in opposing one's destiny; nobody took the
+slightest notice of the scandal."</p>
+
+<p>The elder Dumas has probably had his day,
+though "Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers"
+are still read. The newer romance writers
+are less diffuse, and, not writing <i>feuilletons</i>, are not
+forced to be diffuse. The constant reader of
+French memoirs of the seventeenth century can
+hardly help wondering why anybody should read
+Dumas who could go directly to the sources of his
+romances.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of the relation of books to books, it
+was the "Memoirs" of Madame Campan that took
+me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
+were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we
+thought we knew more about this distinguished
+American than anybody else; but it was through
+certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette
+and her Court" that I turned to his auto<!-- Page 164 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>biography,
+and then to such letters of his as could
+be 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 as
+Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have
+been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could
+ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has never
+been done! Even the seemingly reckless James
+Huneker understood that thoroughly. But the
+autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sufficiently
+frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to
+me that it should be read just after one has finished
+for the second or third time the memoirs of
+Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty
+to acclaim the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto
+Cellini, and I have known a young woman
+who read them reverently in the holy service of
+culture as a pendant to a textbook on the Renascence,
+and followed him by Jowett's translation of
+the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left
+to her fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris
+were not in her course of reading, and they seem
+almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
+them to anybody. There are passages in
+them which might shock the Prohibitionist, and<!-- Page 165 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+also those persons who believe in divorce <i>&agrave; la mode
+de</i> Madame de Sta&euml;l.</p>
+
+<p>For me, they are not only constantly amusing,
+constantly instructive, but they give the best pictures
+of Parisian interiors of the time before and
+during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly
+convinced of this, is it necessary that I should be
+expected to place them among the Best One Hundred
+Books? To me they will be always among
+my best twenty-five books.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well
+how to serve his country efficiently; and he was too
+sensible of the debt of that country to France and
+too sympathetic with the essential genius of the
+French people not to do his best to serve her, too.
+The original verses in his memoirs are the worst
+things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
+faults 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 a venom of partisan politics. I repeat,
+with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that
+no better picture has ever been given of the aristocratic
+society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.<!-- Page 166 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath
+his affectation of the frivolous vice of the
+time, which might be euphemistically called "exaggerated
+chivalry, a fundamental morality which
+one does not find in that class of systematic <i>rou&eacute;s</i>"
+who were astonished at the virtue of the ladies at
+Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends
+dwelt in that town. There may be dull pages in
+these memoirs, but if so I have not yet found
+them.</p>
+
+<p>In "The Diary and Letters" there are many
+bits of gossip about certain great persons, notably
+about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as soon
+as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to
+me that Talleyrand and Philippe &Eacute;galit&eacute; were the
+most fascinating characters of the French Revolution,
+for the same reason perhaps that moved a
+small boy who was listening to a particularly dull
+history of the New Testament to exclaim suddenly,
+"Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to
+me about Judas!"</p>
+
+<p>To persons who might censure Gouverneur
+Morris's frankness one may quote a short passage
+from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such
+weakness," said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson,<!-- Page 167 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+speaking of the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald,
+"exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay,"
+said the pious and great lexicographer, "it is an
+honest picture of human nature."</p>
+
+<p>This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur
+Morris for enlightening 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 Morris a hint
+that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her
+affection. "I may, if I please, wean her from all regard
+toward him, but he is the father of her child,
+and it would be unjust." In this noble moment
+Mr. Morris chivalrously forgets the existence of the
+Count de Flahaut!</p>
+
+<p>In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic
+verses to Madame de Flahaut; the Queen's circle
+at Versailles is worried about the fidelity of the
+troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in
+the Orangery; De Launey's head is carried on a
+pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered men lie
+in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is
+not disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is
+invited for three o'clock, to the house of Madame<!-- Page 168 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock
+the Countess herself came to announce dinner.
+Morris is happy in the belief that his hunger will be
+equal to the delayed feast. For this day, he thinks
+he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He
+is corroborated in his opinion that Madame de
+Beauharnais is a poetess by</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>a very narrow escape from some rancid butter of which the
+cook had been very liberal.</p></div>
+
+<p>But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth
+beneath. It seems to me that there is no more
+interesting and useful book on the French Revolution
+than this autobiography. It ought to be placed
+near De Tocqueville's "Ancient R&eacute;gime" and
+"Democracy in America."</p>
+
+<p>On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the
+general opinion that Mr. Jefferson was considered
+a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would be chosen
+President by the House of Representatives. The
+gentlemen of the House of Representatives believed
+that Burr was vigorous, energetic, just, and
+generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted
+with all the cold-blooded vices, and particularly
+dangerous from false principles of government<!-- Page 169 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of
+course, against Burr, because, Morris writes,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in
+the President's chair!</p></div>
+
+<p>John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson
+vice-President, in 1800. It is edifying for us who
+look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profound reverence,
+to see them at close range in Gouverneur
+Morris's pages.</p>
+
+<p>Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette
+not nearly so well:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle.</p></div>
+
+<p>But, then, Morris had had money transactions
+with the Lafayettes. Morris believed that no man
+ever existed who controlled himself so well as
+Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after
+the "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," not
+far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
+the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?</p>
+
+<p>I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and
+of Gouverneur Morris many times with a dip now
+and then, by way of a change, into the Autobiography
+of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a
+change from the kickshaws of France to the roast<!-- Page 170 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+beef of old England. This autobiography never
+seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
+authors to be industrious and hard-working. It
+is more than that. It is the 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 us an insight into a phase of
+English character which none of his novels ever
+elaborated.</p>
+
+<p>What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly
+in the American atmosphere, with the restless
+American nerves and that lack of doggedness which
+characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of
+himself as a member of the English gentry, deprived
+of all the advantages of his caste except an inborn
+class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
+self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew
+very well what he wanted, and he secured it by the
+most honest and direct means. He knew he could
+get nothing without work, and he worked. His
+exercise of literature as an avocation did not prevent
+him from being a good public servant.</p>
+
+<p>As a typical Englishman brought up in the country,
+he liked to hunt. Hunting is a prerogative of
+the leisurely and the rich. He obtained leisure at<!-- Page 171 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through
+the same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a
+manliness and lack of sentimentalism which endears
+this book to me. It is so much the fashion
+in our day to declare that society is against us when
+we have to work unremittingly for what we want,
+that Trollope's honesty is refreshing, and, though
+most readers will consider the word rather absurd
+as applied to him&mdash;inspiring!</p>
+
+<p>In earlier days every American was brought up
+with a prejudice against Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic
+Manners of the Americans," as we were all taught
+to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all
+softened toward Dickens later, and it would be
+difficult to read the simply told story of the heroic
+devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his
+mother without believing that the recording angel
+in no way holds her responsible for her rather
+vulgar book.</p>
+
+<p>How fascinating to the budding author is the
+record of sales of the books written by Trollope as
+he ascended the ladder of popularity! How he
+managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning
+he does not tell us. They are not so easily managed
+now. And there is the story of the pious<!-- Page 172 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel
+Ray," and although paying Trollope his honorarium,
+stopped it abruptly because there was a
+dancing party in the story! In all this the author
+of "The Warden" and "Barchester Towers"
+nothing extenuates nor puts down aught in malice.
+And I must say that for me this autobiography
+is very good reading. As the sailor once said of a
+piece of rather solid beef, "There's a great deal
+of chaw in it."</p>
+
+<p>I pause a moment to reflect on a letter which I
+have just received from a 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
+professing Christians.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 S&eacute;vign&eacute;, 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.</p></div><p><!-- Page 173 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is an example of what a refined atmosphere
+may do to a Georgia girl! I have written
+to her by way of an apology that this is a little
+volume of impressions and confessions, and that
+personally I should find life 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 acquaintance who would allow me to read
+any of his pages to him or her!</p>
+
+<p>Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or
+any other novel that happens to be the vogue.
+As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; when she says, writing of her granddaughter,
+that bad books ought to be preferred to
+no books at all. But it would be almost better
+for the young not to begin to read until they are
+old, if one is to gauge the value of books by the unfledged
+taste of youth. Purity, after all, is not
+ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance
+at a certain age is very desirable.</p>
+
+<p>While I write this, I have in mind a little essay
+of great charm and value by Coventry Patmore on
+"Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
+into the fundamentals of morality than any other
+modern work on the subject. And, by the way,<!-- Page 174 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
+Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and
+several other novels, I turn from 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."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory;
+though his own interior gaiety&mdash;of which a word by and by&mdash;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<!-- Page 175 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated
+by contempt for its cowardice.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 is
+not 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
+on the majority of the votes cast for him, would,
+with the goldenrod, be our national flowers, seem
+to work too hard in the pursuit of cheerfulness.</p>
+
+<p>Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman
+what supported the pleasant town of Stratford-on-Avon.
+He replied at once, "The Shakespearian
+industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr.
+Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter,
+like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be
+very much of an industry. It is not at all like
+the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous
+and unconscious, which one finds in the really great
+authors. Why the modern realist should believe
+that to be real he must be joyless&mdash;in the United
+States, at least&mdash;is perhaps because he feels the
+public need of protest against the optimistic<!-- Page 176 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and
+the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a
+serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright
+nor Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just
+as serious a mistake as to assume that the late
+Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
+had no value. They pleased exactly the
+same class of people, in their day, which delights
+in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They
+answered to the demand of a public that is moral
+and religious, that needs to be taken into countries
+which savoured something of Fairyland, and
+yet which are framed by reality. However, as
+long as Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold
+Bell Wright, and novelists of higher philosophical
+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 be
+shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the
+Duc de Saint-Simon or of the Comtesse de Boigne.
+So I feel that I am absolved from the responsibility
+of misleading any young reader to sup on the
+horrors of the description of the death of Madame
+de Brinvilliers as painted by Madame de<!-- Page 177 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; or to revel among the groups of Italians
+who range through the scenes drawn by Benvenuto
+Cellini.</p>
+
+<p>While Pepys is always near at hand, I treat his
+contemporary, Evelyn, with very distant politeness
+and respect. Now Evelyn should not be
+treated 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 be read
+nearly every day by the serious as an example of
+propriety and as a model of the expression of the
+finest sentiments on morals, philosophy, literature,
+and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any
+such passages as this, which Pepys writes on
+October 19, 1662 (Lord's day):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<!-- Page 178 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+there should ever be a beginning of trouble, which God
+forbid!</p></div>
+
+<p>Or,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>29th (Lord's day).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Evelyn never condescends to such weaknesses
+as we find in our beloved Pepys!</p>
+
+<p>One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn
+had been able to decipher some of the hidden
+things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have
+written this tribute, under the date of May 26,
+1703:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<!-- Page 179 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hindered
+me from doing him this last office.</p></div>
+
+<p>All the teachings of the histories of our student
+days force us to look on Charles II. as one of the
+weakest of English kings; but when we come to
+enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to
+see that there is much to be said for him as a
+monarch, and that he did more for England under
+difficult circumstances than conventional history
+has given him credit for.</p>
+
+<p>It took many years for me to find any diary or
+memoir that appealed to me as much as that of
+Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you
+what 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 the tops of heads might be taken off,
+so that we could see with an understanding eye
+what goes on. The interest of the human race,
+though it may be disguised rhetorically, is the
+interest that everybody finds in gossip. Malicious
+gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us
+know our fellow men and women somewhat as
+we know ourselves&mdash;but perhaps more clearly<!-- Page 180 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>&mdash;can
+never be rooted out of normal human
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's
+"Diary" many times, and I sat myself down in
+many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land,
+and by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon";
+and then there was always Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute;. Much was hoped from the long-promised
+"Memoirs of Talleyrand." They came; they
+were disappointing.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical
+book that compares in a way with the perennial
+favourites of mine I have been writing about.
+And this is "The Education of Henry Adams,"
+and almost contemporaneously the "Letters of
+William James." It is easy to understand the
+delight with which intelligent people welcomed
+"The Education of Henry Adams." Unconsciously
+to most of us, it showed elaborately what
+we talked about in our graduation essays and what
+we believed in a vague way&mdash;that education consists
+in putting value on the circumstances of life,
+and regarding each circumstance as a step either
+forward or backward in one's educational progress.
+This is the lesson which young Americans are<!-- Page 181 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter;
+and which Samuel 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; it is a series of pictures,
+painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
+looks on the phenomena of life as no other American
+has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other
+American has ever expressed them. The judicious
+and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may
+shrink with horror from me when I say that I put
+at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for
+my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua"
+of Cardinal Newman!</p>
+
+<p>There is the same delicate egoism in both; there
+is the same reasonable and well-bred reticence.
+There is one great difference, however; while
+Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is
+determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not
+quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
+not. And yet Henry Adams is more human,
+more interesting than Cardinal Newman, for,
+while Newman is almost purely intellectual and
+so much above the reach of most of us, Adams is
+merely intelligent&mdash;but intelligent enough to dis<!-- Page 182 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>cern
+the richness of life, and mystical enough to
+long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman
+not only longs, but reasons and acts. It was not
+the definition of the unity of God that troubled
+Adams. It was the question of His personality.
+The existence of pain and wretchedness in the
+world was a bar to his understanding that a personal
+Christ should be equal in divinity with God,
+in fact, God Himself.</p>
+
+<p>Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain
+was no barrier to faith in a personal God. I am
+speaking now only from my own point of view;
+others who like to read both Newman and Adams
+may look on this view as entirely negligible.
+What other American than Adams would have
+so loved without understanding the spirit of Saint
+Francis d'Assisi:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this
+simple and obvious&mdash;in no way unpleasant&mdash;truth; therefore
+one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing
+the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi<!-- Page 183 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution of historical
+riddles seemed the most satisfactory&mdash;or sufficient&mdash;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&mdash;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:&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p class="center">
+Hic Jacet<br />
+Homunculus Scriptor<br />
+Doctor Barbaricus<br />
+Henricus Adams<br />
+Adae Filius et Evae<br />
+Primo Explicuit<br />
+Socnam
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.<!-- Page 184 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his
+thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of
+that very great American John Burroughs. It is
+the facts of life as seen through his personality,
+the changes in our political history as analyzed so
+skilfully by him after the manner of no other man
+that make his book supremely interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The real man is not hidden in "The Education
+of Henry Adams." We can no longer talk of the
+degeneracy of American literary taste when we
+know that this very American, characteristic, and
+illuminating book was a "best seller" in our
+country for several months. Some who like to
+bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and
+of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply
+due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and
+therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate
+book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biog<!-- Page 185 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>raphies.
+This view may be dismissed with a
+scornful wave of the hand.</p>
+
+<p>When I took up "The Education of Henry
+Adams," I was informed that it was "pathetic."
+Personally, it has never struck me that Henry
+Adams, as far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He
+did not assume an air of pathos when he read my
+review in <i>Scribner's Monthly</i>&mdash;before it became the
+<i>Century</i>&mdash;of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard
+Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the
+time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
+his return he read the things I had said about a
+novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be entirely
+un-American.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no
+element of pathos. Adams lived a rare and interesting
+life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
+by tradition and education that he knew
+how to appreciate beauty wherever he found it,
+and to give reasons for its being beautiful. Against
+the rough material obstacles in life, which are
+supposed to be good for a man, but are not at all
+good, since they absorb a great deal of energy
+that is subtracted from his later life, he was not
+obliged to struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt,<!-- Page 186 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+the greatest of all modern Americans, who was a
+man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
+compelled to look up to social strata above him,
+and, whatever the enraged democrats may say,
+this in itself is a great advantage. One can see
+from his "Education" that his material difficulties
+were so slight that he could take them cheerfully,
+even in our world where poverty is both a blunder
+and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness.
+Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his
+heart. His description of the death of his sister is
+heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his
+griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of
+friends, no man more pleasant surrounding. He
+was free in a way that few other men are free, and
+to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he
+does not always take advantage, that is one of
+the most appealing qualities of his book. It is a
+great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with
+him, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the
+power of using wings, whether he uses them or not.</p>
+
+<p>There are many reasons for the success of his
+book. The chapters on "Diplomacy," on "Friends
+and Foes," on "Political Morality," and on "The
+Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our<!-- Page 187 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+history. More than that, they elucidate conditions
+of mind which are generally wrapped up, for
+motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical
+verbiage.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the reviewers found "The Education"
+egotistical. This is too strong a term. These
+memoirs would have no value if they were not
+egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies
+conceit or self-complacency or the desire to show
+one's better side to the public, "The Education"
+does not deserve it. A man cannot write about
+himself without writing about himself. This seems
+very much like a platitude. And Henry Adams
+writes about himself with no affectation of modesty.
+If anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation
+he sometimes took a tone which made him
+appear to those who knew him slightly as below
+the average of the real Henry Adams.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for instance, is a good passage:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Swinburne tested him [Henry Adams] then and there by
+one of his favourite tests&mdash;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<!-- Page 188 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<!-- Page 189 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+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!"</p></div>
+
+<p>The <i>Chose sublime</i> is an Adamesque touch! It
+gives the last delicate tint to the impression.
+Page after page gleams with such impressions and
+such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly.
+But he lacks faith! He is the discoverer of the
+twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the discoverer
+of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He
+perceived the real architecture of both the Cathedral
+of Chartres and of "The Song of Roland."
+How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons
+seem in comparison with his volume on Chartres,
+and their conclusions are so laboured and ineffective
+in comparison with the lightning-like
+glance with which he pierces the real meaning of
+the twelfth century. He has his limitations, and
+he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects
+on the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century
+ignorance, the half-educated vul<!-- Page 190 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>garity
+of most of the writers in German and
+English who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages,
+one cannot help giving grateful thanks for having
+found Henry Adams.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one
+of his reasons seems to be that the Harvard man,
+though capable of valuing the military architecture
+of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize
+with the beauties of Chartres or Sancta
+Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more receptive.
+However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day,
+would have discovered that both Yale and Harvard,
+both seekers after culture and the cultivated,
+the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated,
+have profited greatly by the education he
+has given them. It seems that Henry Adams
+fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did
+not realize that he would give his countrymen an
+education which they greatly lacked, and which
+many of them are sincerely grateful for.</p>
+
+<p>The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity"
+over and over again is incapable of appreciating
+some of Pepys's best passages! Books
+to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small
+space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my<!-- Page 191 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books
+listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us
+will make his own shelf of books. The book for
+me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or
+uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms
+are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes
+literature when he exercises his critical vocation;
+Bruneti&egrave;re has too heavy a hand; Francisque
+Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give
+delight. There are no really good French critics
+to-day, probably because they have so little material
+to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his
+vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews
+knows his line and the value of background and
+perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand;
+but there are many leaves in our forests of critical
+writing and not much wood. Literary criticism
+is becoming a lost art with our English brethren,
+who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes.
+The admitted existence of cliques and claques
+in London makes us distrustful. You were worked
+into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's
+"Herod" until you found that half a score of notices
+of this tragedy were written by the same hand!</p>
+
+<p>It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of<!-- Page 192 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+William James" should appear shortly after "The
+Education of Henry Adams," and, though the
+Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly
+redolent of New England. We had begun to forget
+our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs.
+Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as
+writers of modern folk stories; but the <i>Atlantic
+Monthly</i> has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
+of New England. That Boston which in
+the <i>Atlantic</i> had always been a state of mind has
+become different from the real old Boston.</p>
+
+<p>In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole
+of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had begun
+to stain our map of culture with the modulated
+tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned
+to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe&mdash;leaving
+out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I always
+found detestable&mdash;to "Elsie Venner" and to "The
+Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in the hope that
+the flavour of New England, which I found to my
+horror was growing faint in me, might be retained.
+There is always "The House of the Seven Gables!"</p>
+
+<p>But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten
+pages of Mrs. Stowe with great pleasure,
+something she said reminded me of Walter Savage<!-- Page 193 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor
+which had ever attracted me, "The Imaginary
+Conversations." There was an interlude of enjoyment
+and exasperation. He shows himself so
+malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable
+of comprehending some of the historical persons he
+presents to us. But there are compensations, all
+the same. Whatever one may think of the animus
+of Landor, one cannot get on without an occasional
+dip into "The Imaginary Conversations."
+Suddenly Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's
+"With the Immortals," and I rediscovered
+Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered
+Heine in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave"
+was worth a long search through many magazines.
+Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's
+few pages can never be obliterated from the
+heart of a loving reader&mdash;by a loving reader I mean
+a reader who loves men a little more than books.</p>
+
+<p>You will remember that Crawford's Immortals
+appear at Sorrento where Lady Brenda and Augustus
+and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine
+flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver
+Lodge could only bring back to life, or induce to
+come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius C&aelig;sar<!-- Page 194 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> together
+with that group of semi-happy souls who live on
+the "enamelled green" of Dante, spiritism might
+have more to say for itself!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"'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."</p>
+
+<p>"Just as many as have too much imagination," said
+Augustus.</p>
+
+<p>"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<!-- Page 195 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>"It appears that I must have possessed imagination after
+all," said Francis.</p>
+
+<p>"If you will allow me to say it," said C&aelig;sar 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."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," said Francis, bitterly. "I was not C&aelig;sar."</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," said Johnson in loud, harsh tones, "nor were
+you happy in your marriages&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I adore learned men," whispered Francis to Lady Brenda.
+He had at once recovered his good humour.</p>
+
+<p>"A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element
+of judgment is necessary in the selection of a wife," continued
+the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall
+in love with each other," said Lady Brenda.</p>
+
+<p>"Intuition, madam," replied Johnson, "means the mental<!-- Page 196 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>"Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon," said
+Francis, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his
+house clean," returned the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you believe that people always fall in love very
+quickly?" asked Lady Brenda.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Love," said C&aelig;sar, "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."</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>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 James speak in
+letters, which have the effect of conversation.
+From the very beginning of his precious book I
+somehow feel that I am part of the little circle
+about him. The conversation goes on&mdash;Mr. James
+never loses sight of the point of view and sympathies<!-- Page 197 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+of the party of the second part&mdash;and you are not
+made to feel as an eavesdropper.</p>
+
+<p>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 already
+begun this Letter of James&mdash;written to his
+wife:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <i>guaranty</i> that they will.
+Make it a guaranty&mdash;and the attitude immediately becomes
+to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the
+guaranty, and I feel (provided I am <i>&uuml;berhaupt</i> 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&mdash;it is to me an essential element of the<!-- Page 198 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+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....</p></div>
+
+<p>Personal expression is, after all, what we long for
+in literature. Cardinal Newman tells us, I think,
+in his "Idea of a University," that it <i>is</i> the very essence
+of literature. <i>Scientia</i> is truth, or conclusions
+stated as truths which stand irrespective of the
+personality of the speaker or writer. But literature,
+to be literature, must be personal. It is good
+literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
+accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader
+like myself does not, perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently
+with the philosophy of William James as
+represented in these "Letters." One has a languid
+interest in knowing what he thought of Bergson
+and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but for the
+constant reader his detachment or attachment to
+Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so
+important as his personal impressions of both the
+little things and the big things of our contemporary
+life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you
+must, if you are at all in love with life, become a
+Jamesonian after you have read the "Letters"!<!-- Page 199 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope,
+may resemble his father in time, has arranged them
+so well, and kept himself so tactfully in the background,
+that you feel, too, that whether young
+Henry 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 by drop. To use an oriental metaphor,
+the oil of appreciation is stimulated by 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 begun to read him
+for the same reason that I read Pepys&mdash;for pure
+enjoyment!</p>
+
+<p>A friend of mine, feeling that I had taken the
+"Letters of William James" too frivolously, told
+me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to counteract
+my medi&aelig;val philosophy and too cheerful view of
+life. Just as if I had not struggled with Mr.
+Wells, and irritated myself into a temperature in
+trying to get through his latest preachments! I am
+not quite 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 have said.<!-- Page 200 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>William James helped me to wash the bad taste
+of Mr. Wells's god out of my mouth. It seems remarkable
+that such a distinguished man of talent&mdash;if
+he were dead, one would be justified in saying a
+man of genius&mdash;should not have been able to invent
+a more attractive and potent Deity. Voltaire,
+while making no definition, did better than that;
+but Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells,
+and he had an education such as no modern writer
+has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
+bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those
+who, like the Athenians, are always seeking new
+things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms seriously?
+Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace<!-- Page 201 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+tells us that the merchant wants to be a sailor and
+the sailor a merchant? Does he not begin with&mdash;<i>Qui
+fit, M&aelig;cenas?</i> But Horace says nothing of
+the authors of fiction&mdash;Stevenson calls them very
+lightly "<i>filles de joie</i>,"&mdash;who insist on being boldly
+and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
+might have invented a better god than Wells;
+but he had too much good taste and too much
+knowledge of man in the world to attempt it.</p>
+
+<p>The more one reads of the very moderns, the
+more one falls in love with the ancients. Take
+the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do
+you think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes
+and love him as we do if he insisted that we should
+"sit under him" and assumed a pulpit manner?
+This is as near as he ever comes to teaching us anything:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<i><span class="i0">Lenit albescens animos capillus<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Litium et rixae cupidos protervae;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Consule Planco.<br /></span></i>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved
+himself very much, showed in his translations of
+"The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
+something as well as himself. It does not become<!-- Page 202 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+me to recommend books&mdash;everybody to his own
+taste!&mdash;but I should like to say that for those 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 Marie Antoinette at Versailles, the
+translations of our dear Horatius by Lord Lytton
+is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the
+most charming and most wise of pagan poets.</p>
+
+<p>Horace says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor old age imminent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Nor the indomitable hand of Death.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We might have, in spite of the awful examples
+of Mr. Wells and the other preachers, who ought to
+confine themselves to finer things, desired that
+Horace should have gone further and told us what
+kind of books we ought to read in our old age.
+His choice was naturally limited; it was impossible
+for him to buy a book every week, or every month.
+The publishers were not so active in those days.
+But he might have indicated the kind of book that
+old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
+have tried "Robinson Crusoe,"&mdash;the unequalled<!-- Page 203 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>&mdash;and
+"Swiss Family Robinson"; but they seem too
+grown up for me now. I have taken to "King
+Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that
+perfect gem of excitement and illusion, "The Mutineers,"
+by Charles Boardman Hawes. I read it,
+and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising
+bookseller will unblushingly compile a
+library for the old, and begin it with "The Mutineers!"
+The main difficulty with the Old or the
+Near Old is that the fear of shocking the Young
+makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
+they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they
+express intense interest in new and ponderous
+books, in the presence of Youth&mdash;when they ought
+to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances.
+But if the Old really want to save their faces, and
+at the same time enjoy glimpses of that fountain
+of youth which we long for at every age, let them
+acquire two books&mdash;Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded
+Man" and "The Quest of El Dorado," by Dr. J. A.
+Zahm, whose <i>nom de plume</i> was H. J. Mozans.
+There you have the real stuff. Together, these
+two books are a combination of just what the Old
+need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke
+he cannot dream with any facility when he grows<!-- Page 204 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+old; and if he has not possessed himself of these two
+volumes, he cannot have acquired that basis 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 when it deals with the El Dorado;
+it has all the most attractive qualities of a romance.</p>
+
+<p>But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob,
+Son of Battle," which the author of "Alice For
+Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest
+animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is
+nobly human, and the Black Killer devilishly human,
+and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs, invented
+by clever writers. A great book! It is
+too thrilling; it reminds of "Wuthering Heights";
+I shall, therefore, read this evening some of Henry
+Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with
+"Pride and Prejudice."<!-- Page 205 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>mi fur moetrati gli spiriti magni</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>che del verderli in me stesso 'n esalto</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p class="author">
+&mdash;INFERNO.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books at Random</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>Among nature books that gave me many happy
+hours on the banks of the Delaware&mdash;imperial
+river!&mdash;is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow."
+"Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the
+twelve labours of Hercules than attempt to catalogue
+the varied forms of life found in the area of
+an average ramble!" <i>Soit!</i> And better than that,
+"to feel that whatever creature we may meet will
+prove companionable&mdash;that is, no stranger, but
+rather an amusing and companionable friend&mdash;assures
+both pleasure and profit whenever we
+chance abroad."</p>
+
+<p>Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his
+companion can forget the extracts from the diary
+of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
+the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced
+the number of wild ducks and geese, he says, even
+then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was
+often black with the smaller fowl.<!-- Page 206 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I do seldom see the great swans, but father says that they
+are not unusual in the wide stretches of the Delaware.</p></div>
+
+<p>Happy day! when the wedge-shaped battalions of
+wild geese were almost as frequently seen as the
+spattering sparrows now!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<!-- Page 207 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 skunk cabbage, for it harbours at its
+root</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>"Upland and Meadow" gives one occasion for
+thought on the subject of raccoons. "Foolish
+creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning
+coons are forced to quest or die."</p>
+
+<p>For a stroll by the Thames&mdash;I mean the New
+England Thames&mdash;there is no book like Ik Marvel's
+"Dream Life," but for a day near the Delaware&mdash;imperial
+river!&mdash;give me "Upland and Meadow."</p>
+
+<p>And then with what assurance of satisfaction<!-- Page 208 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+may one turn for refreshment to the continual
+charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby" and
+"Pepacton." Burroughs's opinions upon the problems
+of humanity are more tiresome than John
+Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
+him among the birds and the plants, to hope with
+him that the soaring lark of England may find its
+way down through Canada to our hedges, to look
+with him into the nests in the shrubs that border
+our roads is to begin to feel that joy in being an
+American of the soil that no other author gives.
+He cured the young New England poets and the
+singers of the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills
+of celebrating the English thrush and the nightingale,
+as if those birds sang on the Palisades.</p>
+
+<p>There is an epithet I should like to apply to
+John Burroughs, but he might not like it if he were
+alive. I recall the case of a pleasant Englishman
+who admired two American girls very much, because,
+as he said, they were "so homely." In fact,
+they were rather pretty girls, and he had not used
+the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
+with which I like to describe John Burroughs.
+Forty years ago, I met him at Richard Watson
+Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully<!-- Page 209 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman
+used the word. Some of the refined ladies at Mrs.
+Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
+in the eighties there were still <i>pr&eacute;cieuses</i>. The
+truth is that his rural use of the vernacular was
+part of the charm. It never spoiled his style;
+but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which
+smelt of the good soil of the country.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me&mdash;a
+far-fetched comparison but I will not apologize for
+it&mdash;of "As You Like It" played in one way by
+Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia
+Marlowe in another. Madame Dybwad, being
+nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life,
+gives us an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of
+"homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's, like Ada
+Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial
+character of Watteau. "Walden," then, is somewhat
+too varnished; but "Riverby" and "Pepacton"
+are "homely" and "homey."</p>
+
+<p>To return to memoirs for a moment, that most
+delightful of all mental dissipations for a leisurely
+man. In looking for the second volume of "Walden"&mdash;for
+fear that I should have done Thoreau an
+injustice&mdash;I find the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de<!-- Page 210 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+Boigne." One cannot imagine anything more unlike
+Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John
+Burroughs! Why is Madame 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 and the manifestations of the
+world, and&mdash;not to be ungallant&mdash;she is more like
+an irritated mosquito than like the elegant <i>camellia
+japonica</i> to which she would prefer to be
+compared.</p>
+
+<p>There is a great deal of solid comfort in the
+revelations of Madame de Boigne; she is at times
+so very untruthful that her malice does no real
+harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors
+so well; and gives the atmosphere of French Society
+before and during the Revolution in a most
+fascinating way. She always thinks the worst,
+of course; but a writer of memoirs who always
+thought the best would be as painfully uninteresting
+as Froude is when he describes the character
+of Henry VIII. But this is a digression.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the
+style of Sir Thomas Browne as displaying a
+"rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr.
+Mencken cannot accuse any modern Englishman<!-- Page 211 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+or American of imitating, in his desire to be academic,
+Browne's hyperlatinism or his use of
+Latin words, like "corpage," "confinium," "angustias,"
+or "Vivacious abominations" and "congaevous
+generations."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Symonds says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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, <i>Certum est
+quia impossible est</i>. I desire to exercise my faith in the
+difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects,
+is not faith, but persuasion."</p></div>
+
+<p>Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of
+theology, aside, Sir Thomas lends himself to those<!-- Page 212 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+moments when a man wants to dip a little into
+the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly
+all the modern novelists who describe men seem to
+think that their interior life is purely emotional.
+Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> my favourite among the
+writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to
+make his heroes, or his 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 leads an interior life, or longs to lead an
+interior life, of which he seldom talks. He wants
+inarticulately to know something of the art of
+meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when
+he is successful, is largely due to the fact that he
+has never been taught how to cultivate the spiritual
+sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
+Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert
+and a group of his imitators great contentment in
+the state to which they were called. As a book of
+secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of
+good points. For instance, Sir Thomas starts one
+on the road to meditation on the difference between<!-- Page 213 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism
+in this way:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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;&mdash;ruder
+desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn;&mdash;every
+one having a liberty to amass and heap up
+riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase anything.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>There are singular beings who have tried to
+read "Religio Medici" continuously. Was it
+Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one
+of this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?"
+the amiable donor asked. "I can't say yet; I
+have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous
+that human beings should exist who take this
+attitude toward Sir Thomas Browne, his "Urn
+Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems almost
+more miraculous that this attitude should be
+taken toward Montaigne, and that some folk
+should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the
+pleasant, curtailed edition of John Florio's trans<!-- Page 214 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>lation,
+edited by Justin Huntly McCarthy! These
+small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot
+have the original French, or the leisure to
+browse over the big volume of Florio's old book as
+it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an
+agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It
+somehow or other reminds one of that appalling
+series of cutdown "Classics," so largely recommended
+to a public that is seduced to run and
+read. A condensed edition of Froissart may do
+very well for boys; but who can visualize the kind
+of mind content with a reduced version of "Vanity
+Fair"?</p>
+
+<p>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, to read
+whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and
+"The New Machiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay,"
+will be remembered when "Mr. Britling"&mdash;by the
+way, what did Mr. Britling see through?&mdash;shall
+be forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn
+to Montaigne. It amazed me to hear Montaigne
+called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward
+the eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and
+he has fewer superstitions. It was his humanity<!-- Page 215 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+and his love for religion that turned him from
+Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for
+Plato. He is a real amateur of good books. Listen
+to this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that
+ever the book written by Brutus on Virtue was
+lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
+that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch.
+He would rather know what talk Brutus had with
+some of his familiar friends in his tent on the night
+before going to battle than the speech he made
+to his army. He had no sympathy with eloquent
+prefaces, or with circumlocutions that keep the
+reader back from the real matter of books. He
+does not want to hear heralds or criers. How he<!-- Page 216 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+would have hated the flare of trumpets that precedes
+the entrance of the best sellers! And the
+blazing "jackets," the lowest form of modern art,
+would have made him rip out the favourite oaths
+of his province with violence.</p>
+
+<p>"The Romans in their religion," he says, "were
+wont to say 'Hoc age'; which in ours we say, 'Sursum
+corda.'"</p>
+
+<p>He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner;
+he does not care for the <i>hors d'&oelig;uvres</i>. Note how
+he rushes with rather rough weapons to the translation,
+by his dying father's command, of <i>Theologia
+naturalis sive liber creaturarum magistri
+Raimondi de Sebonde</i>. He thinks that it is a good
+antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is
+leading the vulgar to think for themselves and to
+reject authority. His analysis of himself in the
+essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man
+to sane men; and he does not hesitate to point out
+the fact that no hatred is so absolute as that which
+Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity.
+The discord between zeal for religion and the fury
+of nationality concerns him greatly, and he does
+not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to his
+contemporaries on the subject.<!-- Page 217 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli
+had gathered together in "The Prince,"
+governed Europe. One can see that they do
+not satisfy Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.</p>
+
+<p>"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more
+direct action on real life than any other book in
+the world, and a larger share in emancipating
+Europe from the Middle Ages."</p>
+
+<p>It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the
+"Essays" of Michel de Montaigne give me as
+much pleasure, but not so much edification, as
+the precious sentences of Thomas &agrave; Kempis.
+They are foils; at first sight there seems to be no
+relationship between them; and yet at heart
+Michel de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic,
+has much in common with Thomas &agrave; Kempis.
+If there were no persons in the world capable of
+being Montaignes, Thomas &agrave; Kempis would have
+written for God alone. He would have resembled
+an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber
+had erected. On the side toward the altar it was
+foliated and exquisitely carved in a manner that
+pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
+toward the people and not the side toward the<!-- Page 218 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+Presence of God, it was entirely plain and unornamented!</p>
+
+<p>The friendship of Thomas &agrave; Kempis I owe to
+George Eliot. Emerson might easily perish; Plato
+might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
+supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even
+Rudyard Kipling might exist only in tradition;
+but the loss of all their works would be as nothing
+compared to the loss of that little volume which
+is a marvellous guide to life. The translations of
+Thomas &agrave; Kempis into English vary in value.
+Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of
+&Agrave; Kempis in deleting the passages on the Holy
+Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing Thomas &agrave;
+Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the
+philosophy of his 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 during the paschal season, if Christ had not
+offered His body and blood, soul and divinity to
+his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas &agrave;
+Kempis would never have written "The Following
+of Christ." The Bible, even the New Testament,
+is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St.
+Paul's Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what<!-- Page 219 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+better interpretation of the doctrines of Christ as
+applied to everyday life can there be found than in
+this precious little book?</p>
+
+<p>You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather
+what comfort you can from the philosophy of
+Thoreau's "Walden"&mdash;which might, after all, be
+more comfortable if it were more pagan. The
+Pan of Thoreau was a respectable Pan, because he
+was a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in
+Keble's "Christian Year" if you can; but &Agrave;
+Kempis overtops all! It is strange, too, what an
+appeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers in
+Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with
+every day. And George Eliot was a remarkable
+example of this, for, in spite of her habitual reverence,
+she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox
+dogmas. Another paradox seems to be in the
+fact that Thomas &agrave; Kempis appeals so directly
+and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to
+those who have secluded themselves from the
+world. At first, I must confess that I found this
+a great obstacle to my joy in having found him.</p>
+
+<p>If Montaigne frequently drove me to &Agrave; Kempis,
+&Agrave; Kempis almost as frequently in the beginning
+drove me back to Montaigne. It was not until<!-- Page 220 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+I had become more familiar with the New Testament
+that I began to see that &Agrave; Kempis spoke
+as one soul to another. In this world for him
+there were only three Facts&mdash;God, his own soul,
+and the soul to whom he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many
+of my friends who looked on the Last Supper as a
+mere symbol of love and hospitality, should cling
+to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion.
+Even the example of an intellectual friend of
+mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in Italy,
+could not make it clear. He often asserted that he
+did not believe in God; and yet he was desolate
+if on a certain day in the year he did not pay some
+kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
+Padua!</p>
+
+<p>I have known him to break up a party in the
+Adirondacks in order to reach the nearest church
+where it was possible for him to burn a candle in
+honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious
+anniversary! As long as he exists, as long as he
+continues to burn candles&mdash;<i>les chandelles d'un
+ath&eacute;e</i>&mdash;I shall accept without understanding the
+enthusiasm of so many lovers of &Agrave; Kempis, who
+cut out the mystical longings for the reception of<!-- Page 221 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+that divine food which Christ gave out in the
+upper room. &Agrave; Kempis says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My soul longs to be nourished with Thy body; my heart
+desires to be united with Thee.</p>
+
+<p>Give Thyself to me and it is enough; for without Thee no
+comfort is available.</p>
+
+<p>Without Thee I cannot subsist; and without Thy visitation
+I cannot live.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Deal now in like manner with me, who has left Thyself
+in the sacrament for the comfort of Thy faithful.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>To every soul, oppressed and humble, &Agrave; Kempis
+speaks more poignantly than even David, in that
+great cry of the heart and soul, the De Profundis:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Behold, then, O Lord, my abjection and frailty [Ps. xxiv.
+18], every way known to Thee.</p>
+
+<p>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.<!-- Page 222 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and miseries
+are never wanting; where all things are full of snares
+and enemies.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is no pessimism here, for Thomas &agrave;
+Kempis gives the remedies, the only remedies
+offered to the world since light was created before
+the sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to
+him the sins of the intellect are worse than the
+sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
+never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe
+it. They both knew their hearts and the
+world; and the world has never invented any
+remedy so effective as that which &Agrave; Kempis offers.<!-- Page 223 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot
+exist without the fear of hurting or offending the
+Beloved.</p>
+
+<p>The best book yet written on the causes that
+made for the World War and on their remedy is
+"The Rebuilding of Europe," by David Jayne
+Hill. There we find this quotation from Villari
+illuminated:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Montaigne felt rather than understood the
+cruelty and brutality of the state traditions of his
+time; and these traditions were seriously combatted
+when the United States made brave efforts
+both at Versailles and Washington. Doctor
+Hill sums up the essential principles which guided
+the world from the Renascence to the year 1918:<!-- Page 224 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(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.</p></div>
+
+<p>What member of the memorable conference,
+which began at Washington on November 12, 1921,
+would have dared to assert these unmoral principles,
+accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna
+and the Congress of Berlin, in principle? King
+John of England looked on their negation as an
+unholy novelty, though that negation was the
+leaven of the best of the life of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea
+of freedom was kept alive, in the miasma which
+poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's world, by
+men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A
+better understanding of the principles of these men
+would have made Milton less autocratic&mdash;Lucifer,
+though a rebel, was not a democrat&mdash;and Voltaire
+less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the
+French Republic lately named a war vessel, was the
+friend of Frederick the Great and of Catherine II.<!-- Page 225 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir
+Thomas Browne and Montaigne sent me, says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons
+so clearly; nor does Sir Thomas Browne touch so<!-- Page 226 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+unerringly the canker in the root of the politics of
+his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the
+works of either without contrasting them with the
+physiocrats of the eighteenth century, who tore up
+the cockles and the wheat together.</p>
+
+<p>Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the
+most adventurous, and one might almost say the
+cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried. This
+is admirably exemplified in "The American Language,"
+which appears in a second edition, revised
+and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told that
+Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12,
+1880; that his family has been settled in Maryland
+for nearly a hundred years; and that he is of mixed
+ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He
+is, therefore, a typical American, and well qualified
+to write on "The American Language." Mr.
+Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in our
+universities are those which concern themselves
+with written and spoken English. He adds that
+such grammar as is taught in our schools and colleges</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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;<!-- Page 227 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive;
+but he is not so constructive as to build a road
+through the marsh of confusion into which that
+conflict of dialects in the English language&mdash;a
+language which is grammarless and dependent
+upon usage&mdash;has left us. He tells us that good
+writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
+throwing overboard the principles so
+elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lin<!-- Page 228 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>coln,
+in standing unaware of them. Whether this
+is true in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered
+that Lincoln was fed, through his reading,
+on the results of those linguistic principles
+which are with us in English tradition. It is the
+usage of Cardinal Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson
+or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln himself,
+which those who want to write good English follow
+rather than the elaborate rules of confused English
+grammar which are forgotten almost as soon as
+they are learned.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, in youthful days, I could make
+nothing out of the "grammar" of the English language
+until I had begun to study Latin prosody;
+and then it became clear to me that only a few
+bones in the structure of English, taken from the
+Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of the
+English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>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 or of the influences lying at
+the root of American word-formation&mdash;to quote
+Mr. Mencken&mdash;has as yet been made. The elder<!-- Page 229 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+student was content with correcting the examples
+of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
+read "The Dean's English," very popular at one
+time, Richard Grant White's "Words and Their
+Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The Verbalist."
+To this, one of the most bewildering books
+on the manner of writing English ever written,
+Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" was
+added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a
+sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories
+that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy
+to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so
+lacking as in the "Philosophy of Style." Its
+principles have a perennial value and nearly every
+author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated
+them with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting
+them is as involved as any method adopted
+by a philosopher could be&mdash;and that is saying a
+good deal.</p>
+
+<p>The English of the universities hold that Americans
+are the slave of Webster's Dictionary; and
+this is true of a certain limited class of Americans.
+The English public speaker allows himself more
+freedom in the matter of pronunciation than very
+scrupulous Americans do. Lord Balfour's speeches<!-- Page 230 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+at the Washington Conference offered several examples
+of this.</p>
+
+<p>"The Supreme Court of the United States has
+decided that Webster's Dictionary is <i>the</i> American
+dictionary, and I propose to consider all its decisions
+as final," said, in hot argument, a New
+York lawyer who habitually uses "dontcha know"
+and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as an
+author whose English ought to be corrected; and
+he became furious over what he called the mispronunciation
+of "apotheosis," which he said a
+favourite preacher had not uttered according to
+Webster. And I have known literary societies in
+the South to be disrupted over the use of the word
+"nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for
+"bloody," Mr. Mencken shows us that one of the
+outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
+convention was his permitting the heroine of
+"Pygmalion" to use it on the stage. There is one
+Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
+can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the
+use of the word "consummated" in a phrase like
+"the marriage was consummated in the First Baptist
+Church at high noon"!</p>
+
+<p>In spite of democratic disapproval, some will<!-- Page 231 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+still hold that "lift" is better than "elevator," and
+"station" better than "d&eacute;pot." Though these
+are departures from the current vernacular. We
+speak English often when our critical friends in
+England imagine that we are speaking American.
+I have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has
+cultivated English traditions of speech, to shrink
+in horror at the mention of "flap-jack" and "ice-cream."
+He could never find a substitute in <i>real</i>
+English for "flap-jack," but he always substituted
+"ices" for "ice-cream." On one occasion I heard
+him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies,"
+for those "detestable messy things sold by the ton
+to the uncivilized"; and he spent the time of lunch
+in pointing out that no such composition really existed
+in polite society; but when his "cook general"
+was seen approaching with an unmistakable "pie,"
+the kind supposed by the readers of advertisements
+to be made by "mothers," and ordered
+hastily because of the coming of the unexpected
+guest, he was cast down. The guest tried to save
+the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry
+as "a tart." The host shook his head&mdash;"a tart,"
+in English, could never be covered!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mencken shows us that "flap-jack," "mo<!-- Page 232 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>lasses,"
+"home-spun," "ice-cream" are old English;
+that "Bub," which used to shock London
+visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial
+English; and that "muss" is found in "Antony
+and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when I
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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 always provided with little dishes,
+like butter plates, for the discarded cups. His example
+gave me a profound contempt for those
+newly rich in learning who laugh without understanding,
+who are the slaves of the dictionary, and
+who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman
+was an education in himself; he had lived at
+the "English court"&mdash;or near it&mdash;and when he
+came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured.
+I once fell from grace; but not from my reverence
+for him, by making a mistake in my search<!-- Page 233 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+for knowledge which involved his age. It was
+very easy to ask him whether Anne Boleyn had
+asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape from
+the family denunciation that followed. It seemed
+that he had not lived at or near the court of Henry
+VIII!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick"
+for "ill" is taboo in England, except among the
+very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
+Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes
+so far in one of the speeches of the atrocious Mrs.
+Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used
+by Mr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion
+sinks into a pastel tint! Mr. Mencken says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>The Bible won against the prudery of the new
+English; prudery will go very far, and I can recall
+the objection of an evangelical lady, in Philadelphia,
+who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave
+Maria" by a little Papist relative. This was not<!-- Page 234 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+on religious grounds; it was because of "blessed
+is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer.
+The little Papist had been taught to repeat the
+salutation of the Angel Gabriel in Latin, so, at
+bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus ventris
+tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded
+"more decent"!</p>
+
+<p>Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's
+revelation that "ante" came into our language
+through the Spanish; he says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early
+Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until
+much later.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr.
+Mencken's judgment in regard to that very great
+philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
+quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of
+the English language, another great Dane, Doctor
+Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
+tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It
+has rare elements of strength in its simplicity. In
+English the subject almost invariably precedes the
+verb and the object follows it; even in English
+poetry this usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson,
+its observance might be counted at 80,<!-- Page 235 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>That our language has only five vowels, which
+have to do duty for more than a score of sounds, is
+a grave fault; and the unhappy French preacher
+who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough"
+as "pluff" had much excuse. But on the other
+hand, why do the French make us say "fluer de
+lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"?
+How many conversational pitfalls is "Rheims"
+responsible for!</p>
+
+<p>There is no book that ought to give the judicious
+such quiet pleasure or more 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 S&eacute;vign&eacute;,
+Beveridge's "Life" of Marshall, and the "Memoirs"
+of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book for odd moments;
+yet it is a temptation to continuous reading;
+and a precious treasure is its bibliography! And
+how pleasant it is to verify the quotations in a library;
+preferably with the snow falling in thick<!-- Page 236 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape,
+even after dinner is announced. Mr. Mencken is a
+benefactor!</p>
+
+<p>It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's
+audacious disregard of English grammar in theory
+has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
+and of his own style. If dead authors could
+write after the manner in which Mr. Andrew Lang
+has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
+Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes.
+If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle want
+really to please a small but discriminating public,
+let them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr.
+Mencken's statements on the growth of the
+English language! In my time we were expected
+to take Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously.
+There is no doubt that his principles have
+been repeated by every writer on style, including
+Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English
+Composition," since Mr. Spencer wrote; but the
+method of Spencer's expression of his principles reminds
+one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished
+before he met Beatrice.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us
+think of writing as a science and art; his philosophy<!-- Page 237 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+of style is right enough. But while he provokes
+puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more
+meat in Robert Louis Stevenson's "A College
+Magazine" than in all the complications in style
+in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.</p>
+
+<p>And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the
+author of a little volume which I keep by my side
+ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the terrifying
+Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific.
+It is Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls."
+And if one wants to know how to read for pleasure
+or comfort&mdash;for reading or writing does not come
+by nature&mdash;there is "Moby Dick," by Herman
+Melville, the close friend of the Hawthornes and a
+writer so American that Mr. Mencken must love
+him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea
+Idyls" bring the <i>fl&acirc;neur</i>&mdash;the chief business of a
+<i>fl&acirc;neur</i> of the pavements (we were forbidden in
+old Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look
+into unrelated shop-windows; but the <i>fl&acirc;neur</i>
+among books finds none of his shop-windows unrelated&mdash;back
+to Mr. Mencken, who does not give
+us the genesis of a word that sounded something
+like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every<!-- Page 238 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants
+interfered, and they often did interfere. You
+might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you
+should never say "druggist." I trust that it is
+no breach of confidence to repeat that the devout
+and very distinguished of modern Philadelphians,
+Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two
+languages in his neighbourhood, one for the ears
+of his parents and one for the boys in the street.
+One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
+lad 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
+New York City, at least the beginning of one
+American language&mdash;the language of the street.</p>
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+<p>In considering the impression that books have
+usually made on me, I have often asked myself
+why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure
+and even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his
+own answer to this. For the plots of novels, I
+have always had very little respect, although I
+believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is
+absolutely necessary to a really good novel, and
+that it is the very soul of a romance. Of memoirs<!-- Page 239 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>&mdash;even
+the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de
+Cr&eacute;quy have always 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 the Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless
+journal of Mr. Boswell; and even the revelations
+of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were
+worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame
+d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles
+of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres,
+that it seems like a new discovery in
+psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's
+"Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including
+that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington.
+Life <i>is</i> worth living!</p>
+
+<p>I must confess that I have never found any
+poet excepting King David whom I liked because
+he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
+me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When
+people praise Thompson's "Hound of Heaven,"
+because it is dogmatic, I am surprised&mdash;for if I
+found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all
+its splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The
+Hound of Heaven" are glorious visions of truth
+at a white heat.<!-- Page 240 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value
+when it ceases to be a picture and becomes an
+important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
+didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might
+be lost forever with no great disadvantage to
+posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
+preserved. Browning's optimism has always left
+me cold, and I never could quite understand why
+most of his readers have set him down as a great
+philosopher. All may be well with the world, but
+I could never see that Browning's poetry proved
+it in any way. When the time comes for a cultivated
+English world&mdash;a thoughtful English-speaking
+world&mdash;to weigh the merits of English-speaking
+poets, Browning will be found among the first.
+Who has done anything finer in English than "A
+Grammarian's Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess,"
+or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of the
+passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived
+a better fable for a poem than that of "Pippa"?
+And as for Keats, the world he discovered for us
+is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than
+all the philosophies of Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<p>To me, the intense delight I have in novels and
+poems is due to their power of taking me out of<!-- Page 241 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+myself, of enlightening me as to my own faults and
+peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and
+of raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of
+gaiety of heart.</p>
+
+<p>As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson
+once applied to works of fiction becomes more and
+more regrettable. He compared the followers of
+this consoling art to "<i>filles de joie</i>." He doubtless
+meant that these goddesses&mdash;"<i>les filles de joie</i>" are
+always young&mdash;gave us visions of the joy of life;
+that they might be sensuous without being sensual;
+but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There
+are novels, like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which
+are joyous and serious at once. Or take "The
+Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."</p>
+
+<p>Every constant reader has his favourite essayists.
+As a rule, he reads them to be soothed or
+to be amused. In making my confession, I must
+say that 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 of the essayist.
+Each of us has his favourite bore among them.
+Once I found all the prose works of a fine poet and<!-- Page 242 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of
+a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. "The result
+of a severe sense of duty!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility
+and failed, though she gained in the end a greater
+title. Her works are insufferably and complacently
+conceited, and yet I always look at their
+bindings with respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died
+too soon, has given us, in her first volume&mdash;unfortunately
+the only one&mdash;a new view of this Empress
+of Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame
+Roland could have been nourished by that most
+stimulating of all books&mdash;"The Devout Life of
+St. Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is,
+to my mind, the most practical of all the essayists,
+even when he puts his essays in the form of letters.
+Next comes F&eacute;nelon's and&mdash;I know that I shall
+shock those who regard his philosophy as merely
+Deistic&mdash;next comes, for his power of stimulation,
+Emerson.</p>
+
+<p>It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too
+late, that these confessions may be taken as didactic
+in themselves; in writing them I have had
+not the slightest intention of improving anybody's
+mind but simply of relieving my own, by button-<!-- Page 243 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>holing
+the reader who happens to come my way.
+I should like to add that what is called the coarseness
+of the eighteenth-century novel and romance
+is much more healthful than the nasty brutality
+of a school of our novelists&mdash;who make up for
+their lack of talent and of wide experience by
+trying to excite animal instincts. Eroticism
+may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in
+common with the process of "cooking stale cabbage
+over farthing candles," to use Charles Reade's
+phrase.</p>
+
+<p>If my habit of constant reading had not taught
+me the value of calmness and patience, I should
+like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
+for thanking God is that Americans have produced
+a literature&mdash;the continuation of an older literature
+with variations, it is true,&mdash;that has added to
+the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need
+mention only one book, "The Scarlet Letter,"
+and I am glad to end my book by writing the name
+of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England,
+or with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the
+other continental nations, are no longer to our
+disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
+writes of American books to put&mdash;in his own mind,<!-- Page 244 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+at least&mdash;a title to his discourse that reminds me
+of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It is
+an outworn tradition. American literature is robust
+enough for smiles.</p>
+
+<p>It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not
+self-conscious. It is rapidly taking to itself all the
+best traditions of the older literature and assimilating
+them. Christopher Morley and Heywood
+Broun and Don Marquis and Mencken write&mdash;at
+their best&mdash;as lightly and as trippingly as any past
+master of the <i>feuilleton</i>. There is nobody writing
+in the daily press in Paris to-day who does the
+<i>feuilleton</i> as well as they do it. If you ask me
+whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention
+to what they say, I shall answer, No. But
+their method is the thing. Will they live? Of
+course not. Is &Eacute;mile de Girardin alive? Or all the
+clever ones that James Huneker found buried and
+could not revive? One still reads the "Portraits de
+Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
+something more than a "columnist." And these folk
+will be, too, in time! At any rate, they are good
+enough for the present.</p>
+
+<p>Who, writing in French or in any language,
+<i>outre-mer</i>, does better, or as well, as Holliday?<!-- Page 245 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+And where is the peer of Charles S. Brooks in
+"Hints to Pilgrims"? "Luca Sarto," the best
+novel of old Italian life by an American&mdash;since Mrs.
+Wharton's "Valley of Decision"&mdash;proved him to
+be a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better
+psychologically than Mrs. Wharton, but here
+there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
+she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent
+and insular at long intervals.</p>
+
+<p>"Luca Sarto" dropped like the gentle rain from
+heaven; and then came "Hints to Pilgrims."
+This I wanted to write about in the <i>Yale Review</i>,
+but the selfish editor, Mr. Cross, said that he preferred
+to keep it for himself!</p>
+
+<p>"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern
+essay. Strangely enough, it sent me back to the
+"Colour of Life" by the only real <i>pr&eacute;cieuse</i> living
+in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read that
+with new delight between certain paragraphs in
+Brooks's paper "On Finding a Plot." Why is not
+"Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth edition? Or
+why has it no <i>claque</i>? The kind of <i>claque</i> that
+is so common now&mdash;which opens suddenly like
+a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls of Theocritus"?
+After all, your education must have been well be<!-- Page 246 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>gun
+before you can enjoy "Hints to Pilgrims,"
+while for "Huckleberry Finn" the less education
+you have, the better. Mr. Brooks writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 gather<!-- Page 247 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>ings
+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.</p></div>
+
+<p>You do not find delightful fooling like this every
+day; and there is much more of it. Take this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;flower-girls
+and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the
+hired palms and a table of cut glass.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver Twist and Nancy&mdash;merely acquaintances in the
+original story&mdash;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&mdash;observe
+the cunning of the plot!&mdash;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<!-- Page 248 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+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&mdash;doubtless a Methodist.
+The happy knot is tied. And then&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+<p>When I found Brooks, I felt again the pang of
+loss, that Theodore Roosevelt had not read "Hints
+to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the other room"
+and eternal light shone upon him! He would have
+discovered "Hints to Pilgrims," and celebrated it
+as soon as any of us.</p>
+
+<p>How he loved books! And he seemed to have
+read all the right things in his youth; you forgot
+time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
+with you about them. He could drop from
+Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in whom he had not much
+interest, since he was a <i>gourmet</i> and did not
+regard sausages as the highest form of German
+art!) and his descents and ascents from book to
+book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales&mdash;and
+her scales were smoother than Patti's.<!-- Page 249 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery,"
+and "The Ancient Irish Sagas"? He caught fire
+at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";
+and concluded at once that the Celts were the only
+people who, before Christianity invented chivalry,
+understood the meaning of romantic love. It is
+a great temptation to write at length on the books
+he liked, and how 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!"</p>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 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."</p></div></div>
+
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<p class="footnote"><b>Transcriber's notes:</b><br/>
+People using this book as a reference should be aware that some of
+the spelling and quotations are not necessarily accurate.<br/>
+Some obvious printing errors were corrected <br/>
+(gu'une&rarr;qu'une <a href="#Page_96">p96</a>; natio&rarr;nation <a href="#Page_223">p223</a>)<br/>
+Consistent archaic spellings of names of people and times were retained as is.<br/>
+Accenting was not 'corrected'.<br/>
+Some potential printer's errors left as is include:<br/>
+Gaugain may be Gauguin <a href="#Page_237">p237</a> (Paul Gauguin from context)<br/>
+Who the Holliday refered to in chapter V <a href="#Page_244">p244</a> was is unknown.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Confessions of a Book-Lover, by 
+Maurice Francis Egan
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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions of a Book-Lover, by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Confessions of a Book-Lover
+
+Author: Maurice Francis Egan
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2007 [EBook #24003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elaine Walker, Janet Kegg and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A
+BOOK-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 TRANSLATION
+INTO 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 ACTION
+IN 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 Gu['e]rin.
+      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 love
+these perennial friends very early in life. It is the only way to know
+all their "curves," all those little shadows of expression and small
+lights. There is a glamour which you never _see_ if you begin to read
+with a serious intention late in life, when questions of technique and
+grammar and mere words begin to seem too important.
+
+Then you have become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's
+verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance
+beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable
+flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a
+friend--if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for even
+the memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever have
+done anything that will make the book you love less precious to you.
+
+The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of
+miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de
+S['e]vign['e] that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but
+Madame de S['e]vign['e] 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 when I was young, I read several books which I was told
+afterward were very bad indeed. But I did not find this out until
+somebody told me! The youthful mind must possess something of the
+quality attributed to a duck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions
+of Rousseau" was snatched suddenly away from me by a careful mother just
+as I had begun to think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and
+almost as queer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had
+been allowed to finish the book, it would have become by some mental
+chemical process a very edifying criticism of life.
+
+"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a pious
+aunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown of
+Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little by
+Little," for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rather
+shocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted to
+my aunt's pronouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a
+dangerous book," by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book I
+had ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when God
+wasn't looking." She sent me home.
+
+At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter
+Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
+attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that
+nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The
+Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a
+good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my
+mental vision every day of my life.
+
+In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and
+carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in
+advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my
+acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the International
+Sunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geography
+of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the
+whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human
+interest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand,
+sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes
+because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever
+may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New
+Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition
+not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In
+my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between
+truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often very
+difficult 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 in
+Heaven for children to do!" As to distractions, the modern child is
+surrounded by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions of
+the present system of instruction not to leave to a child any moments of
+leisure for the indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering the
+example of my childhood for imitation by the modern parents.
+
+Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in those
+days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long
+afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in
+"The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that the
+beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to
+visualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, that
+a sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was not
+necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only
+necessary 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 holiday
+afternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that I
+had to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It was
+worth the trouble, however.
+
+Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother's
+knee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she never
+read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful
+misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never
+considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At
+first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets
+of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There
+is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the
+heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
+of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after
+the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved
+her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no
+noise.
+
+In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in
+_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard
+III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine
+Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been
+listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice
+in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the
+adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo
+carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
+of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of
+Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer
+creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.
+
+There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had
+access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
+Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not
+so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to
+Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the
+latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--the
+shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may
+be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little
+Em'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind
+was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as
+much 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 in
+literature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired
+Queen 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 was
+difficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was
+"proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare she seemed to regard as
+eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she
+came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I
+never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or
+Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference
+which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;
+and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above
+Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray.
+
+_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, for
+instance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--General
+Strothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane of
+my existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to
+me as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me as
+that other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledge
+that all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a day
+with powdered charcoal!
+
+After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory
+reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no
+emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes
+came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed,
+but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George
+Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George
+Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
+stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful
+book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges
+in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales
+about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the
+ordinary common sense of geese!
+
+Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one
+unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from my
+entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this
+day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply
+interested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come as
+in the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school
+books, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday School
+opposite 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 honest
+villain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes
+were very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared to
+them. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hate
+religion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that I
+had Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were
+equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended, were quite as
+uninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They were
+generally translated from the French, without vitality and without any
+regard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down
+one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima." As it
+concerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might be
+in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off the
+ear 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 short
+period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff in
+it; it made me feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills;
+and it taught a lot about the archaeology of Rome, for it was part of
+that excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very great
+book. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days of
+Pompeii," I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but
+in some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by Washington
+Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." _Conspuez les livres des poup['e]es!_
+What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, could
+awaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailing
+clouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes the
+pomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates a
+love 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 des
+Bois," by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was a
+horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laborious
+research in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures of
+these infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but I
+know that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctive
+mood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a French
+romance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin." It was of things
+that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with
+an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the
+gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I
+gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have
+been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were
+written by an author named L['e]on Gozlan.
+
+About this time, the book auction became a fashion in Philadelphia. If
+your people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to a
+publication called the _Cosmopolitan Art Magazine_, and you received a
+steel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh
+very much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet and
+very well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington at
+Lexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequented
+the book auctions. My father had a great respect for what he called
+"classical literature." He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely
+classical; it was beautifully bound, and he never read it. One day he
+secured a lovely edition of the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore." It had
+been a subject of much competition at the auction, and was cherished
+accordingly. The binding was tooled. It was put on the centre table and
+adored as a work of art. Here was richness!
+
+Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed at present as belonging to
+those old and faded gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake," by
+Lady Blessington, once flourished; but if I could only recall the
+pleasure I had in the reading of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet
+of Korhasson," I think I should be very happy. And the notes to "Lalla
+Rookh" and to Moore's prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"
+was not much of a novel, but the notes were full of amazing Egyptian
+mysteries, which seemed quite as splendid as the machinery in the
+"Arabian Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled of roses, and I
+remember as a labour of love copying out all the allusions to roses in
+these notes with the intention of writing about them when I grew up. My
+mother objected to the translations from Anacreon; she said they were
+"improper"; but my father said that he had been assured on competent
+authority that they were "classic," and of course that settled it. There
+was 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 city
+boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the
+arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an
+incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and
+something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our
+Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little
+world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to read her tragedy, "The Two
+Foscari." A tragedy had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic
+for some offense against the conventionalities demanded of a
+Philadelphia child, with no book but Miss Mitford's, I spent my time
+looking up all the references to roses in her tragedies. These I
+combined with the knowledge acquired from Tom Moore, and made notes for
+a 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's
+Journal_, where it may still be found. My parents, who did not look on
+my literary attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with favour,
+suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as I had no time to look up the
+meaning of the word in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me
+as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which every honest artist
+must 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 think
+that 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 string
+that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself to the imitation of
+this economic child, and was very highly praised for getting the best
+out of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very tough
+knot.
+
+It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series of
+Beadle's "Dime Novels." I looked on them as delectable but inferior.
+There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; but
+if you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which
+concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were very
+likely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole,"
+because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account of
+a real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in the
+abdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very
+"indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutely
+forbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was a
+moral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to do
+with leaper, the effect was not very convincing.
+
+Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the
+youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I
+happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where
+Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from
+leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything
+of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of
+the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were
+rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been
+written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir
+Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
+again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas
+Nickleby."
+
+"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter
+afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable
+city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to
+work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a
+kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it
+was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas
+Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which
+generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you
+never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly
+know 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 dignified
+manner of standing with her head on a spear!
+
+The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It was
+necessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike,
+they became great bores. But what young reader of Dickens can forget the
+hostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little Miss
+Kenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one grows
+older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think
+of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was it
+Cortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas
+Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found
+"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two
+Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough
+for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. My
+later impressions of Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions.
+
+One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as I
+remember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and
+read it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for good
+novels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, took
+again to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin and
+Amelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't think
+that the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I was
+delighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot of
+stupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of the
+story that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no mother
+to guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on the
+forehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I was
+unhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book
+with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That
+is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe
+that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.
+
+For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David
+Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that
+I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later--it was on one June
+afternoon I think--when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed
+to me that for a while all delight in life had ended.
+
+One of those experts in psychology who are always seeking questions
+sometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced
+me, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our
+"Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottled
+cardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, when
+I was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual." My
+mother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southern
+tendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party,
+and admired Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the famous
+Vallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion of
+American statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of a
+very different type.
+
+Julius Caesar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had
+not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." It seemed to me that Brutus
+was 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 prevent
+me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the
+ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no
+adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a
+convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the
+pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little
+boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost
+suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was
+not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had
+been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades
+covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully
+wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it
+occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the
+night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when
+he 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, I
+knew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a
+last dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On the
+morning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the
+small boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were about
+to be bereaved, and predicted a coming holiday. I was looked on as
+rather "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. The
+bully and his chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The moment had
+come; 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 to
+the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I
+spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were
+incomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, in the
+"Lives."
+
+The next morning I went to school with lessons unstudied and awaited
+events. The mother of the bully appeared, and entered into an excited
+colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. I announced to the
+boy 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's
+coat, 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 total
+depravity; 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 good
+Christian 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 bully
+let me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, which had leaked out,
+gave me such a reputation that I became a dictator myself, and made
+terms for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which were sometimes
+rather despotic.
+
+It was also during these days that I remember carrying confusion into
+the family when a patronizing, intellectual lady called and said, "I
+hope that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo books?" "No," I
+answered quickly and indiscreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by
+Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie Collins until I read
+"The Moonstone." It seemed that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased
+inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "classics."
+
+My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he read
+the evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long
+horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from the
+novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New
+York _Ledger_ by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the
+times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely and
+aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her
+conversion, disapproved of the New York _Ledger_. In fact, there were
+families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In
+our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical,
+which, with many volumes of Godey's _Lady's Book_, were packed in the
+attic.
+
+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 he
+was about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the back
+numbers of the New York _Ledger_ containing a long serial story by Mrs.
+Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the French
+Revolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with a
+description of a dance in an old ch[^a]teau, when the Marquise, who was
+floating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
+glove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where the
+blood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find the
+novel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my father
+sent the numbers of the New York _Ledger_ to the apparently dying man.
+"It's a horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any Christian
+person reading the New York _Ledger_ at the point of death." The young
+man, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed his
+recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories.
+
+There were certain other serial stories I was ordered to read; they were
+stories of the Irish Brigade in France. My mother, I remember,
+disapproved of them because Madame de Pompadour was frequently
+mentioned, and she thought that my father regarded the lady in question
+too tolerantly. These romances were, I think, written by a certain Myles
+O'Reilly who was in some way connected with the army. This procedure of
+reading aloud was not always agreeable, as my father frequently went to
+sleep in the middle of a passage and forgot what I had already read. The
+consequence was that I was obliged to begin the same old story over
+again 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 title
+of the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived in Para; I tried to
+manufacture an imitation of the Urari poison with a view to
+exterminating rats in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
+had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced, at intervals, a
+thrilling novel, with the glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a
+background. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I had ever read. He
+held possession of my imagination, until he was forced out by a Mr.
+Jerningham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany. Saint Malo
+became the only town for me; I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and
+the Stuarts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of Sir Walter
+Scott, were displaced by the Vend['e]ans.
+
+Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me to
+parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent.
+They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the
+adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me to overcome.
+
+About this time, my mother began to feel that I needed to read something
+more gentle, which would root me more effectively in my religion. She
+began, I think, with Cardinal Newman's "Callista" in which there was a
+thrilling chapter called "The Possession of Juba." It seemed to me one
+of the most stirring things I had ever read. Then I was presented with
+Mrs. Sadlier's "The Blakes and the Flanagans," which struck me as a very
+delightful satire, and with a really interesting novel of New York
+called "Rosemary," by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a terribly
+blood-curdling story of the Carbonari in Italy, called "Lionello." After
+this I was wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh; "Natalie,"
+and "Bessie," and "Seven Years," I think were the principals. My father
+declined to read them; he thought they were too sentimental, but as the
+author had an Irish name he was inclined to regard them with tolerance.
+He thought I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom and Jerry; or
+The Adventures of Corinthian Bob," by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to
+this, 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 of
+Froissart for two dollars and a half at an old book stand on Fifth
+Street, near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world during the
+Christmas holidays. After breakfast, I saturated myself with the
+delightful battles in that precious book.
+
+My principal duty was to look after the front pavement. In the spring
+and summer, it was carefully washed twice a week and reddened with some
+kind of paint, which always accompanied a box of fine white sand for the
+scouring of the marble steps; but in the winter, this respectable
+sidewalk 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--or
+in the "square," as we Philadelphians called it. Now it became irksome;
+I neglected to dig the ice from between the bricks; I skimped my
+cleaning of the gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums." The boy next door
+became a mirror of virtue; he was quoted to me as one whose pavement was
+a model to all the neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the Mayor
+passing down our street, had stopped and admired the working of his
+civic spirit, while the result of my efforts was passed by with evident
+contempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart to my heart. Who would
+condescend to wield a broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward of
+ten cents in cash, when he could throw javelins and break lances with
+the knights of the divine Froissart? The end of my freedom came after
+this. The terrible incident of the Mayor's contempt, invented, I
+believe, by the boy next door, induced my mother to believe that I was
+not only losing my morals, but becoming too much of a book-worm. For
+many long weeks I was deprived of any amusing book except "Robinson
+Crusoe." After this interval, vacation came; I seemed to have grown
+older, and books were never quite the same again.
+
+In the vacation, however, when the days were very long and there was a
+great deal of leisure, I found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales"
+and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault, and I was even then very
+much struck by the difference. Of course I read Grimm from cover to
+cover, and went back again over the pages, hoping that I had neglected
+something. The homeliness of the stories touched me; it seemed to me
+that you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany. Madame
+Perrault was more delicate; her fairy tales were pictures of no life
+that ever existed, and there was a great dissimilarity between her
+"Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of "Aschenputtel." As I remember, the
+haughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among the
+ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seem
+smaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's
+slipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in
+_her_ fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no
+such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this
+vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy
+with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in
+Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I
+think I liked him best of all.
+
+That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in
+the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No
+doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of
+scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never
+discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were
+very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never
+was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the
+Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful
+experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be
+expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers
+coming 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 done
+something for his soul.
+
+There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be
+to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were
+persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one
+opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
+episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I
+preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
+devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered
+somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a
+fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was
+"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the
+stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he
+disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere
+prejudice.
+
+The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likes
+to read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myself
+one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon,
+and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale not
+so edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seized
+the book at once. My father was informed of what had occurred. He was
+little alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change the
+whole course of this boy's reading." "We shall have to change the boy
+first," my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At the
+proper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. The
+book was presented to him for destruction.
+
+"It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk about
+any of these stories to the other boys in school?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say much worse things, and I
+would probably have to tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all
+the people in the Boccaccio book were good Catholics, I suppose, as they
+were Italians, and I think, after all, when they caught the plague, they
+died good deaths."
+
+The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and gave me his blessing and
+dismissed me. And my mother seemed to think that I was sufficiently
+exorcised.
+
+After this the books I read were more carefully considered. I was given
+the "Tales of Canon Schmidt"--dear little stories of German children in
+the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, which went very well
+with another volume I found at this time called "Jack Halifax," not
+"John Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had already read to me--but a
+curious little tome long out of print. And then there sailed upon my
+vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish novelist, Hendrik
+Conscience, whose "Lion of Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and
+there were "Wooden Clara," and other pieces which made one feel as if
+one 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; but
+these were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may not have been
+much of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "The
+Virginians" or "Esmond." They were what my father called
+"classics"--things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" was
+quite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionary
+history, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. I
+recall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her
+thumb to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This is
+all that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neither
+Henry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemed
+to have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."
+
+After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through a
+book, given to me by my mother, about _la Vend['e]e_. It was a dull book,
+but nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim the heroism of Henri
+de la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists,
+and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned the
+compliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayette
+a great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the beautiful Marie
+Antoinette!
+
+When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed, as the result
+of my reading, a great belief in all lost causes. I had become
+exceedingly devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor had
+sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an
+antidote to the lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather troubled
+to find so many "swear words" in it, but I made all the allowances that
+a real lover of literature is often compelled to make!
+
+
+_The Bible_
+
+The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, as
+a moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable
+value. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read it
+constantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version and
+the King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learned
+to recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King James
+version--which I always read when I went to one of my cousins--I found
+the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time I
+was limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as it
+was considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testament
+unexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raised
+for some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a great
+deal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and histories of the
+Old Testament. I soon discovered that it was impossible to understand
+the allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible.
+What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had never
+known the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field,
+permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume if
+one knew nothing about the Song of Solomon.
+
+Putting aside the question as to whether young readers should be let
+loose in the Old Testament or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
+justified in including ignorance as the supremest virtue, he who does
+not make himself familiar with Biblical ideas and phraseology finds
+himself in after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. It used
+to be said of the typical English gentleman that all he needed to know
+was to ride after the hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
+absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most moderns. To construe
+Horace, of course, meant that he should have at least a speaking
+acquaintance with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature, and this
+knowledge gave him a grip on the universal speech of all cultivated
+people. However useless his allusions to Chlo[:e] and to Maecenas were in
+the business of practical life, he was at least able to understand what
+they meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the Latins stamped him
+as speaking the speech of a gentleman.
+
+Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is fitted with allusions that
+clarify and illuminate the ordinary speech. He may not have any
+technical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may be so great as to
+debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but
+his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a
+colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace.
+Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a
+measure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make life
+endurable.
+
+Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. Even the poets often now
+assume that Clytie is a name that requires an explanation and that
+Daphne and her flight through the laurel do not bring up immediate
+memories of Syrinx and the reeds. The Dictionary of Lampri[`e]re is covered
+with dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid without an answering
+glance of comprehension from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;
+it is only that, in the modern system, the old mythology is not taken
+very seriously.
+
+Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be a necessary part of a
+gentleman's education, there is no class of allusions from which we can
+draw to lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we turn to the
+Bible. This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders it
+rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young
+people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a
+rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a
+Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when
+he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost
+sure to speak of Jonah and the whale!
+
+It is disappointing to notice this gradual change that has taken place
+in the attitude of the younger generation toward the Sacred Book. The
+Sunday Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies of importance
+and to overload the memories of their little disciples with a multitude
+of texts, or to over-explain every allusion in the terms of physical
+geography, etc., may in a measure be responsible for this, but they
+cannot be entirely responsible. One must admit that diversities of
+interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a religious point of view
+will always be an obstacle to their use in schools where the children of
+Jews, of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian denominations
+assemble. But there is always the home, where the first impetus to a
+satisfactory knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. The decay
+of the practice of reading aloud in our homes is very evident in the
+lack of real culture--or, rather, rudiments of real culture--in our
+children. 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 gave
+me a background against which I could see the trend of the books I
+devoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them;
+besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for a
+boy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standard
+by which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expression
+of life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamations
+full of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love,
+in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple
+stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which
+has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting
+adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It
+is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and
+I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter
+writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar,
+and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They
+may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of
+their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more
+you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human
+he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes
+it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission
+has always been a great delight to me!
+
+Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phases
+of 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 seemed
+only natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination from
+God. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is a
+miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of a
+miracle 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 and
+plead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generally
+right. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who could
+speak to the Greeks in their own language.
+
+Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple of
+Huxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible
+which was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and with
+the 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 modern
+time, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretation
+of the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith which
+St. Paul preached.
+
+Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delight
+the letters of Madame de S['e]vign['e], I put her second as a writer of
+letters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to his
+sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to Dead
+Authors," and a very great letter I found in an English translation of
+Balzac's "Le Lys dans la Vall['e]e."
+
+It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with
+these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often
+reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take
+money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he
+worked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was very
+grateful to Phoebe for remembering that he was a hungry man and in
+need of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengers
+Aquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking them
+from Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able to
+make their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had not
+interfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked
+"Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesus
+were as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleased
+that his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. I
+always felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus would
+give him a better chance of supporting himself.
+
+That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries in his youth, one easily
+guessed. It was plain, too, that he had had the best possible
+instructors, and I liked to believe, when I was young, that his muscles
+had been well trained in the sports of gentlemen of his class.
+Altogether, so graphic were his descriptions and so potent his
+personality that, while Julius Caesar and Brutus receded, he filled the
+foreground, and all the more because at this time I picked up an English
+translation of Suetonius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as I
+had 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, and
+I found St. Luke very good reading, though I often wished that, as I
+understood he had some reputation as an artist, he had adorned his
+writings with illustrations.
+
+It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote in
+English, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different from
+one another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great part
+of my time in classes where Nepos and Caesar were translated by my dear
+young friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator,
+I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of the
+translators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had no
+interest whatever in the translations which we made daily for the
+impatient ears of our instructors!
+
+One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because he was such a good
+fighter. When he said he fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these
+beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons who persecuted and
+contradicted him. No obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too,
+although he called things by their right names and his denunciations
+were so vivid and mouthfilling that you knew his enemies must have been
+afraid to open their lips while he was near them, whatever they might
+have said behind his back.
+
+My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at school
+when discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended to
+conversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it came
+to my turn I answered "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
+Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander
+the Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I was
+looked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, and
+he asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, coming
+suddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought with
+beasts." This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dear
+comrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer for
+it as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they
+discovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next composition
+day, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "being
+filled with all iniquity," and other evil things which brought down a
+horrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such
+plain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I was
+only quoting St. Paul to the Romans.
+
+Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. Be that as it may, I
+regarded him as a very good friend indeed, for some of his "language,"
+quoted in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on one's
+enemies than any swear word that could be invented. I am not excusing my
+attitude toward the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected my
+youthful mind. There was something extremely romantic in the very
+phrase, "the tumult of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to mean a
+whole chapter of a novel in itself.
+
+And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have a
+sympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, on
+its way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiable
+barbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help liking
+the Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was a
+Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him of
+chastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given him
+by Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
+seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! He
+rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's. And one could easily
+imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered into
+the hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city!
+And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, through
+the 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 the
+King Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautiful
+Bernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finally
+they did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity and
+exquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paul
+went to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the very
+fineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment.
+"This man," I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set at
+liberty, if he had not appealed to Caesar."
+
+It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet Micheas, who had
+previously 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 with
+the fulfilments of the New were interesting, and I found great pleasure
+in 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, by
+some reference or other in another book, to read the twenty-third psalm
+of David, in the King James version. It struck me as much more simple
+and 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 have
+looked on as dangerous any attempt to ally English literature with the
+Bible--I soon discovered that nearly everything I read owed something to
+the Bible. At first, the comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the
+King James version enraptured me so much that I began to find fault with
+the Latinized phrases of the Vulgate in English. It was the fashion in
+the early seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in the
+little group at school interested in English literature. Street cars at
+this time were comparatively new in Philadelphia, and I think we reached
+the last extremity of Saxonism in speech when we spoke of them as "folk
+wains." The tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred the Book
+of Job and the story of Ruth in the Latinized version, because the words
+were more mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to translate
+everything into a bald "early English medium", which for a time I had
+been 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 of
+Isaiah. The Latinized medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; and
+then, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes in the Douai version
+than in the King James. In both versions, some passages were so obscure
+that I often wondered how anybody could get any meaning out of them. I
+was often astonished to find in English novels that the old people in
+the cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great length, out of
+which 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 live
+book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at the same time--if anybody had
+asked me whether, being marooned on an island, I should have most
+preferred 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 Ancient
+Rome," would have suited me better, provided, of course, that I could
+have chosen only one book.
+
+It was borne in on me many times that no author could improve on the
+phrasing of the Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James versions
+there are passages which, leaving aside all question of doctrine, it is
+sacrilege to try to improve. The French translation of the Bible is, as
+everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that may account for the fact
+that, while regarded as a precious depository of doctrine, it is not a
+household book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations of Clement
+Marot--called hymns--naturally bored a people who, in their hearts,
+believe that God listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the
+language of the Academy! In their novels, dealing with the beginnings of
+Christianity--and there are many such novels in French unknown in other
+countries--it is hard for a French author not to be rhetorical, in the
+manner 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 words
+of 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 persons
+existing--happily, they have all gone to the great beyond--who thought
+that the "talented" author could have done better!
+
+
+_Essays and Essayists_
+
+I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerous
+reading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptist
+friends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading of
+Emerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parish
+never denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offered
+his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to these
+objections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading of
+my boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parents
+and guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain books
+made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so in
+words, 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 early
+edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts and
+to 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 close
+together, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did not
+get so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked the
+lessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when he
+mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I was
+amiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege of
+studying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on the
+subject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and,
+from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found out
+his mistake.
+
+Perhaps I might have been better engaged in reading the more practical
+books offered to boys in our own time, if we had had them. There were
+some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to the comprehension of
+the young; but not so many as there are now. One of my uncles
+recommended the works of Samuel Smiles--"Self-Help" I think was his
+favourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed to me. My small allowance,
+paid weekly, could not have been affected by "Thrift", and when my uncle
+quoted passages from this tiresome book I astounded him by replying, in
+a phrase I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, that if I had a
+quarter to spend instead of twelve cents, I would give half of it for a
+hyacinth! My miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed, and that
+Emerson had doubtless found it in that dangerous book, the Koran.
+
+I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays of
+Emerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be really
+American; in the second, and largely because of their quality, they
+offered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which had
+succeeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money and
+luxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, where
+simple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and moved
+away into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumour
+that some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagant
+expenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
+stopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of our
+old-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. For
+the first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as the
+principal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons were
+classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferous
+atmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As to
+his philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than the
+religious opinions of Julius Caesar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged
+to read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay.
+
+By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. The inflation of his style
+did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis." That
+on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimately
+to the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto,
+"Tread the lilies under foot." I was for the Bourbons! The French
+Revolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (in
+Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had lived
+through the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probably
+the same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whose
+connections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk to
+Fabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list of
+the condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substituting
+in 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 of
+our family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up and
+down Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief,
+bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believed
+that he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
+We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in our
+neighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured
+every line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. It
+seemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out of
+my life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescued
+Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed
+impossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friends
+who went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie de
+Buxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whose
+letters lie before me as I write.
+
+In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul
+Richter, 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 an
+unreal and lurid book.
+
+Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had
+from 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, he
+reminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott's
+Catherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was an
+unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he
+seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
+which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I
+cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without
+believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So
+much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long
+thoughts 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 it
+only as the world? Give me the old volume of Montaigne and a loaf of
+bread--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 wild
+place! I did not, of course, know, in those early days, what in his
+flavour attracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the very flavour
+and essence of Old France. Carlyle's impressions of historical persons
+interested me, but Montaigne was the most actual of living persons who
+spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly his. To be sure, I read
+him in Florio's translation.
+
+I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modern
+writer, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who
+contributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazine
+called the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and
+Bismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that he
+wrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were so
+interesting and apparently so true that they really became part of my
+life. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of all
+modern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, I
+should have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le
+Sabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared to
+an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip's
+Church at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth.
+Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series of
+sketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like
+other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like
+those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and
+purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken
+out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with
+pleasure 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 the
+Mast." "Walden" I learned to like, but I much preferred Fenimore
+Cooper's description of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book of a man
+playing at out-of-doors, imagining his wildness, and never really liking
+to be too far from the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I
+discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that I began to see that nature
+had beauties in all weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature
+alone never appealed to me. A landscape without human beings seemed
+deadly dull; and I did not understand until I grew much older that I had
+really believed that good art was an improvement on nature.
+
+I have not the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see the
+works of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels
+recently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity and
+what one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as to
+the relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp." I recall
+vividly 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's
+studio and I knew so well from my experience in the drawing classes at
+school, how nature was neglected for artificial models, that I hailed
+these words with great joy.
+
+Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for the
+Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes the
+beginning of the aesthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It may
+seem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts in
+Godey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and an
+occasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of the
+chromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every
+self-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, very
+good casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. My
+father greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had been
+celebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it as
+almost "improper."
+
+Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia, wanted not exactly
+something better, but something more vivid. There were few sports; long
+walks and a little cricket supplied the place of the coming baseball and
+tennis.
+
+In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of his weekly walks with Mr.
+Edward Roth, the head of a military school and the author of "Christus
+Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an occasional row on the
+Schuylkill with him as the best part of my education. But this was
+later. All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, was to walk and
+talk and read.
+
+The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. The
+beginning 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 lately
+read "Jane Eyre." This added interest to the volume, and there came the
+details of the invention of the new hut, intended to be a shelter
+against all weathers, so that the artist might study nature on intimate
+terms. 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 the
+heather changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our pet place of
+beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or river if you like, was not the same
+every day in the year except when the ice bound it! This may seem a
+rather stupid state of mind; but it is the stupidity that is very
+common. I could understand how interesting it would be to be in
+snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton thus described his
+hut:
+
+     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 of
+the Clouds," and the little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset,
+Sept. 23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before struck me that Loch
+Awe was different on September 23, 1860, from what it was at other
+times, or--to carry the idea further--that the imperial Delaware had
+changed since that momentous time when George Washington crossed it, or
+the 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 at
+Rest." Hamerton, who is probably now very much out of fashion, taught me
+the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an accessory to Emerson, the
+philosophy of enjoying the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who,
+I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; and I still think that
+there can be no better introduction to a consideration of the relation
+of 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 passage
+in Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" that emphasized the need
+of 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 "The
+Intellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic,
+as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. For
+instance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty was
+unfavourable to the intellectual life! It was enlightening to know the
+reason why a man should wear evening dress after six o'clock, and why
+the sporting of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of the
+Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character!
+
+And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished
+Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful
+self-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 pages
+which were intensely stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they
+like; 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 this
+Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's Camp" ought to be
+included in every list of books.
+
+It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following of Christ," and she
+interested me in Saint Teresa, that illustrious woman so well compounded
+of mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, I could find no good
+"Life." But Thomas [`a] Kempis was a revelation! He fitted into nearly
+every 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 came
+to understand that the counsel of perfection which Christ gave to the
+rich young man was not intended for the whole world, and many fine
+passages in [`A] Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than my own.
+
+Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. I
+found him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with [`A] Kempis. His
+philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a
+very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my
+English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he
+said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even
+philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the
+works of Marcus Aurelius!"
+
+It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little
+plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art
+of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a
+very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book
+itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always
+seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by
+Ruskin 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 "The
+Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to
+form 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, probably
+because it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find a
+copy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found one
+most unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discovered
+the copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just half
+of my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. I
+must have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for I
+had 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-felt
+want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No
+doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might
+have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and
+art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately
+tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.
+
+By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made
+apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double
+and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real
+violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a
+bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green
+ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the
+effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
+to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was
+artificial, 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 book
+happens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is a
+great temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that I
+think that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must
+be judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me to
+acquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art and
+life. 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 volumes
+that graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of the
+Cathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to being
+prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find
+some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and
+pigments before he began to paint with the pen.
+
+Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which
+we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little
+by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for
+those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which
+shock the old who have forgotten what it is to be young.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+POETS AND POETRY
+
+_France--Of Maurice de Gu['e]rin_
+
+
+In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. These
+were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
+the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
+of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
+interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
+letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eug['e]nie and her
+coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
+literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
+Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.
+
+One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile
+Library--now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
+size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as to
+its shelves--had an excellent collection of volumes in French.
+
+How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that
+library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
+Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided
+by the critics of the period. I found Am['e]d['e]e Achard as interesting as
+Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even
+"La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending
+her for her "vitality." I found Madame de G['e]rardin's "La Femme qui
+D['e]teste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not
+seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed
+to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest
+and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by
+Octave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme
+Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne
+Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seigli[`e]re," by Jules
+Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of
+their predecessors.
+
+At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte de
+Chambord--Henry V., as a few of us preferred to call him. And this
+reminds me of my partisanship in things English--if I may turn for the
+moment 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 time
+attached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in England
+invariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, to
+indicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small and
+frugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host--he
+was an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant--insisted on waving
+his glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were
+drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water--whoever he might
+be--and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutal
+Hanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, might
+be still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of Mary
+Stuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary of
+Scotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!
+
+Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
+not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
+suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
+suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
+corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
+admirably correct.
+
+Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
+dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
+seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
+seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
+excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
+Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
+attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
+Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
+did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
+acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
+his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
+recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
+it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
+these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
+mentioned with rapt admiration.
+
+But to come to the poets!
+
+It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
+that I discovered Maurice de Gu['e]rin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
+from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Gu['e]rin on the ground
+of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
+account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
+looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
+negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
+Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
+find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
+Testament at times.
+
+Keats and Maurice de Gu['e]rin will be always associated in my mind. I
+discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
+eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
+considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
+whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
+intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural
+selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then
+all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Gu['e]rin.
+
+I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister
+Eug['e]nie. 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 Marie
+Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
+calm life of Eug['e]nie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to
+understand the allusions, to plunge again into the journals, letters,
+and poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin. Thus it happened that I had fallen upon
+"Le Centaure" first. It is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me
+the 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 all
+my Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and
+all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not
+occur to me then--at least I did not know it--that the great Greek
+statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that
+glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure"
+seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with
+human emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of the
+opening? 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 Eug['e]nie de
+Gu['e]rin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sister
+together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate
+and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice
+loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read
+the Journals of the De Gu['e]rins, I had leisure. A period of ill health
+stopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days that
+could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring
+days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these
+two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought
+to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for
+quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing
+the impression that Maurice de Gu['e]rin made. It was a great surprise to
+find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt
+Whitman, 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 charm[`e]d 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 Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin's little sketches of outdoor scenery--sketches
+which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any
+pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
+able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
+human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
+came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
+other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
+letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.
+
+As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
+world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
+pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin
+had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper
+on Maurice de Gu['e]rin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
+sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
+written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
+sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
+piety should be sentimental, if Eug['e]nie's sentiment can be
+characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was
+evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware
+that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the
+average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.
+
+The beloved home of Eug['e]nie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even
+more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eug['e]nie, being
+less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
+sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
+sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
+the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
+sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
+charm of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
+landscape, 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 a
+little space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short
+outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in
+this; but Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin exemplifies its value much more than any
+other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
+joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing
+this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to
+recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_
+which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent
+amusements.
+
+The devotion of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin to her brother resembles that of
+Madame de S['e]vign['e] for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was
+George Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her
+characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the
+Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De
+Gu['e]rin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the
+reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now
+probably forgotten, and to go back to Keats.
+
+After Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek
+than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Gu['e]rin,
+and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
+life; 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 is
+too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved,
+while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of
+a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for
+the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.
+When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was
+not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.
+The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal
+laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to
+study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry
+Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot
+have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected
+after his best verse had been written.
+
+Maurice de Gu['e]rin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in
+his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and
+director, P[`e]re de Lamennais--the "M. F['e]li" of the little paradise
+of la Ch['e]nie. To the delight of some of the more independent and
+emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand,
+Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have
+tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be
+almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it
+did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.
+
+De Gu['e]rin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing
+poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
+"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
+great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual.
+Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
+conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
+talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
+enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
+Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Tr['e]butien's
+"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin." It would be folly
+for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the
+atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
+delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
+Eug['e]nie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
+feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
+beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"
+
+One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
+from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
+this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
+imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
+the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
+Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage,
+and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
+of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
+secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
+Maurice de Gu['e]rin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
+common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
+the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
+his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
+this!--Maurice and Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, Keats, Madame de S['e]vign['e],
+Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
+related.
+
+In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
+not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
+that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
+take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
+who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.
+
+The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the
+dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while
+they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite
+process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
+honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen
+in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this
+teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and
+obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman
+Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
+to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived
+and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
+Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make
+the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the
+Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted
+were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the
+glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!
+
+The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard
+work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Centaure," to read
+joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While
+browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of
+Tourgu['e]neff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found
+Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has
+now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of
+Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these
+poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the
+hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from
+Oxford 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 he
+had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect,
+treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in
+merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
+poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases,
+very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and
+partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence
+Stedman 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 AEtna, 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 in
+English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
+in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
+swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
+delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
+degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
+extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
+against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
+the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
+silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
+Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.
+
+But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Gu['e]rin lead us!
+Here is another link--Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, and his jewelled and chiselled
+sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
+the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."
+
+      _Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre m[^e]me s'use.
+    Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse
+    Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_
+
+      _Et seul le dur m['e]tal que l'amour fit docile
+    Garde encore en sa fleur, aux m['e]dailles d'argent,
+    L'immortelle beaut['e] 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 he
+known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
+rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
+poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
+Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
+sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
+heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
+Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
+paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
+_enrag['e]_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
+confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
+even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
+a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
+thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
+prairie.
+
+
+_Dante_
+
+A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may
+find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is
+dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous
+tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
+once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two
+conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.
+"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of
+reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On
+the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous
+books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the
+windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."
+
+Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the
+winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's
+"Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially in
+country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many
+journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have
+taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.
+Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably
+learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of
+this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good
+books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.
+
+The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
+proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
+talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
+enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
+height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
+capable 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 rimed
+translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
+growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
+are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
+the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
+wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
+order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
+one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
+necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
+enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
+the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
+valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
+occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
+"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
+contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
+English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
+Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
+translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
+the 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 Bo[:e]thius, and
+     although we know that Dante had made a special study of Bo[:e]thius,
+     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 death
+and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
+means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the
+green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was
+the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen
+souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific
+Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
+in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts
+of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on
+as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the
+"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any
+sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church
+Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that
+all 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 to
+that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the
+Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict
+Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their
+Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the
+merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and
+of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or
+sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in
+this world.
+
+And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant,
+among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and
+opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the
+Voltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in Hell!
+And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this
+Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the
+way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time,
+is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents of
+Constantine's donation were mediaeval forgeries. Dante believed, however,
+that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being
+of 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 the
+Faithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as in
+the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the
+Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book,
+suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So
+may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming
+under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?
+
+Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor
+does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There
+is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the poet's faith--
+
+    _Cos[`i] spir[`o] di quell' amore acceso;
+      indi soggiunse: "Assai bene [`e] trascorsa
+      d'esta moneta gi[`a] 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 virt[`u] si fonda,
+    onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia
+      dello Spirito Santo, ch' [`e] diffusa
+      in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia,_
+
+    _[`E] 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 the
+better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in
+modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added
+the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--the
+musical 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 Pope
+Gregory that saved Trajan.
+
+When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we
+find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The
+"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For
+instance, 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 his
+widow 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 may
+long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul
+in 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 the
+victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
+three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought
+guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
+says,
+
+    _E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta
+      la riverenza delle somme chiavi,
+      che tu tenesti nella vita lieta
+      l' userei parole ancor pi[`u] 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 his
+generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It
+is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great
+reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are
+hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever
+the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest
+in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his
+portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"
+with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace
+into something very beautiful, was new.
+
+We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson
+while we were not especially struck by those mediaeval lay figures which
+he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They
+were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that
+the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our
+eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
+Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is
+the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality,
+a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and
+scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a
+Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The
+result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the
+man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary
+expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is
+of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
+they 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 Arthur
+Quiller-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 rapidly
+becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
+Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
+might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
+emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
+before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
+into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
+jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
+the 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 more
+splendid and appealing?
+
+The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
+itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
+were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
+requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
+is beyond the touch of time. The women in Fran[c,]ois Villon's "Ballade of
+Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
+beauty 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 it
+was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
+that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
+perhaps eternal.
+
+Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
+is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
+damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
+singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
+sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
+and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
+produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
+or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
+intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
+age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
+discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
+Le['o]n; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
+attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
+revolutionists.
+
+The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a
+high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear
+for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the
+use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but
+they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she
+has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and
+even splendid. But there are others!
+
+It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read
+Coventry 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 the
+proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The
+Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and
+Sleep," 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 is
+a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each
+stanza. 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" is
+merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would
+be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent
+through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of
+rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of
+sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely
+accessory 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 of
+academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the
+slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real
+success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
+hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical
+poets 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, and
+even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
+Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
+tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
+Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
+masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
+fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
+of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
+Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
+Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
+rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
+hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
+action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
+the thought.
+
+But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
+perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
+poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
+some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
+outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
+Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
+compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
+unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
+neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
+her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
+throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
+on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.
+
+It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English
+Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the
+time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at
+all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the
+odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English
+Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has
+freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied
+charm, 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 the
+opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect
+expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the
+intangible "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 is
+not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.
+
+Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse
+which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
+imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
+been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
+indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
+repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
+is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
+of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
+established 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 time
+that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
+curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted
+the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that
+Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that
+"Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not
+detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons
+brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?
+
+And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
+Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
+been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
+ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
+young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
+Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
+much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
+Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
+of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
+Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
+Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
+devout 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 imitate
+him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
+easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
+dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
+with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
+poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some
+noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
+passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
+existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
+gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
+improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
+carved 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, though
+they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
+was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
+passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
+few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.
+
+Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could
+meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts
+in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us
+represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the
+Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another
+thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a
+marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.
+
+Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had
+a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after
+verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a
+breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across
+the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I
+wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or
+Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or
+even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the
+choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And
+there 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 beginning
+to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
+lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
+Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
+want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
+young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
+private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
+cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
+advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
+astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
+Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
+their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and
+amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
+of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas['e] and cynical
+and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
+many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.
+
+Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights
+and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In
+England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than
+Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the
+English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they
+wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.
+
+I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
+Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
+never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
+_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
+for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
+"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
+amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
+closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
+obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
+"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
+Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
+cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
+trifle!
+
+    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 he
+hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans,
+Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo
+accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the
+New.
+
+When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully
+examined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue and
+explanations, 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 la
+Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as
+an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to
+say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his
+cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of
+modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about
+an old-fashioned a[:e]roplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
+centre of something interesting.
+
+The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear
+and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the
+very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the
+principle 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 appeal
+to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary
+to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw
+in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the
+poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good
+example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it
+is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not
+ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the
+expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is
+certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings
+of the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!
+
+Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, in "Les Troph['e]es," is both an Imagist and a
+Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without
+her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the
+professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and
+angry 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, but
+who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as
+an 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 character
+might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to
+ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all,
+when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the
+Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of
+Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse
+unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
+series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven
+of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
+Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.
+
+Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
+it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
+is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
+relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
+could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
+Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
+poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring."
+And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demod['e]_
+because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediaeval
+knights cut out of pasteboard.
+
+By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
+statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
+modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
+test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
+different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
+those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
+"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
+cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
+Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
+Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
+Kreymborg and others new--_chacun [`a] son go[^u]t_--I feel that by
+comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are
+poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the
+Christians.
+
+Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
+shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
+neither 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 than
+Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
+Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
+really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
+religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
+themselves.
+
+If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
+he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
+the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
+painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
+the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
+them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
+Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
+poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
+efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
+which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
+Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
+struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
+Christianity 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 a
+statuette of Leda and the Swan or Dana[:e] and the Descent of Jupiter as a
+shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
+blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
+a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
+beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
+impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
+unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
+past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
+write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
+very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
+the pulsations of the hearts of others.
+
+Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
+shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
+believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
+to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
+Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
+Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
+manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
+illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.
+
+Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love
+in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be
+united with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.
+They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that
+ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the
+mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.
+
+Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but
+in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the
+search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the
+splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost
+fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of
+Saint 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 poets
+pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a
+corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious
+colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a
+pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.
+
+To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this
+seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;
+and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity
+did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante,
+in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that
+the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of
+gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when
+Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks
+were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers
+represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their
+lives.
+
+The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from
+despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome
+came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had
+children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any
+god 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 be
+united 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 a
+man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CERTAIN NOVELISTS
+
+
+My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens was an evolution rather than a
+discovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby," the
+book became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimes
+felt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not know
+him!
+
+Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and that
+chuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian guide
+introduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joys
+indeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind of
+humour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities of
+Artemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.
+Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages, my pleasure in the
+works 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 a
+time. 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 human
+interest, a lack of coarseness, which placed it immeasurably above that
+of Mark Twain.
+
+The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the
+greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens
+redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and
+deeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds
+apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I
+know persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they could
+in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as a
+masterpiece.
+
+It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests his
+narrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack of
+knowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for an
+appearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual.
+That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kind
+friend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many other
+authors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easily
+understood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain.
+
+Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very different
+causes. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of an
+understanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
+spirituality without which no great work can be effective. It was
+because Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his
+study of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from the
+point 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 new
+to him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel is
+nevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with a
+France that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as the
+mauve tints through which certain artists see their figures and
+landscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
+lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of a
+great power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without that
+training which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sources
+of French history.
+
+In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the power to reach the
+sources; it was an inability to understand the character of the woman
+whom he reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and an invincible
+ignorance of the character of her time. Mark Twain was modern; but
+modern in the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry Finn" and the
+other young Americans--whom our youth are expected to like, if not to
+imitate--are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those libraries who
+recommend typical books to eager juvenile readers. But let that pass for
+the moment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any man or woman of
+refinement who will hold a brief in defense of the vulgarity of "A
+Connecticut 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 world
+over--cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The average American
+reads Mark Twain only to be amused, or to recall the adventures of a
+time not far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, whether my
+compatriots are in the habit of looking into books for a philosophy or
+not, or of considering the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it
+does not follow that it is to their credit if they neglect an analysis
+which cultivated readers in other countries seldom omit.
+
+If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety
+which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but
+as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions,
+I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American
+reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has
+become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a
+time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all
+self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of
+culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's
+statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not
+think that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or of
+Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more
+pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of
+Autolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"
+
+"You who admire Don Quixote," said an infuriated Mark Twainite, "should
+not talk of coarseness. There are pages in that romance of Cervantes
+which I would not allow my son or daughter to read."
+
+One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side to
+show what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
+is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were not
+his. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not mean
+innocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admit
+that the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was no
+conspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness,
+however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither
+Cervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.
+
+To them, even the ordinary things of life have a certain sacerdotal
+quality; but Mark Twain abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors
+a vacuum. To say that he has affected the American spirit or the
+American heart would be to go too far--for Americans are irreverent only
+on the surface. It seems to me that they are the most reverent people in
+the world toward those essential qualities which make up the spiritual
+parts of life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is just at present
+the one author to whom all Europe and all outlanders point as the great
+typical American writer!
+
+That a delightful kind of American humour may exist without
+exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many
+joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that
+are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm
+and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the
+American 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, so
+pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the
+knowledge 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 was
+during 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 the
+maze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrived
+just when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was the
+only real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine as
+the sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed from
+the earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not be
+forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived.
+
+Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had in
+the past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one of
+the most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" was
+one of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a better
+novel 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 be
+forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
+professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
+succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
+pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
+talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
+memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
+remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phoebe Junior"--finds a slowly
+decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
+"Les Rois en Exil['e]" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
+literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
+"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
+to be unread.
+
+To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially
+bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series
+is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo
+books to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracy
+which the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes adapted to
+the subway is supposed to indicate, is a real menace when one discovers
+that "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!
+
+We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity, but it is my belief that
+Sodom and Gomorrah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of that
+time had made it possible to keep books like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" in
+general circulation!
+
+It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as long as English men and
+women of the upper and middle classes continued to exist, he might go on
+writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And the same thing might be
+said of Booth Tarkington in relation to his unique chronicles of
+youth--that is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal Soul. His
+types are American, but there are Americas and Americas. Usage permits
+us to use a term for our part of the continent to which our Canadian and
+South and Central Americans and Mexicans might reasonably object; but
+while 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 in
+Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances would have made him
+different. The consciousness of class distinction would have made him
+old before his time; and though he might be just as amusing--he would
+not have been amusing quite in the same way.
+
+And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. Tarkington's imaginative
+synthesis. He is individual and of his own soil; he knows very well that
+it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to invent; he has only to
+perceive with those rare gifts of perception which he possesses. It all
+seems so easy until you try to do it yourself!
+
+The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageant
+of the "Table Round," is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but
+no child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child has
+suffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainable
+hardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something or
+other prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parents
+are bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibres
+of his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrod
+has gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be so
+unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"
+Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real as
+those parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens is
+pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybody
+admits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
+to be pathetic.
+
+One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful situations which
+seem to ripple from the pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being
+the 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's
+entrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's best. Penrod is expected to
+find, according to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the
+cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young lady unengaged, who
+was Miss Rennsdale, aged eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his
+call.
+
+     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 have
+so conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
+gets it just right. He has created boy characters which will live
+because they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after Mark
+Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's "Child's
+History of England." The two books have various gross faults in common
+and these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
+says 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 do
+very 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 no
+reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
+papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
+defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
+for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
+fact 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, the
+more modern definition would have been very different from what the
+English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
+a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
+England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
+by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
+exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
+Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
+thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
+often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
+analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
+was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
+if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
+gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
+Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
+Weller. Why not?
+
+There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes,
+which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms
+of the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out,
+though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lower
+classes of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because they
+are satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Weller
+represents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's
+"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When one
+examines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
+lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the
+English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all
+conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be
+a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor
+Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say
+it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions as Dickens was.
+
+Dickens had the art of making insupportable bores most interesting. This
+was an art in which the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but
+Dickens's methods compared to hers are like those of a scene painter
+when compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times when
+Dickens is consciously "common," and then he is almost unbearable; but
+this objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers." This book is
+inartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not
+grow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They are
+spontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes
+to do--and all the world loves a lover who loves his work.
+
+There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate the
+romantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby." There are no really romantic
+qualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero,
+no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom
+suddenly as the branch in "Tannh[:a]user" bloomed. Even Dickens can work no
+miracle there.
+
+It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of those
+gentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as his
+predecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "Tristram
+Shandy," a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones," very
+tiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of
+eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was
+brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
+and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian
+Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
+analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance
+between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the
+adventures of the peerless Pickwick.
+
+If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, he
+ought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The Poor
+Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias," and others too
+numerous to mention.
+
+The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows older, perhaps becomes a
+student of Dickens, and is surprised to find that the development of
+Dickens is much more marked and easily noted than the development of
+Thackeray. In fact, Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier,
+sprang into the public light fully equipped and fully armed. Both these
+men had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportion
+before they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art and
+life and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
+begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither method nor proportion; and he
+who reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new and
+good perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically,
+it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks that
+flavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get such
+thorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens
+sacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in it
+that gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles
+or of 'Tilda Price.
+
+Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography," which ought to be a textbook
+in all those practical classes of literature that work to turn out
+self-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of a
+novel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot in
+the works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt to
+summarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
+
+Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
+read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
+an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
+and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
+thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
+1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
+Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
+Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
+find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
+and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
+was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
+almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
+read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
+winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
+bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
+had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
+a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
+chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!
+
+George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. No
+well-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
+Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. The
+heroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, but
+she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificiality
+of Kingsley's "Hypatia," which I read at almost the same time, made me
+admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth could
+ever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or Catherine
+Seton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring with
+Blackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholastic
+philosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consomm['e]_ of St.
+Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemed
+truer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as
+_papier-mach['e]_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of the
+time. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history,
+but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and
+as "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's reading
+of Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, of
+course. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and the
+scene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel,
+give me "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and probably fewer will
+read it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the genius
+of a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that it
+almost 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 that
+whenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. In
+a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. It
+is true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not
+very narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of the
+most pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all his
+life is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, or
+to preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommend
+unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature have
+undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools
+of critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; and
+the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval and
+condemnation. 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 it
+is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a
+book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint
+Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the
+relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of
+pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this
+charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal ch[^a]teau, he
+never 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, or
+perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his
+friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could
+not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that
+the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back
+to him; he could not see the old ch[^a]teau and the water in the moonlight,
+or conceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved of their duty. I
+can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as
+I read the "Letters" of Madame de S['e]vign['e] or the "Memoirs" of the Duc
+de Saint Simon.
+
+I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English
+translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--the
+interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon.
+Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
+think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to
+become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic
+author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without
+the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture
+of Mademoiselle de la Valli[`e]re looking hopelessly out of the window of
+her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the
+chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly,
+holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis
+XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?
+
+But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simon
+and Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
+and ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has his
+pet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age who
+gives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and
+"Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believe
+that? 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 he
+considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard to
+exist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in a
+number of the _Atlantic Monthly_ not so long ago there is a vivid,
+pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portion
+of 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. I
+might incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a direct
+question about books, one does incriminate oneself.
+
+However, to return to what I was saying--while I love the "Memoirs of
+Cardinal de Retz," I adore--to be a little extravagant--the "Letters of
+Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does not know the real story of the
+life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the
+brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really
+fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real
+reformer in the France of his time.
+
+Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of
+Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the
+contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the
+Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the
+worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good
+peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He
+earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de S['e]vign['e], for
+which any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a
+lifetime. But even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he
+gives a picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is
+shamelessly true. No living man to-day in political office, although he
+might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so
+interestingly shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if
+you read him in French, you discover that he knew how to make
+literature.
+
+The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so
+penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
+have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
+But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
+the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
+literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
+General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
+Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
+Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
+reputation 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 point
+of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in
+the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to
+an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where
+"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the
+clergymen 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 younger
+son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his
+faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his
+best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with
+Bassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois de
+Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the
+Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my
+duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the
+utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's
+destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."
+
+The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The
+Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less
+diffuse, and, not writing _feuilletons_, are not forced to be diffuse.
+The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can
+hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go
+directly to the sources of his romances.
+
+Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of
+Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
+were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more
+about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through
+certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that
+I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could
+be 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 as
+Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but,
+then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has
+never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood
+that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is
+sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it
+should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time
+the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim
+the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a
+young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a
+pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's
+translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
+fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
+reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
+them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
+Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _[`a] la
+mode de_ Madame de Sta[:e]l.
+
+For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive,
+but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time before
+and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this,
+is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best
+One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five
+books.
+
+In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country
+efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to
+France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French
+people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his
+memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
+faults 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 a
+venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of
+contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the
+aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.
+
+His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of
+the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called
+"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in
+that class of systematic _rou['e]s_" who were astonished at the virtue of
+the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in
+that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have
+not yet found them.
+
+In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
+great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
+soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
+and Philippe ['E]galit['e] were the most fascinating characters of the
+French Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy
+who was listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to
+exclaim suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about
+Judas!"
+
+To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quote
+a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness,"
+said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of
+Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the
+pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of human
+nature."
+
+This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for
+enlightening 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 Morris
+a hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "I
+may, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is the
+father 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 de
+Flahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelity
+of the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; De
+Launey's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered
+men lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is not
+disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock,
+to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock
+the Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in the
+belief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day,
+he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He is
+corroborated 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 to
+me that there is no more interesting and useful book on the French
+Revolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near De
+Tocqueville's "Ancient R['e]gime" 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 be
+chosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of the
+House of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic,
+just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all the
+cold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles of
+government which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against
+Burr, 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 profound
+reverence, 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. Morris
+believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as
+Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of
+Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
+the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?
+
+I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many
+times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the
+Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the
+kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This
+autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
+authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is
+the 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 us
+an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels
+ever elaborated.
+
+What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American
+atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of
+doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself
+as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his
+caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
+self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he
+wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew
+he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of
+literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public
+servant.
+
+As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt.
+Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained
+leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the
+same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of
+sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashion
+in our day to declare that society is against us when we have to work
+unremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing,
+and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as applied
+to him--inspiring!
+
+In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice against
+Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans," as we were all
+taught to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all softened toward
+Dickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told story
+of the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his mother
+without believing that the recording angel in no way holds her
+responsible for her rather vulgar book.
+
+How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of the
+books written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! How
+he managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tell
+us. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of the
+pious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray," and
+although paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly because
+there was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "The
+Warden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aught
+in malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very good
+reading. 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 from
+a 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 professing
+Christians.
+
+     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 S['e]vign['e], 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 Georgia
+girl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a little
+volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find
+life 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 acquaintance
+who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!
+
+Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens
+to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de
+S['e]vign['e] when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad
+books ought to be preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost
+better for the young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is
+to gauge the value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity,
+after all, is not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a
+certain age is very desirable.
+
+While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and
+value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
+into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the
+subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
+Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn
+from 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 is
+not 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 on
+the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be
+our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of
+cheerfulness.
+
+Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant
+town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian
+industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.
+Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be
+very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that
+delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the
+really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be
+real he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhaps
+because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic
+sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters.
+But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright nor
+Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to
+assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
+had no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in their
+day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered
+to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be
+taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet
+which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene
+Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher
+philosophical 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 be
+shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or of
+the Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from the
+responsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors of
+the description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted by
+Madame de S['e]vign['e] or to revel among the groups of Italians who range
+through 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 be
+treated 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 be
+read nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as a
+model of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy,
+literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such passages
+as 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 beloved
+Pepys!
+
+One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn had been able to decipher
+some of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have written
+this 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 look
+on Charles II. as one of the weakest of English kings; but when we come
+to enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is much
+to be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England under
+difficult circumstances than conventional history has given him credit
+for.
+
+It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed to
+me as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you
+what 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 the
+tops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with an
+understanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, though
+it may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody finds
+in gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us
+know our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves--but perhaps
+more clearly--can never be rooted out of normal human nature.
+
+I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and I
+sat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, and
+by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there was
+always Madame de S['e]vign['e]. Much was hoped from the long-promised
+"Memoirs of Talleyrand." They came; they were disappointing.
+
+Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in a
+way with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. And
+this is "The Education of Henry Adams," and almost contemporaneously the
+"Letters of William James." It is easy to understand the delight with
+which intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams."
+Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about
+in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--that
+education consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, and
+regarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward in
+one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans
+are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which
+Samuel 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; it
+is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
+looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on
+them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The
+judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with
+horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry
+Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of
+Cardinal Newman!
+
+There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable
+and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while
+Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it,
+Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
+not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal
+Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much
+above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--but
+intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough
+to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but
+reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God that
+troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of
+pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a
+personal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, God
+Himself.
+
+Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in
+a personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others
+who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely
+negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without
+understanding 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. It
+is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our
+political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no
+other man that make his book supremely interesting.
+
+The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no
+longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know
+that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a
+"best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail
+the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that
+its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion,
+and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to
+purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed
+with a scornful wave of the hand.
+
+When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it
+was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as
+far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air of
+pathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it became
+the _Century_--of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the
+editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
+his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the
+heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.
+
+Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams
+lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
+by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty
+wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful.
+Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be
+good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal
+of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to
+struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern
+Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
+compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the
+enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can
+see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight
+that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is
+both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry
+Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of
+the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst
+of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no man
+more pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men are
+free, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does not
+always take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities of
+his book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with
+him, 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 "The
+Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More than
+that, 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 too
+strong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were not
+egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit or
+self-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public,
+"The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himself
+without writing about himself. This seems very much like a platitude.
+And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. If
+anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took a
+tone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below the
+average 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 delicate
+tint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions and
+such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! He
+is the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the
+discoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the real
+architecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song of
+Roland." How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem in
+comparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are so
+laboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glance
+with which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He has
+his limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects on
+the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, the
+half-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and English
+who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help giving
+grateful thanks for having found Henry Adams.
+
+To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems to
+be that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the military
+architecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with the
+beauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more
+receptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would have
+discovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture and
+the cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, have
+profited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that Henry
+Adams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize that
+he would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, and
+which many of them are sincerely grateful for.
+
+The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over
+again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books
+to 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 Best
+Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own
+shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts,
+soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are
+not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his
+critical vocation; Bruneti[`e]re has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey
+has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really
+good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little
+material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth
+while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background
+and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are
+many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood.
+Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who
+once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of
+cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into
+great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that
+half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!
+
+It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should
+appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the
+Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We
+had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman
+and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories;
+but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
+of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a
+state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.
+
+In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and
+Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the
+modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the
+novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which
+I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I
+found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is
+always "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 Walter
+Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever
+attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of
+enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted,
+so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical
+persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same.
+Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on
+without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly
+Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I
+rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine
+in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many
+magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's few
+pages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader--by a
+loving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books.
+
+You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento where
+Lady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine
+flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bring
+back to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius
+Caesar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together with that
+group 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 Caesar 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 Caesar."
+
+     "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 Caesar, "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 James
+speak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the very
+beginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of the
+little circle about him. The conversation goes on--Mr. James never loses
+sight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the second
+part--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 already
+begun 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 _[:u]berhaupt_ 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," that
+it _is_ the very essence of literature. _Scientia_ is truth, or
+conclusions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the personality
+of the speaker or writer. But literature, to be literature, must be
+personal. It is good literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
+accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader like myself does not,
+perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently with the philosophy of William
+James as represented in these "Letters." One has a languid interest in
+knowing what he thought of Bergson and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but
+for the constant reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and
+St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal
+impressions of both the little things and the big things of our
+contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you
+are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read
+the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may
+resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself
+so tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether young
+Henry 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 by
+drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated
+by 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 begun
+to 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 William
+James" too frivolously, told me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to
+counteract my mediaeval philosophy and too cheerful view of life. Just as
+if I had not struggled with Mr. Wells, and irritated myself into a
+temperature in trying to get through his latest preachments! I am not
+quite 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 have
+said.
+
+     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 of
+my mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man of
+talent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man of
+genius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potent
+Deity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; but
+Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an education
+such as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
+bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians,
+are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms
+seriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us that
+the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not
+begin with--_Qui fit, Maecenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authors
+of fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_,"--who
+insist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
+might have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much good
+taste 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 with
+the ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do you
+think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if he
+insisted 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 in
+his translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
+something as well as himself. It does not become me to recommend
+books--everybody to his own taste!--but I should like to say that for
+those 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 Marie
+Antoinette at Versailles, the translations of our dear Horatius by Lord
+Lytton is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the most charming
+and 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 other
+preachers, who ought to confine themselves to finer things, desired that
+Horace should have gone further and told us what kind of books we ought
+to read in our old age. His choice was naturally limited; it was
+impossible for him to buy a book every week, or every month. The
+publishers were not so active in those days. But he might have indicated
+the kind of book that old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
+have tried "Robinson Crusoe,"--the unequalled--and "Swiss Family
+Robinson"; but they seem too grown up for me now. I have taken to "King
+Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that perfect gem of
+excitement and illusion, "The Mutineers," by Charles Boardman Hawes. I
+read it, and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising bookseller
+will unblushingly compile a library for the old, and begin it with "The
+Mutineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the Near Old is that the
+fear of shocking the Young makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
+they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they express intense
+interest in new and ponderous books, in the presence of Youth--when they
+ought to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. But if the Old
+really want to save their faces, and at the same time enjoy glimpses of
+that fountain of youth which we long for at every age, let them acquire
+two books--Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded Man" and "The Quest of El
+Dorado," by Dr. J. A. Zahm, whose _nom de plume_ was H. J. Mozans. There
+you have the real stuff. Together, these two books are a combination of
+just what the Old need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke he
+cannot dream with any facility when he grows old; and if he has not
+possessed himself of these two volumes, he cannot have acquired that
+basis 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 when
+it deals with the El Dorado; it has all the most attractive qualities of
+a romance.
+
+But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob, Son of Battle," which the
+author of "Alice For Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest
+animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is nobly human, and the
+Black Killer devilishly human, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs,
+invented by clever writers. A great book! It is too thrilling; it
+reminds of "Wuthering Heights"; I shall, therefore, read this evening
+some of Henry Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with "Pride
+and Prejudice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BOOKS AT RANDOM
+
+
+Among nature books that gave me many happy hours on the banks of the
+Delaware--imperial river!--is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow."
+"Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the twelve labours of Hercules than
+attempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the area of an
+average ramble!" _Soit!_ And better than that, "to feel that whatever
+creature we may meet will prove companionable--that is, no stranger, but
+rather an amusing and companionable friend--assures both pleasure and
+profit whenever we chance abroad."
+
+Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his companion can forget the
+extracts from the diary of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
+the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced the number of wild ducks and
+geese, he says, even then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was often
+black 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 as
+frequently 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 skunk
+cabbage, 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 of
+raccoons. "Foolish creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning coons
+are forced to quest or die."
+
+For a stroll by the Thames--I mean the New England Thames--there is no
+book like Ik Marvel's "Dream Life," but for a day near the
+Delaware--imperial river!--give me "Upland and Meadow."
+
+And then with what assurance of satisfaction may one turn for
+refreshment to the continual charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby"
+and "Pepacton." Burroughs's opinions upon the problems of humanity are
+more tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
+him among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaring
+lark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, to
+look with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is to
+begin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no other
+author gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers of
+the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the English
+thrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades.
+
+There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but he
+might not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasant
+Englishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as he
+said, they were "so homely." In fact, they were rather pretty girls, and
+he had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
+with which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him
+at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully
+"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the
+refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
+in the eighties there were still _pr['e]cieuses_. The truth is that his
+rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his
+style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the
+good soil of the country.
+
+Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I
+will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by
+Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame
+Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us
+an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's,
+like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character
+of 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 mental
+dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of
+"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find
+the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything
+more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is
+Madame 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 and
+the manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is more
+like an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ to
+which she would prefer to be compared.
+
+There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame de
+Boigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no real
+harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and gives
+the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a
+most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a
+writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully
+uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry
+VIII. But this is a digression.
+
+Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne as
+displaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr. Mencken
+cannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in his
+desire 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, Sir
+Thomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a little
+into the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modern
+novelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life is
+purely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
+writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, or
+his 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 leads
+an interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldom
+talks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art of
+meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful,
+is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how to
+cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
+Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his
+imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a
+book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points.
+For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the
+difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in
+this 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 of
+this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "I
+can't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous that
+human beings should exist who take this attitude toward Sir Thomas
+Browne, his "Urn Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems almost more
+miraculous that this attitude should be taken toward Montaigne, and that
+some folk should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the pleasant,
+curtailed edition of John Florio's translation, edited by Justin Huntly
+McCarthy! These small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot have
+the original French, or the leisure to browse over the big volume of
+Florio's old book as it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an
+agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It somehow or other reminds
+one of that appalling series of cutdown "Classics," so largely
+recommended to a public that is seduced to run and read. A condensed
+edition of Froissart may do very well for boys; but who can visualize
+the 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, to
+read whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and "The New
+Machiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay," will be remembered when "Mr.
+Britling"--by the way, what did Mr. Britling see through?--shall be
+forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn to Montaigne. It amazed me
+to hear Montaigne called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward the
+eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and he has fewer superstitions.
+It was his humanity and his love for religion that turned him from
+Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for Plato. He is a real
+amateur 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 by
+Brutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
+that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather know
+what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on
+the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He
+had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that
+keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to
+hear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpets
+that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing
+"jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out
+the 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'oeuvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the
+translation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis sive
+liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is a
+good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar
+to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself
+in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and
+he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute
+as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The
+discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns
+him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to
+his contemporaries on the subject.
+
+In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together
+in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy
+Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.
+
+"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life
+than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating
+Europe from the Middle Ages."
+
+It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de
+Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the
+precious sentences of Thomas [`a] Kempis. They are foils; at first sight
+there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel
+de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with
+Thomas [`a] Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being
+Montaignes, Thomas [`a] Kempis would have written for God alone. He would
+have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had
+erected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitely
+carved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
+toward the people and not the side toward the Presence of God, it was
+entirely plain and unornamented!
+
+The friendship of Thomas [`a] Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson might
+easily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
+supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling might
+exist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be as
+nothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellous
+guide to life. The translations of Thomas [`a] Kempis into English vary in
+value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of [`A] Kempis in
+deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing
+Thomas [`a] Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of
+his 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 during
+the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul
+and divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas [`a] Kempis
+would never have written "The Following of Christ." The Bible, even the
+New Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul's
+Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what better interpretation of the
+doctrines of Christ as applied to everyday life can there be found than
+in this precious little book?
+
+You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather what comfort you can from the
+philosophy of Thoreau's "Walden"--which might, after all, be more
+comfortable if it were more pagan. The Pan of Thoreau was a respectable
+Pan, because he was a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in Keble's
+"Christian Year" if you can; but [`A] Kempis overtops all! It is strange,
+too, what an appeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers in
+Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with every day. And George
+Eliot was a remarkable example of this, for, in spite of her habitual
+reverence, she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox dogmas. Another
+paradox seems to be in the fact that Thomas [`a] Kempis appeals so directly
+and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to those who have secluded
+themselves from the world. At first, I must confess that I found this a
+great obstacle to my joy in having found him.
+
+If Montaigne frequently drove me to [`A] Kempis, [`A] Kempis almost as
+frequently in the beginning drove me back to Montaigne. It was not
+until I had become more familiar with the New Testament that I began to
+see that [`A] Kempis spoke as one soul to another. In this world for him
+there were only three Facts--God, his own soul, and the soul to whom he
+spoke.
+
+It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many of my friends who looked
+on the Last Supper as a mere symbol of love and hospitality, should
+cling to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. Even the example
+of an intellectual friend of mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in
+Italy, could not make it clear. He often asserted that he did not
+believe in God; and yet he was desolate if on a certain day in the year
+he did not pay some kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
+Padua!
+
+I have known him to break up a party in the Adirondacks in order to
+reach the nearest church where it was possible for him to burn a candle
+in honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious anniversary! As long
+as he exists, as long as he continues to burn candles--_les chandelles
+d'un ath['e]e_--I shall accept without understanding the enthusiasm of so
+many lovers of [`A] Kempis, who cut out the mystical longings for the
+reception of that divine food which Christ gave out in the upper room.
+[`A] 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, [`A] Kempis speaks more poignantly
+than even David, in that great cry of the heart and soul, the De
+Profundis:
+
+     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 [`a] Kempis gives the remedies, the
+only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the
+sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect
+are worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
+never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knew
+their hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedy
+so effective as that which [`A] Kempis offers.
+
+It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fear
+of hurting or offending the Beloved.
+
+The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War and
+on 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 the
+state traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriously
+combatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versailles
+and Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles which
+guided 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 on
+November 12, 1921, would have dared to assert these unmoral principles,
+accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, in
+principle? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholy
+novelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life of
+the Middle Ages.
+
+There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was kept
+alive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's
+world, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A better
+understanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton less
+autocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaire
+less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic lately
+named a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and of
+Catherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir Thomas
+Browne 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 Sir
+Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the
+politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of
+either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth
+century, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together.
+
+Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and
+one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.
+This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears
+in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told
+that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his
+family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that
+he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is,
+therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The
+American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in
+our universities are those which concern themselves with written and
+spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools
+and 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 so
+constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into
+which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language
+which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us
+that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
+throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
+the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true
+in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was
+fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles
+which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal
+Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln
+himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than
+the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten
+almost 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; and
+then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of
+English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of
+the 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 or
+of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote
+Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with
+correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
+read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant
+White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The
+Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of
+writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"
+was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or
+the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is
+not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in
+the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and
+nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them
+with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved
+as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a
+good deal.
+
+The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of
+Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class of
+Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the
+matter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord
+Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several
+examples of this.
+
+"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's
+Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all
+its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who
+habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as
+an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious
+over what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis," which he said
+a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have
+known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of
+the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody," Mr. Mencken
+shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
+convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on
+the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
+can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word
+"consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in the
+First Baptist Church at high noon"!
+
+In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" is
+better than "elevator," and "station" better than "d['e]pot." Though these
+are departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often when
+our critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. I
+have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated English
+traditions 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 one
+occasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," for
+those "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; and
+he spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such composition
+really existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seen
+approaching with an unmistakable "pie," the kind supposed by the readers
+of advertisements to be made by "mothers," and ordered hastily because
+of the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest tried
+to 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 London
+visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that
+"muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when
+I 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 always
+provided with little dishes, like butter plates, for the discarded cups.
+His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learning
+who laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary,
+and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an education
+in himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when he
+came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell from
+grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my
+search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask
+him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape
+from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not
+lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!
+
+Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in
+England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
+Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches
+of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used by
+Mr. 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 go
+very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in
+Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a
+little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was
+because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The
+little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel
+Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus
+ventris 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 regard
+to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
+quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language,
+another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
+tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of
+strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably
+precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this
+usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted
+at 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 more
+than a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy French
+preacher who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" as "pluff" had
+much excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluer
+de lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How many
+conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!
+
+There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or
+more 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 S['e]vign['e], Beveridge's
+"Life" of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book
+for odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a
+precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify
+the quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thick
+flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner is
+announced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!
+
+It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of English
+grammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
+and of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner in
+which Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
+Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir
+Conan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, let
+them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. Mencken's statements on the
+growth of the English language! In my time we were expected to take
+Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt that
+his principles have been repeated by every writer on style, including
+Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition," since Mr.
+Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principles
+reminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he met
+Beatrice.
+
+There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as a
+science and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while he
+provokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in Robert
+Louis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications in
+style in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.
+
+And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a little
+volume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the
+terrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It is
+Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." And if one wants to know
+how to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does not
+come by nature--there is "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville, the close
+friend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken must
+love him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _fl[^a]neur_--the
+chief business of a _fl[^a]neur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in old
+Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows;
+but the _fl[^a]neur_ among books finds none of his shop-windows
+unrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of a
+word that sounded something like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every
+Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and they
+often did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you
+should never say "druggist." I trust that it is no breach of confidence
+to repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modern
+Philadelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languages
+in his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for the
+boys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
+lad 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 New
+York City, at least the beginning of one American language--the language
+of the street.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I have
+often asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure and
+even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. For
+the plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although I
+believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to a
+really good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Of
+memoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Cr['e]quy have
+always 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 the
+Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and
+even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth
+returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so
+admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all
+atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now
+comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries
+including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth
+living!
+
+I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David
+whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
+me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise
+Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am
+surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its
+splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious
+visions of truth at a white heat.
+
+Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a
+picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
+didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no
+great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
+preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never
+could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a
+great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see
+that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a
+cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh
+the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the
+first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's
+Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of
+the passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for a
+poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for
+us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the
+philosophies of Wordsworth.
+
+To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their
+power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own
+faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of
+raising 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 works
+of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers
+of this consoling art to "_filles de joie_." He doubtless meant that
+these goddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave us
+visions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without being
+sensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels,
+like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which are joyous and serious at once. Or
+take "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."
+
+Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads
+them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say
+that 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 of
+the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found
+all 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 a
+severe sense of duty!" he said.
+
+Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility and failed, though she
+gained in the end a greater title. Her works are insufferably and
+complacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings with
+respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her first
+volume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress of
+Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have been
+nourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St.
+Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the most
+practical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the form
+of letters. Next comes F['e]nelon's and--I know that I shall shock those
+who regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his power
+of stimulation, Emerson.
+
+It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that these
+confessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them I
+have had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind but
+simply of relieving my own, by button-holing the reader who happens to
+come my way. I should like to add that what is called the coarseness of
+the eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than the
+nasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lack
+of talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts.
+Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common with
+the process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles," to use
+Charles Reade's phrase.
+
+If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmness
+and patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
+for thanking God is that Americans have produced a literature--the
+continuation of an older literature with variations, it is true,--that
+has added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mention
+only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," and I am glad to end my book by
+writing the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, or
+with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, are
+no longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
+writes of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a title to
+his discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It
+is an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough for
+smiles.
+
+It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is
+rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature
+and assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don
+Marquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippingly
+as any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is nobody writing in the
+daily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they do
+it. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention to
+what they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Will
+they live? Of course not. Is ['E]mile de Girardin alive? Or all the clever
+ones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One still
+reads the "Portraits de Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
+something 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, or
+as 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 by
+an American--since Mrs. Wharton's "Valley of Decision"--proved him to be
+a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better psychologically than
+Mrs. Wharton, but here there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
+she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent and insular at long
+intervals.
+
+"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 for
+himself!
+
+"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern essay. Strangely
+enough, it sent me back to the "Colour of Life" by the only real
+_pr['e]cieuse_ living in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read that
+with new delight between certain paragraphs in Brooks's paper "On
+Finding a Plot." Why is not "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth
+edition? Or why has it no _claque_? The kind of _claque_ that is so
+common now--which opens suddenly like a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls
+of Theocritus"? After all, your education must have been well begun
+before 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 is
+much 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 Theodore
+Roosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the
+other 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 in
+his youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
+with you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in
+whom he had not much interest, since he was a _gourmet_ and did not
+regard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents and
+ascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales--and
+her scales were smoother than Patti's.
+
+Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," and "The Ancient Irish
+Sagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";
+and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before
+Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love.
+It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and
+how 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 of
+the 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 retained
+as 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.
+
+There are a lot of accented characters in this text.
+I have put most of such characters in square brackets.
+[`x] - grave accent above letter x
+['x] - acute accent above letter x
+[:x] - umlaut above letter x
+[^x] - circumflex above letter x
+[c,] - cedilla below c
+x mostly being vowels
+ae and oe ligatures have been replaced with the letters separately.
+PPing temp: Spellcheck complete.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Confessions of a Book-Lover, by 
+Maurice Francis Egan
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