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diff --git a/old/50915-0.txt b/old/50915-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6a9742a..0000000 --- a/old/50915-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5651 +0,0 @@ -Project Gutenberg's The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays, by Henry A. Beers - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays - -Author: Henry A. Beers - -Release Date: January 14, 2016 [EBook #50915] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONNECTICUT WITS, OTHER ESSAYS *** - - - - -Produced by Larry Harrison and Cindy Beyer and the online -Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at -http://www.pgdpcanada.net with images provided by The -Internet Archives - - - - - - THE CONNECTICUT WITS - - - - - REPRINTS FROM THE YALE REVIEW - - [Illustration] - - _A Book of Yale Review Verse, 1917._ - - _War Poems from The Yale Review, 1918._ - (_Second Edition, 1919._) - - _Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne,_ - _Emerson, Whitman, 1919._ - (_Second Printing, 1920._) - - _Milton’s Tercentenary, 1910._ - - - - - PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF - THE ELIZABETHAN CLUB OF YALE UNIVERSITY - ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED - IN MEMORY OF - OLIVER BATY CUNNINGHAM - OF THE CLASS OF 1917, YALE COLLEGE - - - - - T H E - C O N N E C T I C U T W I T S - AND OTHER ESSAYS - - - BY - HENRY A. BEERS - PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE EMERITUS - YALE UNIVERSITY - - [Illustration] - - - - NEW HAVEN - YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS - LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS - MDCCCCXX - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY - YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS - - - - - CONTENTS - - - 1. The Connecticut Wits - 2. The Singer of the Old Swimmin’ Hole - 3. Emerson’s Journals - 4. The Art of Letter Writing - 5. Thackeray’s Centenary - 6. Retrospects and Prospects of the English - Drama - 7. Sheridan - 8. The Poetry of the Cavaliers - 9. Abraham Cowley - 10. Milton’s Tercentenary - 11. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries - - - - - THE OLIVER BATY CUNNINGHAM - MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND - ❦ - - THE present volume is the first work published by the - Yale University Press on the Oliver Baty Cunningham - Memorial Publication Fund. This Foundation was established - May 8, 1920, by a gift from Frank S. Cunningham, - Esq., of Chicago, to Yale University, in - memory of his son, Captain Oliver Baty Cunningham, - 15th United States Field Artillery, who was born in - Chicago, September 17, 1894, and was graduated from - Yale College in the Class of 1917. As an undergraduate - he was distinguished alike for high scholarship and for - proved capacity in leadership among his fellows, as evidenced - by his selection as Gordon Brown Prize Man - from his class. He received his commission as Second - Lieutenant, United States Field Artillery, at the First - Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Sheridan, and in - December, 1917, was detailed abroad for service, receiving - subsequently the Distinguished Service Medal. He - was killed while on active duty near Thiaucourt, France, - on September 17, 1918, the twenty-fourth - anniversary of his birth. - - - - - THE CONNECTICUT WITS - - -IN the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it -had _men_ in the patriot armies, in Washington’s Cabinet, in the Senate -of the United States—men like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver -Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth,—in those same days there was a premature but -interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of -young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in -residence for their Master’s degree, formed themselves into a school for -the cultivation of letters. I speak advisedly in calling them a school: -they were a group of personal friends, united in sympathy by similar -tastes and principles; and they had in common certain definite, -coherent, and conscious aims. These were, first, to liberalize and -modernize the rigidly scholastic curriculum of the college by the -introduction of more elegant studies: the _belles lettres_, the _literae -humaniores_. Such was the plea of John Trumbull in his Master’s oration, -“An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts,” delivered at -Commencement, 1770; and in his satire, “The Progress of Dulness,” he had -his hit at the dry and dead routine of college learning. Secondly, these -young men resolved to supply the new republic with a body of poetry on a -scale commensurate with the bigness of American scenery and the vast -destinies of the nation: epics resonant as Niagara, and Pindaric odes -lofty as our native mountains. And finally, when, at the close of the -Revolutionary War, the members of the group found themselves reunited -for a few years at Hartford, they set themselves to combat, with the -weapon of satire, the influences towards lawlessness and separatism -which were delaying the adoption of the Constitution. - -My earliest knowledge of this literary coterie was derived from an -article in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1865, “The Pleiades of -Connecticut.” The “Pleiades,” to wit, were John Trumbull, Timothy -Dwight, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore -Dwight. The tone of the article was ironic. “Connecticut is pleasant,” -it said, “with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with -tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, peddlers, and -single women,—but there are no poets known to exist there . . . the -brisk little democratic state has turned its brains upon its machinery -. . . the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a -profit can be made—except poetry.” - -Massachusetts has always been somewhat condescending towards -Connecticut’s literary pretensions. Yet all through that very volume of -the _Atlantic_, from which I quote, run Mrs. Stowe’s “Chimney Corner” -papers and Donald Mitchell’s novel, “Doctor Johns”; with here and there -a story by Rose Terry and a poem by Henry Brownell. Nay, in an article -entitled “Our Battle Laureate,” in the May number of the magazine, the -“Autocrat” himself, who would always have his fling at Connecticut -theology and Connecticut spelling and pronunciation (“Webster’s -provincials,” forsooth! though _pater ipse_, the Rev. Abiel, had been a -Connecticut orthodox parson, a Yale graduate, and a son-in-law of -President Stiles),—the “Autocrat,” I say, takes off his hat to my old -East Hartford neighbor, Henry Howard Brownell. - -He begins by citing the paper which I have been citing: “How came the -Muses to settle in Connecticut? . . . But the seed of the Muses has run -out. No more Pleiades in Hartford . . .”; and answers that, if the -author of the article asks Nathanael’s question, putting Hartford for -Nazareth, he can refer him to Brownell’s “Lyrics of a Day.” “If Drayton -had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if -Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with -the six hundred at Balaclava, each of these poets might possibly have -pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has -painted the sea fights in which he took part as a combatant.” - -Many years later, when preparing a chapter on the literature of the -county for the “Memorial History of Hartford,” I came to close quarters -with the sweet influence of the Pleiades. I am one of the few -men—perhaps I am the only man—now living who have read the whole of -Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad.” “Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?” asks -Hawthorne’s crazy correspondent. “Unconscionable man! . . . And _does_ -he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas, with machinery -contrived on the principle of the steam engine?” I also “perused” (good -old verb—the right word for the deed!) Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill”—a -meritorious action,—but I cannot pretend to have read his “Conquest of -Canaän” (the diaeresis is his, not mine), an epic in eleven books and in -heroic couplets. I dipped into it only far enough to note that the poet -had contrived to introduce a history of our Revolutionary War, by way of -episode, among the wars of Israel. - -It must be acknowledged that this patriotic enterprise of creating a -national literature by _tour de force_, was undertaken when Minerva was -unwilling. These were able and eminent men: scholars, diplomatists, -legislators. Among their number were a judge of the Connecticut Supreme -Court, a college president, foreign ministers and ambassadors, a -distinguished physician, an officer of the Revolutionary army, intimate -friends of Washington and Jefferson. But, as poetry, a few little pieces -of the New Jersey poet, Philip Freneau,—“The Indian Student,” “The -Indian Burying Ground,” “To a Honey Bee,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and -“The Battle of Eutaw Springs,”—are worth all the epic and Pindaric -strains of the Connecticut bards. Yet “still the shore a brave attempt -resounds.” For they had few misgivings and a truly missionary zeal. They -formed the first Mutual Admiration Society in our literary annals. - - Here gallant Humphreys charm’d the list’ning throng. - Sweetly he sang, amid the clang of arms, - His numbers smooth, replete with winning charms. - In him there shone a great and godlike mind, - The poet’s wreath around the laurel twined. - -This was while Colonel Humphreys was in the army—one of Washington’s -aides. But when he resigned his commission,—hark! ’tis Barlow sings:— - - See Humphreys glorious from the field retire, - Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre. - O’er fallen friends, with all the strength of woe, - His heartfelt sighs in moving numbers flow. - His country’s wrongs, her duties, dangers, praise, - Fire his full soul, and animate his lays. - -Humphreys, in turn, in his poem “On the Future Glory of the United -States of America,” calls upon his learned friends to string _their_ -lyres and rouse their countrymen against the Barbary corsairs who were -holding American seamen in captivity:— - - Why sleep’st thou, Barlow, child of genius? Why - See’st thou, blest Dwight, our land in sadness lie? - And where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? - ’Tis yours, ye bards, to wake the smothered flame. - To you, my dearest friends, the task belongs - To rouse your country with heroic songs. - -Yes, to be sure, where _is_ Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? He came -from Watertown (now a seat of learning), a cousin of Governor -Trumbull—“Brother Jonathan”—and a second cousin of Colonel John -Trumbull, the historical painter, whose battle pieces repose in the Yale -Art Gallery. Cleverness runs in the Trumbull blood. There was, for -example, J. Hammond Trumbull (abbreviated by lisping infancy to “J. -Hambull”) in the last generation, a great sagamore—O a very big -Indian,—reputed the only man in the country who could read Eliot’s -Algonquin Bible. I make no mention of later Trumbulls known in letters -and art. But as for our worthy, John Trumbull, the poet, it is well -known and has been often told how he passed the college entrance -examination at the age of seven, but forebore to matriculate till a more -reasonable season, graduating in 1767 and serving two years as a tutor -along with his friend Dwight; afterwards studying law at Boston in the -office of John Adams, practising at New Haven and Hartford, filling -legislative and judicial positions, and dying at Detroit in 1831. - -Trumbull was the satirist of the group. As a young man at Yale, he -amused his leisure by contributing to the newspapers essays in the -manner of “The Spectator” (“The Meddler,” “The Correspondent,” and the -like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is -nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom -Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these -compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the -stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er -the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s -masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed -in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in -1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the -most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty -editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate -historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book -of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition, -in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820. - -Timothy Dwight pronounced “M’Fingal” superior to “Hudibras.” The Marquis -de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayette for the independence of the -colonies; who had been amused when at Windham, says my authority, by -Governor Jonathan Trumbull’s “pompous manner in transacting the most -trifling public business”; and who translated into French Colonel -Humphreys’s poetical “Address to the Armies of the United States of -America,”—Chastellux wrote to Trumbull _à propos_ of his burlesque: “I -believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry -could offer. . . . I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even -‘Hudibras.’” And Moses Coit Tyler, whose four large volumes on our -colonial and revolutionary literature are, for the most part, a much ado -about nothing, waxes dithyrambic on this theme. He speaks, for example, -of “the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American -people.” But surely all this is very uncritical. All that is really -alive of “M’Fingal” are a few smart couplets usually attributed to -“Hudibras,” such as— - - No man e’er felt the halter draw - With good opinion of the law. - -“M’Fingal” is one of the most successful of the innumerable imitations -of “Hudibras”; still it is an imitation, and, as such, inferior to its -original. But apart from that, Trumbull was far from having Butler’s -astonishing resources of wit and learning, tedious as they often are -from their mere excess. Nor is the Yankee sharpness of “M’Fingal” so -potent a spirit as the harsh, bitter contempt of Butler, almost as -inventive of insult as the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. Yet “M’Fingal” -still keeps a measure of historical importance, reflecting, in its -cracked and distorted mirror of caricature, the features of a stormy -time: the turbulent town meetings, the liberty poles and bonfires of the -patriots; with the tar-and-feathering of Tories, and their stolen -gatherings in cellars or other holes and corners. - -After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together -again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly -meetings—“The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little -provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull -had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow, -who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by -a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less -sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and -started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of -the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had -enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New -York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he -afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at -Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to -the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of -Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On -returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the -legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull, -who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s -graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778. -These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude, -the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of -Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of -the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an -eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich—“Peter -Parley”—as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling -legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich,—a -description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at -least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance. - -Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown, -who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight, -brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary -and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near -to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth -Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published -in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed—of all places in the -world—at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest -American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If -you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this -collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith, -hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more. - -The Hartford Wits contributed to local papers, such as the _New Haven -Gazette_ and the _Connecticut Courant_, a series of political lampoons: -“The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” and “The Political Greenhouse,” a sort of -Yankee “Dunciad,” “Rolliad,” and “Anti-Jacobin.” They were staunch -Federalists, friends of a close union and a strong central government; -and used their pens in support of the administrations of Washington and -Adams, and to ridicule Jefferson and the Democrats. It was a time of -great confusion and unrest: of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and -the irredeemable paper currency in Rhode Island. In Connecticut, -Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years’ pay to -the officers of the disbanded army. “The Echo” and “The Political -Greenhouse” were published in book form in 1807; “The Anarchiad” not -till 1861, by Thomas H. Pease, New Haven, with notes and introduction by -Luther G. Riggs. I am not going to quote these satires. They amused -their own generation and doubtless did good. “The Echo” had the honor of -being quoted in Congress by an angry Virginian, to prove that -Connecticut was trying to draw the country into a war with France. It -caught up cleverly the humors of the day, now travestying a speech of -Jefferson, now turning into burlesque a Boston town meeting. A local -flavor is given by allusions to Connecticut traditions: Captain Kidd, -the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, the Hebron pump, the Wethersfield -onion gardens. But the sparkle has gone out of it. There is a perishable -element in political satire. I find it difficult to interest young -people nowadays even in the “Biglow Papers,” which are so much superior, -in every way, to “M’Fingal” or “The Anarchiad.” - -Timothy Dwight would probably have rested his title to literary fame on -his five volumes of theology and the eleven books of his “Conquest of -Canaän.” But the epic is unread and unreadable, while theological -systems need constant restatement in an age of changing beliefs. There -is one excellent hymn by Dwight in the collections,—“I love thy -kingdom, Lord.” His war song, “Columbia, Columbia, in glory arise,” was -once admired, but has faded. I have found it possible to take a mild -interest in the long poem, “Greenfield Hill,” a partly idyllic and -partly moral didactic piece, emanating from the country parish, three -miles from the Sound, in the town of Fairfield, where Dwight was pastor -from 1783 to 1795. The poem has one peculiar feature: each of its seven -parts was to have imitated the manner of some one British poet. Part One -is in the blank verse and the style of Thomson’s “Seasons”; Part Two in -the heroic couplets and the diction of Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and -“Deserted Village.” For lack of time this design was not systematically -carried out, but the reader is reminded now of Prior, then of Cowper, -and again of Crabbe. The nature descriptions and the pictures of rural -life are not untruthful, though somewhat tame and conventional. The -praise of modest competence is sung, and the wholesome simplicity of -American life, under the equal distribution of wealth, as contrasted -with the luxury and corruption of European cities. Social questions are -discussed, such as, “The state of negro slavery in Connecticut”; and -“What is not, and what is, a social female visit.” Narrative episodes -give variety to the descriptive and reflective portions: the burning of -Fairfield in 1779 by the British under Governor Tryon; the destruction -of the remnants of the Pequod Indians in a swamp three miles west of the -town. It is distressing to have the Yankee farmer called “the swain,” -and his wife and daughter “the fair,” in regular eighteenth century -style; and Long Island, which is always in sight and frequently -apostrophized, personified as “Longa.” - - Then on the borders of this sapphire plain - Shall growing beauties grace my fair domain - * * * * * - Gay groves exult: Chinesian gardens glow, - And bright reflections paint the wave below. - -The poet celebrates Connecticut artists and inventors:— - - Such forms, such deeds on Rafael’s tablets shine, - And such, O Trumbull, glow alike on thine. - -David Bushnell of Saybrook had invented a submarine torpedo boat, -nicknamed “the American Turtle,” with which he undertook to blow up Lord -Admiral Howe’s gunship in New York harbor. Humphreys gives an account of -the failure of this enterprise in his “Life of Putnam.” It was some of -Bushnell’s machines, set afloat on the Delaware, among the British -shipping, that occasioned the panic celebrated in Hopkinson’s satirical -ballad, “The Battle of the Kegs,” which we used to declaim at school. -“See,” exclaims Dwight,— - - See Bushnell’s strong creative genius, fraught - With all th’ assembled powers of skillful thought, - His mystic vessel plunge beneath the waves - And glide through dark retreats and coral caves! - -Dr. Holmes, who knew more about Yale poets than they know about each -other, has rescued one line from “Greenfield Hill.” “The last we see of -snow,” he writes, in his paper on “The Seasons,” “is, in the language of -a native poet, - - The lingering drift behind the shady wall. - -This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, Timothy Dwight, the -same from whom we borrowed the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we -said it), - - Columby, Columby, to glory arise! - -The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in -an old nest, and is all that remains to me of his ‘Greenfield Hill.’” - - * * * * * - -As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, Dr. Dwight, by his -sermons, addresses, and miscellaneous writings, his personal influence -with young men, and his public spirit, was a great force in the -community. I have an idea that his “Travels in New England and New -York,” posthumously published in 1821–1822, in four volumes, will -survive all his other writings. I can recommend Dwight’s “Travels” as a -really entertaining book, and full of solid observation. - -Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s -seems to me the woodenest,—big patriotic verse essays on the model of -the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the Armies of the United States”; “On -the Happiness of America”; “On the Future Glory of the United States”; -“On the Love of Country”; “On the Death of George Washington,” etc. Yet -Humphreys was a most important figure. He was plenipotentiary to -Portugal and Spain, and a trusted friend of Washington, from whom, -perhaps, he caught that stately deportment which is said to have -characterized him. He imported a hundred merino sheep from Spain, -landing them from shipboard at his native Derby, then a port of entry on -the lordly Housatonic. He wrote a dissertation on merino sheep, and also -celebrated the exploit in song. The Massachusetts Agricultural Society -gave him a gold medal for his services in improving the native breed. -But if these sheep are even remotely responsible for Schedule K, it -might be wished that they had remained in Spain, or had been as the -flocks of Bo-Peep. Colonel Humphreys died at New Haven in 1818. The -college owns his portrait by Stuart, and his monument in Grove Street -cemetery is dignified by a Latin inscription reciting his titles and -achievements, and telling how, like a second Jason, he brought the -_auream vellerem_ from Europe to Connecticut. Colonel Humphreys’s works -were handsomely published at New York in 1804, with a list of -subscribers headed by their Catholic Majesties, the King and Queen of -Spain, and followed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and numerous dukes -and chevaliers. Among the humbler subscribers I am gratified to observe -the names of Nathan Beers, merchant, New Haven; and Isaac Beers & Co., -booksellers, New Haven (six copies),—no ancestors but conjecturally -remote collateral relatives of the undersigned. - -I cannot undertake to quote from Humphreys’s poems. The patriotic -feeling that prompted them was genuine; the descriptions of campaigns in -which he himself had borne a part have a certain value; but the poetry -as such, though by no means contemptible, is quite uninspired. Homer’s -catalogue of ships is a hackneyed example of the way in which a great -poet can make bare names poetical. Humphreys had a harder job, and -passages of his battle pieces read like pages from a city directory. - - As fly autumnal leaves athwart some dale, - Borne on the pinions of the sounding gale, - Or glides the gossamer o’er rustling reeds, - Bland’s, Sheldon’s, Moylan’s, Baylor’s battle steeds - So skimmed the plain. . . . - Then Huger, Maxwell, Mifflin, Marshall, Read, - Hastened from states remote to seize the meed; - * * * * * - While Smallwood, Parsons, Shepherd, Irvine, Hand, - Guest, Weedon, Muhlenberg, leads each his band. - -Does the modern reader recognize a forefather among these heroic -patronymics? Just as good men as fought at Marathon or Agincourt. Nor -can it be said of any one of them _quia caret vate sacro_. - -But the loudest blast upon the trump of fame was blown by Joel Barlow. -It was agreed that in him America had produced a supreme poet. Born at -Redding,—where Mark Twain died the other day,—the son of a farmer, -Barlow was graduated at Yale in 1778—just a hundred years before -President Taft. He married the daughter of a Guilford blacksmith, who -had moved to New Haven to educate his sons; one of whom, Abraham -Baldwin, afterwards went to Georgia, grew up with the country, and -became United States Senator. - -After the failure of his Hartford journal, Barlow went to France, in -1788, as agent of the Scioto Land Company, which turned out to be a -swindling concern. He now “embraced French principles,” that is, became -a Jacobin and freethinker, to the scandal of his old Federalist friends. -He wrote a song to the guillotine and sang it at festal gatherings in -London. He issued other revolutionary literature, in particular an -“Advice to the Privileged Orders,” suppressed by the British government; -whereupon Barlow, threatened with arrest, went back to France. The -Convention made him a French citizen; he speculated luckily in the -securities of the republic, which rose rapidly with the victories of its -armies. He lived in much splendor in Paris, where Robert Fulton, -inventor of steamboats, made his home with him for seven years. In 1795, -he was appointed United States consul to Algiers, resided there two -years, and succeeded in negotiating the release of the American captives -who had been seized by Algerine pirates. After seventeen years’ absence, -he returned to America, and built a handsome country house on Rock -Creek, Washington, which he named characteristically “Kalorama.” He had -become estranged from orthodox New England, and lived on intimate terms -with Jefferson and the Democratic leaders, French sympathizers, and -philosophical deists. - -In 1811 President Madison sent him as minister plenipotentiary to -France, to remonstrate with the emperor on the subject of the Berlin and -Milan decrees, which were injuring American commerce. He was summoned to -Wilna, Napoleon’s headquarters in his Russian campaign, where he was -promised a personal interview. But the retreat from Moscow had begun. -Fatigue and exposure brought on an illness from which Barlow died in a -small Polish village near Cracow. An elaborate biography, “The Life and -Letters of Joel Barlow,” by Charles Burr Todd, was published by G. P. -Putnam’s Sons in 1886. - -Barlow’s most ambitious undertaking was the “Columbiad,” originally -printed at Hartford in 1787 as “The Vision of Columbus,” and then -reissued in its expanded form at Philadelphia in 1807: a sumptuous -quarto with plates by the best English and French engravers from designs -by Robert Fulton: altogether the finest specimen of bookmaking that had -then appeared in America. The “Columbiad’s” greatness was in inverse -proportion to its bigness. Grandiosity was its author’s besetting sin, -and the plan of the poem is absurdly grandiose. It tells how Hesper -appeared to Columbus in prison and led him to a hill of vision whence he -viewed the American continents spread out before him, and the panorama -of their whole future history unrolled. Among other things he saw the -Connecticut river— - - Thy stream, my Hartford, through its misty robe, - Played in the sunbeams, belting far the globe. - No watery glades through richer vallies shine, - Nor drinks the sea a lovelier wave than thine. - -It is odd to come upon familiar place-names swollen to epic pomp. There -is Danbury, for example, which one associates with the manufacture of -hats and a somewhat rowdy annual fair. In speaking of the towns set on -fire by the British, the poet thus exalteth Danbury, whose flames were -visible from native Redding:— - - Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills - High flaming Danbury the welkin fills. - Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes - And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains. - -But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the -fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One -couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time:— - - E’en in thy native regions how I blush - To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush! - -This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand -as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a -bowl of _polenta_, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the -familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr. -Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in -Paris at the _Trois Frères_; and how one of them would sit tinkling the -ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he -used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight -from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards -the sunset.” - - - - - THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE - - -MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman -may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of -the American people. He is the idol of a literary _culte_. Shall I tell -you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James -Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when -speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling -newspaper poetry of the usual kind—and very poor of its kind—which had -attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to -himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something -startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. -I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world -will say—as in fact it did—‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, -democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here -must be the great American poet at last.’” - -Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he -had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming -multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said -Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to -any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize -them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all -“leaves of grass.” - -Well, my friend, and Walt Whitman’s, promised to read Riley’s poems. And -shortly I got a letter from him saying that he had read them with much -enjoyment, but adding, “Surely you would not call him a great national -poet.” Now since his death, the newspaper critics have been busy with -this question. His poetry was true, sweet, original; but was it great? -Suppose we leave aside for the moment this question of greatness. Who -are the great poets, anyway? Was Robert Burns one of them? He composed -no epics, no tragedies, no high Pindaric odes. But he made the songs of -the Scottish people, and is become a part of the national consciousness -of the race. In a less degree, but after the same fashion, Riley’s -poetry has taken possession of the popular heart. I am told that his -sales outnumber Longfellow’s. This is not an ultimate test, but so far -as it goes it is a valid one. - -Riley is the Hoosier poet, but he is more than that: he is a national -poet. His state and his city have honored themselves in honoring him and -in keeping his birthday as a public holiday. The birthdays of nations -and of kings and magistrates have been often so kept. We have our fourth -of July, our twenty-second of February, our Lincoln’s birthday; and we -had a close escape from having a McKinley day. I do not know that the -banks are closed and the children let out of school—Riley’s children, -for all children are his—on each succeeding seventh of October; but I -think there is no record elsewhere in our literary history of a tribute -so loving and so universal to a mere man of letters, as the Hoosier -State pays annually to its sweet singer. Massachusetts has its poets and -is rightly proud of them, but neither Bryant nor Emerson nor Lowell nor -Holmes, nor the more popular Longfellow or Whittier, has had his natal -day marked down on the calendar as a yearly state _festa_. And yet -poets, novelists, playwriters, painters, musical composers, artists of -all kinds, have added more to the sum of human happiness than all the -kings and magistrates that ever lived. Perhaps Indianians are warmer -hearted than New Englanders; or perhaps they make so much of their poets -because there are fewer of them. But this is not the whole secret of it. -In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to -local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the -odd ways and characters of little country towns. But just for this -faithfulness to their environment these “poems here at home” come home -to others whose homes are far away from the Wabash, but are not so very -different after all. - -America, as has often been said, is a land of homes: of dwellers in -villages, on farms, and in small towns. We are common people, -middle-class people, conservative, decent, religious, tenacious of old -ways, home-keeping and home-loving. We do not thrill to Walt Whitman’s -paeans to democracy in the abstract; but we vibrate to every touch on -the chord of family affections, of early friendships, and of the dear -old homely things that our childhood knew. Americans are sentimental and -humorous; and Riley abounds in sentiment—wholesome sentiment—and -natural humor, while Whitman had little of either. - -To all Americans who were ever boys; to all, at least who have had the -good luck to be country boys and go barefoot; whether they dwell in the -prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and -characters of Riley’s poems are familiar: Little Orphant Annie and the -Raggedy Man, and the Old Swimmin’ Hole and Griggsby’s Station “where we -ust to be so happy and so pore.” They know when the frost is on the -“punkin,” and that the “Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out”; -and how the old tramp said to the Raggedy Man:— - - You’re a _purty_ man!—_You_ air!— - With a pair o’ eyes like two fried eggs, - An’ a nose like a Bartlutt pear! - -They have all, in their time, followed along after the circus parade, -listened to the old village band playing tunes like “Lily Dale” and “In -the Hazel Dell my Nellie’s Sleeping” and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower”; -have heard the campaign stump speaker when he “cut loose on monopolies -and cussed and cussed and cussed”; have belonged to the literary society -which debated the questions whether fire or water was the most -destructive element; whether town life was preferable to country life; -whether the Indian or the negro had suffered more at the hands of the -white man; or whether the growth of Roman Catholicism in this country is -a menace to our free institutions. And _was_ the execution of Charles -the First justifiable? Charles is dead now; but this good old debate -question will never die. They knew the joys of “eatin’ out on the porch” -and the woes of having your sister lose your jackknife through a crack -in the barn floor; or of tearing your thumb nail in trying to get the -nickel out of the tin savings bank. - -The poets we admire are many; the poets we love are few. One of the -traits that endear Riley to his countrymen is his cheerfulness. He is -“Sunny Jim.” The south wind and the sun are his playmates. The drop of -bitterness mixed in the cup of so many poets seems to have been left out -of his life potion. And so, while he does not rouse us with “the thunder -of the trumpets of the night,” or move us with the deep organ tones of -tragic grief, he never fails to hearten and console. And though tragedy -is absent from his verse, a tender pathos, kindred to his humor, is -everywhere present. Read over again “The Old Man and Jim,” or “Nothin’ -to Say, my Daughter,” or any of his poems on the deaths of children; for -a choice that poignant little piece, “The Lost Kiss,” comparable with -Coventry Patmore’s best poem, “The Toys,” in which the bereaved father -speaks his unavailing remorse because he had once spoken crossly to his -little girl when she came to his desk for a good-night kiss and -interrupted him at his work. - -Riley followed the bent of his genius and gave himself just the kind of -training that fitted him to do his work. He never had any regular -education, adopted no trade or profession, never married and had -children, but kept himself free from set tasks and from those -responsibilities which distract the poet’s soul. His muse was a truant, -and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood -and old age, which is one definition of genius. He was better employed -when he joined a circus troupe or a travelling medicine van, or set up -as a sign painter, or simply lay out on the grass, “knee deep in June,” -than if he had shut himself up in a school or an office. He did no -routine work, but wrote when he felt like it, when he was in the mood. -Fortunately the mood recurred abundantly, and so we have about two dozen -volumes from him, filled with lovely poetry. Most of us do hack work, -routine work, because we can do nothing better. But for the creative -artist, hack work is a waste. Creative work, when one is in the mood, is -more a pleasure than a toil; and Riley worked hard at his verse-making. -For he was a most conscientious artist; and all those poems of his, -seemingly so easy, natural, spontaneous, were the result of labor, -though of labor joyously borne. How fine his art was perhaps only those -can fully appreciate who have tried their own hands at making verses. -Some of the things that he said to me about the use and abuse of dialect -in poetry and concerning similar points, showed me how carefully he had -thought out the principles of composition. - -He thought most dialect poetry was overdone; recalling that delightful -anecdote about the member of the Chicago Browning Club who was asked -whether he liked dialect verse, and who replied: “Some of it. Eugene -Field is all right. But the other day I read some verses by a fellow -named Chaucer, and he carries it altogether too far.” - -In particular, Riley objected to the habit which many writers have of -labelling their characters with descriptive names like Sir Lucius -O’Trigger and Birdofredum Sawin. I reminded him that English comedy from -“Ralph Roister Doister” down had practised this device. (In Ben Jonson -it is the rule.) And that even such an artist as Thackeray employed it -frequently with droll effect: Lady Jane Sheepshanks, daughter of the -Countess of Southdown, and so forth. But he insisted that it was a -departure from _vraisemblance_ which disturbed the impression of -reality. - -In seeking to classify these Hoosier poems, we are forced back -constantly to a comparison with the Doric singers: with William Barnes, -the Dorsetshire dialect poet; and above all with Robert Burns. -Wordsworth in his “Lyrical Ballads,” and Tennyson in his few rural idyls -like “Dora” and “The Brook” dealt also with simple, country life, the -life of Cumberland dalesmen and Lincolnshire farmers. But these poets -are in another class. They are grave philosophers, cultivated scholars, -university men, writing in academic English; writing with sympathy -indeed, but from a point of view outside the life which they depict. In -our own country there are Will Carleton’s “Farm Ballads,” handling the -same homely themes as Riley’s; handling them truthfully, sincerely, but -prosaically. Carleton could not - - . . . add the gleam, - The light that never was, on sea or land, - The consecration, and the poet’s dream. - -But Riley’s world of common things and plain folks is always lit up by -the lamp of beauty. Then there is Whittier. He was a farmer lad, and was -part of the life that he wrote of. He belonged; and, like Riley, he knew -his Burns. I think, indeed, that “Snow-Bound” is a much better poem than -“The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Whittier’s fellow Quaker, John Bright, in -an address to British workingmen, advised them to read Whittier’s poems, -if they wanted to understand the spirit of the American people. Well, -the spirit of New England, let us say, if not of all America. For -Whittier is in some ways provincial, and rightly so. But though he uses -homely New England words like “chore,” he does not, so far as I -remember, essay dialect except in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride”; and that is -Irish if it is anything. No Yankee women known to me talk like the -fishwives of Marblehead in that popular but overrated piece. Then there -are the “Biglow Papers,” which remind of Riley’s work on the humorous, -as Whittier’s ballads do on the serious side. Lowell made a careful -study of the New England dialect and the “Biglow Papers” are brilliantly -true to the shrewd Yankee wit; but they are political satires rather -than idyls. Where they come nearest to these Hoosier ballads or to -“Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line” is where they record old local ways and -institutions. “This kind o’ sogerin’,” writes Birdofredum Sawin, who is -disgustedly campaigning in Mexico, like our National Guards of -yesterday:— - - This kind o’ sogerin’ aint a mite like our October trainin’, - A chap could clear right out from there ef ’t only looked like - rainin’, - An’ th’ Cunnles, tu, could kiver up their shappoes with bandanners, - An’ send the insines skootin’ to the bar-room with their banners - (Fear o’ gittin’ on ’em spotted), . . . - -Isn’t that something like Riley? Lowell, of course, is a more imposing -literary figure, and he tapped intellectual sources to which the younger -poet had no access. But I still think Riley the finer artist. Benjamin -F. Johnson, of Boone, the quaint, simple, innocent old Hoosier farmer, -is a more convincing person than Hosea Biglow. In many of the “Biglow -Papers” sentiment, imagery, vocabulary, phrase, are often too elevated -for the speaker and for his dialect. Riley is not guilty of this -inconsistency; his touch here is absolutely correct. - -Riley’s work was anything but academic; and I am therefore rather proud -of the fact that my university was the first to confer upon him an -honorary degree. I cannot quite see why geniuses like Mark Twain and -Riley, whose books are read and loved by hundreds of thousands of their -countrymen, should care very much for a college degree. The fact -remains, however, that they are gratified by the compliment, which -stamps their performances with a sort of official sanction, like the -_couronné par l’Académie Française_ on the title-page of a French -author. - -When Mr. Riley came on to New Haven to take his Master’s degree, he was -a bit nervous about making a public appearance in unwonted conditions; -although he had been used to facing popular audiences with great -applause when he gave his delightful readings from his own poems, with -humorous impersonations in prose as good as Beatrice Herford’s best -monologues. He rehearsed the affair in advance, trying on his Master’s -gown and reading me his poem, “No Boy Knows when He Goes to Sleep,” -which he proposed to use if called on for a speech. He asked me if it -would do: it did. For at the alumni dinner which followed the conferring -of degrees, when Riley got to his feet and read the piece, the audience -broke loose. It was evident that, whatever the learned gentlemen on the -platform might think, the undergraduates and the young alumni knew their -Riley; and that his enrolment on the Yale catalogue was far and away the -most popular act of the day. For in truth there is nothing cloistral or -high and dry among our modern American colleges. A pessimist on my own -faculty even avers that the average undergraduate nowadays reads nothing -beyond the sporting columns in the New York newspapers. There were other -distinguished recipients of degrees at that same Commencement. One -leading statesman was made a Doctor of Laws: Mr. Riley a Master of Arts. -Of course a mere man of letters cannot hope to rank with a politician. -If Shakespeare and Ben Butler had been contemporaries and had both come -up for a degree at the same Commencement—supposing any college willing -to notice Butler at all—why Ben would have got an LL.D. and William an -M.A. Yet exactly why should this be so? For as I am accustomed to say of -John Hay, anybody can be Secretary of State, but it took a smart man to -write “Little Breeches” and “The Mystery of Gilgal.” - - - - - EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS - - -THE publication of Emerson’s journals,[1] kept for over half a -century, is a precious gift to the reading public. It is well known that -he made an almost daily record of his thoughts: that, when called upon -for a lecture or address, he put together such passages as would -dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all -these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were -finally evolved. - -Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his -published works, but a great wealth of matter remains—chips from his -workshop—which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed -carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as -consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with -a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished -writings. - -The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand -the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its -completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem: - - “August 28. [1838.] - - “It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman - cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman - priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English - church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to - be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this - nearer home.” - -This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The -Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” -(April 5, 1856): - - “Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain; - but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through - Concord plain. - - “Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy - water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through - darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the - inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in - summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are - they who can hear it. - - “I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For - thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal - and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away - from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it - with me to-day.” - -These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of -thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the -most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the -attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that -gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, -lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, -college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, -to afford the material of a new biography,[2] which has been published -uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held -himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who -breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will -perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where -his little son—the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody”—being taken to -the circus, said _à propos_ of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me -want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the -subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career -of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests—even profane -jests—with occasional anecdotes, _bons mots_, and miscellaneous -witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like -to know who was the “Miss —— of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s -book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’” -Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848? - -In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of -criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or -eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such -as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But -here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: -“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, -because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to -the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the -appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s -obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as -unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies -that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The -only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of -Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, -comparing it with Aeschylus. - -The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly -savage—less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend -Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome -play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used -in studying jokes and _bons mots_ at home for a dinner or a club, who -laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good -and never said anything wise.” - -Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the -first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American -literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with -proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among -American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander -Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe -to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving -clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the -insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of -the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which -translate the Kantian _Vernunft_ and _Verstand_.) Dialectics he -eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He -announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of -reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: -they were borne in upon him—revelations. At New Bedford he visited the -meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of -the inner light. - -When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked -by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox -Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and -Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no -attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I -could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, -on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments -are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling -what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am -the most helpless of mortal men.” - -Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written -at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by -morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define. . . . That -which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until -now. . . . It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned -though all the martyrs apostatize. . . . What is this they say about -wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed -they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But -do I not know the Now to be eternal? . . . Men seem to be -constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can -cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, -affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that -side. . . . But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different -persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet -when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.” - -No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no -reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s -phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be -accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle -policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of -responsibility _in forma pauperis_. He could argue well, when he wanted -to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable -shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, -and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the -fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse -your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the -pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for -mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction. . . . The state tax -does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and -French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at -buying.” - -Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American -literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how -far was that mind _in_ literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne, -or Longfellow, or Irving was _in_ literature: was, above all things -else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to -many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces -of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his -writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but -tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a -theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human -life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson -is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book, -“Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed. -Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of -the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected -system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its -mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive -claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent -friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child. . . . But I confess it -has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for -many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation. . . . I need not inform -you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains -Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the -Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some -conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.” - -Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little, -not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22, -1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which -complains that “historical Christianity . . . dwells with noxious -exaggeration about the _person_ of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and -the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons. . . . And yet, when -cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily -as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men. . . . -Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity -of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the -absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.” - -The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” -needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the -scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more -immediate—a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a -heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic -seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. -“The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do -we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we -go or think at all.” - -The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot -love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to -believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over _me_. As for -the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart. - - My servant Death, with solving rite, - Pours finite into infinite. - -I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss -of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another -state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, -besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my -heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!” - -In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting -aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the -understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of -difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, -with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of -talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the -Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of -genius.” - -All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on -Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The -Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience -of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, -in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the _più_ and not -the _uno_. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and -fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and -this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both. - -This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye -for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a -masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in -“Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of -Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this -transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying -hand” with which he credits Carlyle. - -As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this -impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness -of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His -love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and -individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good. - - Have I a lover who is noble and free? - I would he were nobler than to love me. - -Alas! _nous autres_, we do not love our friends because they are more or -less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their -faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults -because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said -the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “‘Madam,’ said I, -‘damn your attributes!’” - -Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of -his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon -hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and -educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. -So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre. - - A subtle chain of countless rings - The next unto the farthest brings. - -He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched -to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like -to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It -carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity -and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal -world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God, -God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should -not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any -such thoughts yet.” - -Another block of stumbling, about which much has been written, is -Emerson’s optimism, which rests upon the belief that evil is negative, -merely the privation or shadow of good, without real existence. It was -the heresy of “Uriel” that there was nothing inherently and permanently -bad: no line of division between good and evil—“Line in nature is not -found”; “Evil will bless and ice will burn.” He turned away resolutely -from the contemplation of sin, crime, suffering: was impatient of -complaints of sickness, of breakfast-table talk about headaches and a -bad night’s sleep. Doubtless had he lived to witness the Christian -Science movement, he would have taken an interest in the underlying -doctrine, while repelled by the element of quackery in the practice and -preaching of the sect. Hence the tragedy of life is ignored or evaded by -Emerson. But _ici bas_, the reality of evil is not abolished, as an -experience, by calling it the privation of good; nor will philosophy -cure the grief of a wound. We suffer quite as acutely as we enjoy. We -find that all those disagreeable appearances—“swine, spiders, snakes, -pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies,”—which he assures us will -disappear, when man comes fully into possession of his kingdom, do not -disappear but persist. - -The dispute between optimism and pessimism rests, in the long run, on -individual temperament and personal experience, and admits of no secure -solution. Imposing systems of philosophy have been erected on these -opposing views. Leibnitz proved that everything is for the best in the -best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer demonstrated the futility of -the will to live; and showed that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth -sorrow. Nor does it avail to appeal from the philosophers to the poets, -as more truly expressing the general sense of mankind; and to array -Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and the book of “Lamentations,” and “The City -of Dreadful Night” against Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and others of -the hopeful wise. The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the -question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about -the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by -continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide? -Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves -because we are the fools of hope:— - - When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat . . . - -Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron, -in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has -seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we -have been, it were better not to be at all. - -The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a -necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light—a discipline without -which we could have no notion of good,—but whether or not evil -predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat -of a contempt for Bryon, affirms:— - - . . . There’s a simple test - Would serve, when people take on them to weigh - The worth of poets. “Who was better, best, - This, that, the other bard?” . . . - End the strife - By asking “Which one led a happy life?” - -This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power -to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without -qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, -thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a -deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in -his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of -misery in human life?—Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief -candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” -persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to -lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” -upon the approach of age, - - Let me not live after my flame lacks oil. - -It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in -Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the -feeling of the _dramatis persona_ who speaks them. It may be so; but -often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like -passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us -the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it. - -Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, -indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may -envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is -not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let -it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who -emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain -that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid -optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become -sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new -“Candide” and exclaim impatiently, _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_! - - Grow old along with me, - The best is yet to be. - -Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not -universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and -Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at -best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage. - - Strange cozenage! None would live past years again, - Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain, - And from the dregs of life hope to receive - What the first sprightly runnings could not give. - I’m tired of waiting for this chymic gold, - Which fools us young and beggars us when old. - -Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either -optimist or pessimist. - - . . . Life still - Yields human effort scope. - But since life teems with ill, - Nurse no extravagant hope. - Because thou must not dream, - Thou needs’t not then despair. - -Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention -in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and -neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of -them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband: -transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists—the “cranks” of -our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these -memoranda is—naturally—Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks -with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over -his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a -deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing -is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven, -Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great -Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better -state of things than other men are acquainted with. . . . He has no -venture in the present.” - -Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his -medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its -steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which -one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to -what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge -tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the -sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and -expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a -skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott -would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no -senses. . . . We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know -‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they -will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to -carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a -perfume? I did not know it.’” - -And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as -Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly -testify—those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe. -Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish, -wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright -silly—“shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words -concerning it. - -Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and -brilliant talker: (“such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe,” -Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and -Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.” -Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But -Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s -writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that -she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation; -then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent -talker, who did not outlive her influence.” - -This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and -Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are -American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the -six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not -interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most -happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment -in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its -local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts -his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of -Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning -innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with -pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested -character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother -Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the -matter: - -“In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to his native town of -Wolcott; found his father’s farm in possession of a stranger; found many -of his cousins still poor farmers in the town; the town itself unchanged -since his childhood, whilst all the country round has been changed by -manufactures and railroads. Wolcott, which is a mountain, remains as it -was, or with a still less population (ten thousand dollars, he said, -would buy the whole town, and all the men in it) and now tributary -entirely to the neighboring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving -factory village. Alcott went about and invited all the people, his -relatives and friends, to meet him at five o’clock at the schoolhouse, -where he had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither they all came, and -he sat at the desk and gave them the story of his life. Some of the -audience went away discontented, because they had not heard a sermon, as -they hoped.” - -Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary -pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain -from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a -farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which -the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I -believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered -by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy -summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away -to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few -human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson -Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family -once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little -Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of -which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet -and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill, -which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it -was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which -set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This -baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have -never renewed it. - -It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are -also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in -1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in -Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime. . . . If a -nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight -and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use -violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men: -they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would -communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.” - -Is this transcendental politics? Does it belong to what Mr. Roosevelt -calls, with apt alliteration, the “realm of shams and shadows”? It is, -at all events, applied Christianity. It is the principle of the Society -of Friends; and of Count Tolstoy, who of all recent great writers is the -most consistent preacher of Christ’s gospel. - ------ - -[1] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–76._ Edited by E. W. Emerson -and Waldo E. Forbes. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1909–14. - -[2] _Ralph Waldo Emerson._ By O. W. Firkins. Houghton Mifflin Company, -1915. - - - - - THE ART OF LETTER WRITING - - -THIS lecture was founded by Mr. George F. Dominick, of the Class of -1894, in memory of Daniel S. Lamont, private secretary to President -Cleveland, and afterwards Secretary of War, during Mr. Cleveland’s -second term of office. Mr. Dominick had a high regard for Lamont’s skill -as a letter writer and in the composition of messages, despatches, and -reports. It was his wish, not only to perpetuate the memory of his -friend and to associate it with his own Alma Mater, but to give his -memorial a shape which should mark his sense of the importance of the -art of letter writing. - -Mr. Dominick thought that Lamont was particularly happy in turning a -phrase and that many of the expressions which passed current in -Cleveland’s two presidencies were really of his secretary’s coinage. I -don’t suppose that we are to transfer such locutions as “innocuous -desuetude” and “pernicious activity” from the President to his -secretary. They bear the stamp of their authorship. I fancy that Mr. -Lamont’s good phrases took less room to turn in. - -But however this may be, the founder of this lecture is certainly right -in his regard for the art of letter writing. It is an important asset in -any man’s equipment, and I have heard it said that the test of education -is the ability to write a good letter. Merchants, manufacturers, and -business men generally, in advertising for clerks or assistants, are apt -to judge of the fitness of applicants for positions by the kind of -letters that they write. If these are illegible, ill-spelled, badly -punctuated and paragraphed, ungrammatical, confused, repetitious, -ignorantly or illiterately expressed, they are usually fatal to their -writers’ hopes of a place. This is not quite fair, for there is many a -shrewd man of business who can’t write a good letter. But surely a -college graduate may be justly expected to write correct English; and he -is likely to be more often called on to use it in letters than in any -other form of written composition. “The writing of letters,” says John -Locke, “has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life, that no -gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing . . . which -always lays him open to a severer examination of his breeding, sense and -abilities than oral discourses whose transient faults . . . more easily -escape observation and censure.” _Litera scripta manet._ Who was the -prudent lady in one of Rhoda Broughton’s novels who cautioned her -friend: “My dear, never write a letter; there’s not a scrap of my -handwriting in Europe”? Rightly or wrongly, we are quick to draw -conclusions as to a person’s social antecedents from his pronunciation -and from his letters. - -In the familiar epistle, as in other forms of social intercourse, -nothing can quite take the place of old use and wont. Still the proper -forms may be learned from the rhetoric books, just as the young man -whose education has been neglected may learn from the standard manuals -of politeness, such as “Etiquette and Eloquence or The Perfect -Gentleman,” what the right hour is for making an evening call, and on -what occasions the Tuxedo jacket is the correct thing. The rhetorics -give directions how to address a letter, to begin it, to close it, and -where to put the postage stamp; directions as to the date, the -salutation, the signature, and cautions not to write “yours -respectively” instead of “yours respectfully.” These are useful, but -beyond these the rhetoric books cannot go, save in the way of general -advice. The model letters in “The Complete Letter Writer” are dismal -things. “Ideas,” says one of these textbook authorities, “ideas should -be collected by the card system.” Now I rather think that ideas should -_not_ be collected by the card system, or by any other system. The charm -of a personal letter is its spontaneity. Any suspicion that the ideas in -it have been “collected” is deadly. To do the rhetoric books justice, -the best of them warn against formality in all except the necessarily -formal portions of the letter. A letter, like an epic poem, should begin -_in medias res_. Ancient targets for jest are the opening formulae in -servant girls’ correspondence. “I take my pen in hand to inform you that -I am well and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing;” or the -sentence with which our childish communications used to start out: “Dear -Champ,—As I have nothing else to do I thought I would write you a -letter”—matter of excusation and apology which Bacon instructs us to -avoid. - -The little boy whom Dr. John Brown tells about was unconsciously obeying -Aristotle’s rule. Without permission he had taken his brother’s gun and -broken it; and after hiding himself all day, he opened written -communications with his stern elder; a blotted and tear-spotted scrawl -beginning: “O Jamie, your gun is broke and my heart is broke.” - -But no general rules for letter writing give much help; nor for that -matter, do general rules for any kind of writing. A little practice in -the concrete, under intelligent guidance, is worth any number of -rhetorical platitudes. But such as it is, the rule for a business letter -is just the reverse of that for a friendly letter. It should be as brief -as is consistent with clearness, for your correspondent is a business -man, whose time is his money. It should above all things, however, be -explicit; and in striving to avoid surplusage should omit nothing that -is necessary. Ambiguity is here the unpardonable sin and has occasioned -thousands of law suits, involving millions of dollars. It should be -severely impersonal. Pleasantries, sentiments, digressions and the like -are impertinences in a business letter, like the familiarity of an -unintroduced stranger. I knew a lawyer—and a good lawyer—who suffered -professionally, because he would get himself into his business letters. -He made jokes; he made quotations; sometimes French quotations which his -correspondents could not translate; he expressed opinions and vented -emotions on subjects only incidentally connected with the matter in -hand, which he embroidered with wit and fancy; and he was a long time -coming to the point. Now men of business may trifle about all other -serious aspects of life or death, but when it concerns the making of -money, they are in deadly earnest; so that my friend’s frivolous -treatment of those interests seemed to them little less than sacrilege. - -Viewed then as one of the commonest means of communication between man -and man, it is well to be able to write a good letter; just as it is -well to know how to tie a bowknot, cast an account, carve a joint, shave -oneself, or meet any other of the ordinary occasions of life. But tons -of letters are emptied from the mail bags every day, and burned, which -serve no other than a momentary end. The art of composing letters worth -keeping and printing is a part of the art literary. The word letters and -the word literature are indeed used interchangeably; we speak of a man -of letters, polite letters, the _belles lettres_, _literae humaniores_. -How far are such expressions justified? Manifestly a letter, or a -collection of letters, has not the structural unity and the deliberate -artistic appeal of the higher forms of literature. It is not like an -epic poem, a play, a novel or an ode. It has an art of its own, but an -art of a particular kind, the secret of which is artlessness. It is not -addressed to the public but to an individual and should betray no -consciousness of any third party. It belongs, therefore, in the class -with journals and table talk and, above all, autobiography, of which it -constitutes the very best material. A book is written for everybody, a -diary for oneself, a letter for one’s friend. While a letter, therefore, -cannot quite claim a standing among the works of the creative -imagination, yet it comes so freshly out of life and is so true in -self-expression that, in some moods, we prefer it to more artificial or -more objective kinds of literature; just as the advertisements in an old -newspaper or magazine often have a greater veracity and freshness as -dealing with the homely, actual needs and concerns of the time, than the -stories, poems, and editorials whose fashion has faded. - -I am speaking now of a genuine letter, “a link between two -personalities,” as it has been defined. There are two varieties of -letters which are not genuine. The first of these is the open letter, -the letter to the editor, letter to a noble lord, etc. This is really -addressed to the public through the medium of a more or less imaginary -correspondent. The Englishman’s habit of writing to the _London Times_ -on all occasions is proverbial. Professor Goldwin Smith is a living -example of the practice, transplanted to the field of the American -newspaper press. But _private_ letters written with an eye to -publication are spoiled in the act. To be natural they should not mean -to be overheard. If afterwards, by reason of the eminence of the writer, -or of some quality in the letters themselves, they get into print, let -it be by accident and not from forethought. Why is it, then, that the -best printed letters, such as Gray’s, Walpole’s, Cowper’s, Fitzgerald’s, -written with all the ease and intimacy of confidential -intercourse—“written _from_ one man and _to_ one man”—are found to be -composed in such perfect English, with such high finish, filled with -matter usually reserved by professional authors for their essays or -descriptive sketches; in fine, to be so literary? The reason I take to -be partly in the mutual intellectual sympathy between writer and -correspondent; and partly in the conscientious literary habit of the -letter writer. Hawthorne’s “Note Books,” intended only for his own eye, -are written with almost as much care as the romances and tales into -which many pages of them were decanted with little alteration. - -Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real -letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of -telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist, -Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles -Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of -recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of -Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina” -and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a -delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of -correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of -dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages -and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could -have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the -nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young -people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of -our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also -Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a -characteristic _introduced_ letter here and there in a novel, as -Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form; -yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and -Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly -unendurable. - -The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself -easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection, -humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The -Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s -“Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of -the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the -parody. - -But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the -consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to -another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the -temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing -has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous -Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not -all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the -formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing -of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the -sure index of a character.” - -It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of -leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit -is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the -picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P. -note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned -correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem -the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did -she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that -the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have -left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record. -She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered -and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time, -but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits. -Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask -questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or -impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour -out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I -suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways -of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the -interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a -very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves, -I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be -expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the -public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private -correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last -ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to -write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a -penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And -in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was -paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to -waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in -1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome -does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent -for our feelings. . . . But as we grow older and find more ease of -expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the -general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less -needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton -came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two -volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some -exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find -the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell -himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s -case, under protest; but the habit of literary expression is strong in -them; they like to practise their pens; they begin a note to a friend -and before they know it they have made a piece of literature, bound some -day to get into print with others of the same kind. - -And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from -that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you -receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them. -Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t -mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the -patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for -reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is -perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It -is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most -personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this -mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last -generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than -ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the -garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains -of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old -loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the -tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to -enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed -volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,” -ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning -sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who -preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future -greatness and the value of his autograph? - -Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de -Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary -Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald -somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. -French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at -this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native -beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in -female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that -class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a -correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” -De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public -character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But -in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural -advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and -their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a -letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, -burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary _sand flood_, as unlike -as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows -the paper. _They_ are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their -t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their -correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And -writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of -authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of -a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s -self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not -mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly -paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the -work of professional _literati_. Byron’s letters have been preferred by -some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, -_verve_, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats -was _par excellence_ the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the -artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which -he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. -Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a -trifle too _composed_. They have that trick of quaintness which runs -through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to -a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking -of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of -arts, the writer should write _to_ his friend what will interest him as -well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe -his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his -friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are -delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the -language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his -prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him -now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show -off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a -good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and -Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His -epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened -or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best -letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own -way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a -whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and -sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual -ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at -once nobility and charm of thought. - -Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now -impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson -could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost -anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was -preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for -permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not -without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s -length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he -was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was -fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever -sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from -him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” -But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter -writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest -us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that -interests most. - -Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take -personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great -deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging -confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write -them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the -ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but -to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the -feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like -Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, -sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the -world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few -friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, -feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above -all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. -Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, -country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was -unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London -streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old -bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his -solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, -engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The -familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, -to _desipere in loco_, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and -humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are -not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as -Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they -were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop -to trifles. - -Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. -Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between -interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are -not necessarily good letter writers, and _vice versa_. Coleridge, e.g., -was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. -Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was -silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, -notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter -writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in -style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary -correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social -intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk -was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in -hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into -Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors -under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and -pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the -noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this -oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with -Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s -light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s -dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are -not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the _ore rotundo_ -utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead -of the audience of one. - -The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of -the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But -there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a -tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the -soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. -It seems profane to use the word _art_ in such connections. Yet even a -prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, -though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the -church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art. - -Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence -and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test -of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, -the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed -solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring -false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say -less than you feel than even to _seem_ to say more. - -There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been -killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not -cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally -known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, -Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the -Gettysburg address. - - - - - THACKERAY’S CENTENARY - - -AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for -me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the -relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two -things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, -have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give -my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it -may represent, in some degree, the experience of others. - -What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and -how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather -by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism -does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the -English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the -great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what -may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë -sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe -that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary -importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley -is going fast. - -The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I -think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order -of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than -Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in -securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason -why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. -Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and -George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what -they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral -philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest -impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below -themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens -into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into -psychology and ethical reflection. - -I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time -that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the -Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years -I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat -overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when -Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old -Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all -his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and -tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s -sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were -George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What -sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot -of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior -manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess -that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that -first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand -what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s -novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he -did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it -is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that -it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the -best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The -Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” -to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I -agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the -public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively -considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its -author’s masterpiece and we _ought_ to like it best—only we don’t. We -have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to -defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I -suppose, a part of my dislike of the _genre_. I know the grounds on -which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately -Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. -Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like -Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether -and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no -man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s -report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his -reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since -early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley -novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch -life and character as he knew them. - -I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in -college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done -so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives -out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment -seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture -killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a -protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be -false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus -turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense -a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is -the cruel condition of all growth. - - The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold, - Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old. - -But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did -not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have -continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished -satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say -that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so -great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of -her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more -thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart -from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems -her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative -or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his -great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His -method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that -Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is -little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English -Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with -the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with -the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with -its imaginative or expressional power. - -In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a -satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually -exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but -Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he -was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin -Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature—a very gross -caricature—a piece of _bouffe_. But it lacks the true likeness which is -the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense -of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a -humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the -eccentric, the grotesque—sometimes the monstrous; his books, and -especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as -incredible as Jonson’s _dramatis personae_. In other words, he was a -caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I -do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly -so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of -parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in -burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take -it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous _exaggeration_ of -character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous -_imitation_ for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention -in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad -_facetiae_—“Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray -began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At -the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations -of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. -At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the -prize poem of the year—a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote -those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent -Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, -“The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember -Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to - - A violet shrinking meanly - Where blow the March winds[3] keenly— - A timid fawn on wildwood lawn - Where oak-boughs rustle greenly. - -I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that -Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose -house in Hartford I once inhabited (_et nos in Arcadia_). The passage is -in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings:— - - “‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing, - O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string, - A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’ - -Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. -Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always -had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by -Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), -which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a -quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is -a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense -of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes -from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the -like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of -Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where -the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, -whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances -of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took -the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how - - First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black, - Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back. - _Chorus of Children_: - Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back. - -Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of -exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has -been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s -clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the -fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those -particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his -contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the -greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said. -“I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, -whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in -special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is -false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the _roman -naturaliste_ of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to -forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by -comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that -he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, -himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him -and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was -buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, -to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, -notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a -curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” -scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly -immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel -in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks -of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in -spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make -you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as -a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but -he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of -Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances -the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who -acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds -that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying -planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; -Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat -unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn—“the travesty of a man”; and even -Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, -is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally -comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a -caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists. - -Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am -not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome -discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I -don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that -photographic fiction—the “mirror up to nature” fiction—exists or can -exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without -selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the -history of one day: everything—literally everything—that you have -done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard -said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it -possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, -reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he -mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of -view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of -view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is -optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking -of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, -unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in -style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality -should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long -ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality -is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of -the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic -or realistic fiction—and I don’t say it is—then it is an impossible -ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? -Because, however well documented, his facts are _selected_ to make a -particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed -so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that -his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire -was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and -other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, -and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all -know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his -court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled _grand monarque_: -and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man—a good -illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which -Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena -and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a -suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat. - -Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a -big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant . . . than any -poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the -Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think -of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’: . . . Byron himself always drank -gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a -dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!” - -And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this -attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the -usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, -it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while -realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels -the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and -poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which -Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. -But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that -transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White -Squall” closes: - - And when, its force expended, - The harmless storm was ended, - And as the sunrise splendid - Came blushing o’er the sea; - I thought, as day was breaking, - My little girls were waking - And smiling and making - A prayer at home for me. - -And such is the quality of all his best things in verse—“The Mahogany -Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture -of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling. - -Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting -his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its -worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be -gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a -great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, -and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of -the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do -find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself -skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not -sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, -episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the -old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and -says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding -upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a -different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question, -he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys -illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not -argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, -Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in -the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, -Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it -from his master, Fielding. - -Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a -charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses -contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that -such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as -manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as -Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even -an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes -irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His -satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the -disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He -saw - - How very weak the very wise, - How very small the very great are. - -Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain -and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a -deep melancholy underlay his fun. _Vanitas vanitatum_ is the last word -of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death -better than life. But he was never bitter: his pen was driven by love, -not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope; and -Thackeray’s dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his -chapter on Swift in “The English Humorists.” And therefore I have never -been able to enjoy “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” which has the almost -unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the -book—maintained, of course, with superb consistency—seems to me -uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its -model, “Jonathan Wild.” Swift’s irony I enjoy because it is the natural -expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask. - -Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. The favorite -target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across -flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the “mean admiration of mean things,” such as -wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant -obsession with this subject, his acute consciousness of social -distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is -ridiculing. “Letters four do form his name,” to use a phrase of Dr. -Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more -reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are -all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of -a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families -are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent -jealousies, heartburnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it, -where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may -refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but -he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man -who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the -educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h’s, or the -Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says _haöw_, the woman who -_callates_, and the gent who wears _pants_. In feudal ages the lord -might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does -not oppress his social inferior: he only calls him a bounder. In -primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are -accepted quite simply: they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I -used to be puzzled by the conventional epithet applied by Homer to -Eumaeus—“the godlike swineherd”—which is much as though one should -say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes - - Honor and fame from no condition rise - -he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the -twentieth, honor and fame do rise from condition. Now in the presence of -the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. -But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and -that is the region in which Thackeray’s comedy moves—the _comédie -mondaine_, if not the full _comédie humaine_. It is a world of -convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the -world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention: -but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I suppose it is -because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather -liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved -mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes: “When -he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was -something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that -so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs: we shall have -men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it -is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, -and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which -underlie our economic life. . . . This is the toxic property of all -Thackeray’s writing. . . . He rails at the order of things, but he -imagines nothing different.” In other words, Thackeray was not a -socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming -measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream. - -All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was honestly fond of -mundane advantages. He liked the conversation of clever, well-mannered -gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well-dressed women. -He liked to go to fine houses: liked his club, and was gratified when -asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devonshire. Speaking -of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to -think ill of people who gave you such good claret. - -This explains his love of Horace. Venables reports that he would not -study his Latin at school. But he certainly brought away with him from -the Charterhouse, or from Trinity, a knowledge of Horace. You recall -what delightful, punning use he makes of the lyric Roman at every turn. -It is _solvuntur rupes_ when Colonel Newcome’s Indian fortune melts -away; and _Rosa sera moratur_ when little Rose is slow to go off in the -matrimonial market. Now Horace was eminently a man of the world, a man -about town, a club man, a gentle satirist, with a cheerful, mundane -philosophy of life, just touched with sadness and regret. He was the -poet of an Augustan age, like that English Augustan age which was -Thackeray’s favorite; social, gregarious, urban. - -I never saw Thackeray. I was a boy of eight when he made his second -visit to America, in the winter of 1855–56. But Arthur Hollister, who -graduated at Yale in 1858, told me that he once saw Thackeray walking up -Chapel Street, a colossal figure, six feet four inches in height, -peering through his big glasses with that expression which is familiar -to you in his portraits and in his charming caricatures of his own face. -This seemed to bring him rather near. But I think the nearest that I -ever felt to his bodily presence was once when Mr. Evarts showed me a -copy of Horace, with inserted engravings, which Thackeray had given to -Sam Ward and Ward had given to Evarts. It was a copy which Thackeray had -used and which had his autograph on the flyleaf. - -And this mention of his Latin scholarship induces me to close with an -anecdote that I find in Melville’s “Life.” He says himself that it is -almost too good to be true, but it illustrates so delightfully certain -academic attitudes, that I must give it, authentic or not. The novelist -was to lecture at Oxford and had to obtain the license of the -Vice-Chancellor. He called on him for the necessary permission and this -was the dialogue that ensued: - - _V. C._ Pray, sir, what can I do for you? - - _T._ My name is Thackeray. - - _V. C._ So I see by this card. - - _T._ I seek permission to lecture within your precincts. - - _V. C._ Ah! You are a lecturer: what subjects do you undertake, - religious or political? - - _T._ Neither. I am a literary man. - - _V. C._ Have you written anything? - - _T._ Yes, I am the author of “Vanity Fair.” - - _V. C._ I presume, a dissenter—has that anything to do with - Jno. Bunyan’s book? - - _T._ Not exactly: I have also written “Pendennis.” - - _V. C._ Never heard of these works, but no doubt they are proper - books. - - _T._ I have also contributed to “Punch.” - - _V. C._ “Punch.” I have heard of that. Is it not a ribald - publication? - ------ - -[3] Unquestionably Lady Jane pronounced it wīnds. - - - - - RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA[4] - - -THE English drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years. Mr. -Gosse says that in 1700 the English had the most vivacious school of -comedy in Europe. And, if their serious drama was greatly inferior, -still the best tragedies of Dryden and Otway—and perhaps of Lee, -Southerne, and Rowe—made not only a sounding success on the boards, but -a fair bid for literary honors. Ten years later the drama was moribund, -and in 1747 its epitaph was spoken by Garrick in the sonorous prologue -written by Dr. Johnson for the opening of Drury Lane: - - Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined, - For years the power of Tragedy declined: - From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, - Till declamation roared whilst passion slept. - Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread; - Philosophy remained though nature fled. - But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit, - She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit: - Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, - And pantomime and song confirmed her sway— - -That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the -opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the -stage. - -The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to -flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it -did two hundred—nay, two thousand—years ago. The theatre, as an -institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in -innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the -provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and -the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a -few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as -if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we -should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is -not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is -both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a -composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer, -the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer, -nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the -interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding -exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well -as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at -all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest -terms, as in the Italian _commedie a soggetto_, where the actors -improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says -Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and -acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters -like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a -more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show, -as in the French pantomime play “_L’Enfant Prodigue_.” A good dramatist -includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations, -telling climaxes, tableaux, _ensemble_ scenes, spectacular and -histrionic effects, _coups de théâtre_. These things may seem to the -literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art. -Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful -dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill. - -Still, although stage presentation, the _mise en scène_, is the -touchstone of a play as play, it is of course quite possible to read a -play with pleasure. It is even better to read it than to see it badly -acted, just as one would rather have no pictures in a novel than such -pictures as disturb one’s ideas of the characters. A musical adept can -take pleasure in reading the score of an opera, though he would rather -hear it performed. This is not to say that a play depends for its effect -upon actual performance in anywhere near the same degree as a musical -composition; for written speech is a far more definite language than -musical notation. I use the latter only as an imperfect illustration. - -This professional quality has been much insisted on by practical -playwrights, who are properly contemptuous of closet drama. But just -what is a closet drama? Let it be defined provisionally as a piece meant -to be read and not acted. Yet a play’s chances for representation depend -partly on the condition of the theatre and the demands of the public. -Mr. Yeats, for example, thinks that a play of any poetic or spiritual -depth has no chance to-day in a big London theatre, with an audience -living on the surface of life; and he advises that such plays be tried -in small suburban or country playhouses before audiences of scholars and -simple, unspoiled folk. To the English public, with its desire for -strong action and variety, Racine’s tragedies are nothing but closet -dramas; and yet they are played constantly and with applause in the -French theatre. In the eighteenth century, when the English stage still -maintained a literary tradition,—though it had lost all literary -vitality,—the rankest sort of closet dramas were frequently put on and -listened to respectfully. No manager now would venture to mount such a -thing as “Cato” or “Sophonisba” or “The Castle Spectre.” The modern -public will scarcely endure sheer poetry, or long descriptive and -reflective tirades even in Shakespeare. Such passages have to be cut in -the acting versions. The Elizabethan craving for drama was such that -everything was tried, though some things, when brought to the test of -action, proved failures. Ben Jonson’s heavy tragedies, “Catiline” and -“Sejanus,” failed on the stage; and Daniel’s “Cleopatra” never got so -far as the stage, a rare example of an Elizabethan closet drama. Very -likely, modern literary plays like “Philip Van Artevelde” and Tennyson’s -“Queen Mary” might have succeeded in the seventeenth century. For the -audiences of those days were omnivorous. They hungered for sensation, -but they enjoyed as well fine poetry, noble declamation, philosophy, -sweet singing, and the clown with his funny business, all in close -neighborhood. They cared more for quantity of life than for delicate -art. Their art, indeed, was in some ways quite artless, and the drama -had not yet purged itself of lyric, epic, and didactic elements, nor -attained a purely dramatic type. Since then, the French, whose ideal is -not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English -playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution -and differentiation of literary kinds (_genres_), says that -Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its -infancy. - -Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting -drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. -“Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet -drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put -on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a -good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet -we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a -temporary _succès d’estime_. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play, -without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had -selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself -played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South -Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic -audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original -Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to -report the performance were unconvinced. - -Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play -is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern -literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama,—which was also -literary,—as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature -has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets -_wrote for_ the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In -the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework -did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be -played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When -one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception, -and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties -and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which -recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied -the _literati_ to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s -“Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The -Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the -’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent -foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces, -which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary -point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw -it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham -and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me—in spite of its -somewhat absurd _motivirung_—decidedly impressive as an acting play. On -the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and -sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too -subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the -stage. - -The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The -playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet -dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the -theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators, -fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer, -he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He -need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the -need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider -whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply -thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain -points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is -other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent. - -In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and -Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English -practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with -other “binding and perplexing . . . conventions and limitations of -playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary -degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the -nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher -intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during -the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will -merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,” -Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s -Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,” -Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is -justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is -only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have -been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre -pieces, were flat failures. - -It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As -reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted, -Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of -them took notoriously, and the last two—as any one can testify who has -seen them performed—retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps -the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing -tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially -dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking -which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or -delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no -depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark -how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical -relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter -of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe -and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and -stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and -Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, -Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors. - -Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly -emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even -hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it -must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than -an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital -relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a -criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what -interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read -our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of -stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left -the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His -plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything -since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage -strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were -put together. But if one to-day tries to _read_ any one of his three -hundred and fifty pieces—say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des -Dames”—one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of -the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness -is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions. - -When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for -nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its _literary_ -vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come -back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter -some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and -then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate. -Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an -epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without -an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in -England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude -chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the -sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the -spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of -Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it -again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of -contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process -of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still -rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy -in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s -plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes -Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes: - - In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with - the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between - the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius - to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary - corruption. . . . Walpole . . . promptly gagged the stage by a - censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898]. - Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, - took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has - been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama - has been its disgrace. - -But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of -Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom -Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the -freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not -Walpole but the _Zeitgeist_ that was responsible for his failure in one -literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and -though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of -the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to -their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England -before its final extinction. - -In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day” -there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays -put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about -twenty-four hundred; and—until we reach the last decade of the -century—it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become -a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for -pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher -or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of -non-literary kinds—burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then -there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign -drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, _père -et fils_, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and -many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our -modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful -novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less, -for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in -their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of -dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly -increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel -seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it -may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to _read_ the stage -version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one -would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The -dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist. -“Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To -be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that -is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took -only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far -more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a -great part of the dialogue is already done to hand. - -Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their -memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and -schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s -versatilities—“classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental -Irish melodramas—“The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn”—and popular -favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor, -with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.; -Burnand’s multifarious _facetiae_; the cockney vulgarities of that very -prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s -“cup-and-saucer” comedies—“Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three -thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside -of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us -in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s -plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any -one recall the famous “Ours” _galop_ that we used to dance to _consule -Planco? Eheu fugaces!_ - -The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named, -their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and -George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of -entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to -literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late -centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking -because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There -have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, -historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other -countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind: -from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and -genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French -theatres. In Germany—with some breaks—the case has been the same. From -Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to -Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy -dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre -seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences -intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by -government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the -national life. - -It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute -to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly -ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it -was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a -play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, -Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others -who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now. -In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force: -still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray, -Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and -some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent -of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the -failure of his farce, “Mr. H——.” Dickens was a good actor in private -theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the -theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade, -who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre -piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg -Woffington”—_vice versa_ the usual case. More recently we have seen -Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and -“Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral -Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life -melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the -second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most -certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or -Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the -dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts” -(1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with -choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to -the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King -John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but -“The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface -confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for -“mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by -inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the -fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.” - -Mr. Henry James, too, has tempted the stage, teased, yet fascinated, by -the “insufferable little art”; and the result is a dramatized version of -“Daisy Miller,” and two volumes of “Theatricals”: “Tenants” and -“Disengaged” (1894); “The Album” and “The Reprobate” (1895). These last -were written with a view to their being played at country theatres (an -opportunity having seemingly presented itself), but they never got so -far. In reading them, one feels that a single rehearsal would have -decided their chances. Mr. James, in the preface to the printed plays, -treats his failure with humorous resignation. He complains of “the hard -meagreness inherent in the theatrical form,” and of his own -conscientious effort to avoid supersubtlety and to cultivate an “anxious -simplicity” and a “deadly directness”—to write “something elaborately -plain.” It was to be expected that Mr. James’s habit of refined analysis -would prove but a poor preparation for acted drama; and that his -singular coldness or shyness or reticence would handicap him fatally in -emotional crises. Whenever he is led squarely up to such, he bolts. -Innuendo is not the language of passion. In vain he cries: “See me being -popular: observe this play to the gallery.” The failure is so complete -as to have the finality of a demonstration. - -What was less to be expected is the odd way in which this artist drops -realism for melodrama and farce when he exchanges fiction for -playwriting. Sir Ralph Damant, in “The Album,” is a farce or “humor” -character in the Jonsonian sense, his particular obsession being a fixed -idea that all the women in the play want to marry him. In “Disengaged,” -Mrs. Wigmore, a campaigner with a trained daughter, is another farce -character; and there are iterations of phrase and catchwords here and -elsewhere, as in Dickens’s or Jonson’s humorists. In “The Reprobate,” -Paul Doubleday and Pitt Brunt, M.P., have the accentuated contrast of -the Surface brothers. In “The Album,” that innocent old stage trick is -played again, whereby some article—a lace handkerchief, a scrap of -paper, a necklace, or what not—is made the plot centre. In “Daisy -Miller”—dramatized version—the famous little masterpiece is spoiled by -the substitution of a conventional happy ending and the introduction of -a blackmailing villain. All this insinuates a doubt as to the reality of -a realism which turns into improbability and artificiality merely by a -change in the method of presentation. But the doubt is unfair. No -_reductio ad absurdum_ has occurred, but simply another instance of the -law that every art has its own method, and that the method of the novel -is not that of the play. Of course, there are clever things in the -dialogue of these three-act comedies, for Mr. James is always Mr. James. -But the only one of them that comes near to being a practicable theatre -piece is “Tenants,” which has a good plot founded on a French story. - -The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the -indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to -seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England -has lost the dramatic habit. - -The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted -effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair -prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is -announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim -success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output -of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century -since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary -plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced -during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest -and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of -the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney -Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”; -Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the -Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar -Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s -“Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have -gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the -Haymarket in 1871.) - -Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one -of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of -cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece, -or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and -Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their -first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they -constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that -favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer -ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed -that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also -that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy -of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a -school—that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike -in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no -single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy -to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to -those on the first list. - -Probably the foremost English playwriter of to-day is Mr. A. W. Pinero, -whether tried by the test of popular success in the theatre, or by the -literary quality of his printed dramas. He learned his art as -Shakespeare learned his, by practical experience as an actor, and by -years of obscure work as a hack writer for the playhouses, adapting from -the French, dramatizing novels, scribbling one-act curtain-raisers and -all kinds of theatrical nondescripts. There is a long list of failures -and half successes to his account before he emerged, about 1885, with a -series of three-act farces, “The Magistrate,” “The Cabinet Minister,” -“The Schoolmistress” and the like, which pleased every one by their -easy, natural style, their fresh invention, the rollicking fun that -carried off their highly improbable entanglements, and the _bonhomie_ -and knowledge of the world with which comic character was observed and -portrayed. Absurdity is the kingdom of farce; and, as in the topsyturvy -world of _opera bouffe_, a great part of the effect in these plays is -obtained by setting dignified persons, like prime ministers, cathedral -deans and justices, to doing ludicrously incongruous actions. Thus, the -schoolmistress, outwardly a very prim and proper gentlewoman, leads a -double life, putting in her Christmas vacation as a _figurante_ in comic -opera; anticipating, and perhaps suggesting, Mr. Zangwill’s “Serio-Comic -Governess.” - -To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental -comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions: -“Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and the Butterfly,” “Trelawney of the -Wells,” and others. Of these, the first was, perhaps, the favorite, and -was translated and performed in several languages. It is a very winning -play, with a genuine popular quality, though with a slight twist in its -sentiment. Pinero’s art has deepened in tone, until in such later work -as “The Profligate,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “The Second Mrs. -Tanqueray,” “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,” and “Iris,” he has dealt -seriously, and sometimes tragically, with the nobler passions. His _chef -d’oeuvre_ in this kind, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” is constructed with -consummate skill, and its psychology is right and true. This is a -problem play (it is unfortunate that we apply this term exclusively to -plays dealing with one particular class of problems), and its ethical -value, as well as its tragical force, lies in its demonstration of the -truth that no one can escape from his past. The past will avenge itself -upon him or her, not only in the unforeseen consequences of old -misdeeds, but in that subtler nemesis, the deterioration of character -which makes life under better conditions irksome and impossible. The -catastrophe comes with the inevitableness of the old Greek -fate-tragedies. In this instance, it is suicide, as in “Hedda Gabler” or -Hauptmann’s “_Vor Sonnenaufgang_.” Though criticised as melodramatic, -the dramatist makes us feel it here to be the only solution. Mr. Pinero -has already achieved the distinction of a “Pinero Birthday Book”; while -“Arthur Wing Pinero: a Study,” by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a book of two -hundred and fifty pages, with a bibliography, reviews his plays -_seriatim_. - -Without pushing the analogy too far, we may call Mr. Pinero and Mr. -Bernard Shaw the Goldsmith and Sheridan of the modern stage. In Pinero, -as in Goldsmith, humor more than wit is the prevailing impression. That -“brilliancy” which is often so distressing is absent from his comedy, -whose surfaces do not corruscate, but absorb the light softly. His -satire is good-natured, his worldliness not hard, and his laughter is a -neighbor to tears. Shaw is an Irishman, a journalistic free-lance and -Socialist pamphleteer. He has published three collections of -plays—“Pleasant,” “Unpleasant,” and “For Puritans”—accompanied with -amusingly truculent prefaces, discussing, among other things, whether -his pieces are “better than Shakespeare’s.” Two of his comedies, “Arms -and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” were put on in New York by Mr. -Mansfield as long ago, if I am right, as 1894 and 1897, respectively. -“Arms and the Man” is an effective theatre piece, with a quick movement, -ingenious misunderstandings, and several exciting moments. Like his -fellow countryman, Sheridan, Mr. Shaw is clever in inventing situations, -though he professes scorn of them as bits of old theatrical lumber, a -concession to the pit. “Candida” was given in America a season or two -ago, and the problems of character which it proposes have been -industriously discussed by the dramatic critics and by social circles -everywhere. The author is reported to have been amused at this, and to -have described his heroine as a most unprincipled woman—a view quite -inconsistent with the key kindly afforded in the stage directions. -These, in all Shaw’s plays, are explicit and profuse, comprising details -of costume, gesture, expression, the furniture and decorations of the -scene, with full character analyses of the _dramatis personae_ in the -manner of Ben Jonson. The italicized portions of the printed play are -little less important than the speeches; and small license of -interpretation is left to the players. This is an extra-dramatic method, -the custom of the novel overflowing upon the stage. But Mr. Shaw defends -the usage and asks: “What would we not give for the copy of ‘Hamlet’ -used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original ‘business’ scrawled -by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had, in addition, the descriptive -directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character -sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the -sort of person he meant him to incarnate! Well, we should have had all -this if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had -prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as -elaborate as that of Meredith.” “I would give half a dozen of -Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.” - -Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his -plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he -complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an -irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of -going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public. -The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety, -but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that -wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy—a wit which in both -is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern -dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and -Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are -conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of -character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles -Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For -nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who -detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with -finer reagents. - -And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable -foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly -driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to -the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr. -Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others -had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880, -a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a -Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and -a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The -English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism -will be found to agree better with the English character than the -article furnished by Dumas _fils_ and other French dramatists; and he -even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the -fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar -sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity -is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as -his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is -thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s -influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of -“The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a -practice—perhaps a principle—of the latest realistic schools of drama -and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows -continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old -tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only -episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not -killed—and, perhaps for that reason, the quarto title-page describes it -as a comedy. But in Ibsenite drama the hero or heroine does not always -die. Sometimes he or she goes away, or sometimes just accepts the -situation and stays on. The sound of the door shutting in “A Doll’s -House” tells us that Nora has gone out into the world to begin a new -career. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” one of Shaw’s strongest “Plays -Unpleasant,”—so unpleasant that its production on the boards was -forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain,—when Vivie discovers what her -mother’s profession is, and where the money comes from that sent her to -Newnham, she does nothing melodramatic, but simply utilizes her -mathematical education by entering an actuary’s office. The curtain -falls to the stage direction, “Then she goes at her work with a plunge, -and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.” - -Shaw is a convinced Ibsenite and took up the foils for the master in a -series of articles in the _Saturday Review_ in 1895. The new woman, the -emancipated woman so much in evidence in Ibsen, goes in and out through -Shaw’s plays, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, a business woman with no -nonsense about her, a good fellow, calling her girl friends by their -last names and treating male associates with a brusque _camaraderie_. -But, as he satirizes everything, himself included, he has his laugh at -the Ibsen cult in “The Philanderer.” There is an Ibsen Club, with a bust -of the Norse divinity over the library mantelpiece. One of the rules is -that no womanly woman is to be admitted. At the first symptom of -womanliness, a woman forfeits her membership. What Shaw chiefly shares -with Ibsen is his impatience of heroics, cant, social lies, respectable -prejudices, the conventions of a traditional morality. Face facts, call -things by their names, drag the skeleton out of the closet. Ibsen -brushes these cobwebs aside with a grave logic and a savage contempt; he -makes their hollow unreality the source of tragic wrong. But Shaw’s -lighter temperament is wholly that of the comic artist, and he attacks -cant with the weapons of irony. His favorite characters are audacious, -irreverent young men and women, without illusions and incapable of being -shocked, but delighting in shocking their elders. The clergy are the -professional trustees of this conventional morality and are treated by -Ibsen and Shaw with scant respect. Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” shows the -same contemptuous toleration of the scruples of the rabbit-like Parson -Manders, as Candida shows for her clerical husband’s preaching and -phrase-making. The present season has witnessed the first appearance on -the American stage of Mr. Shaw’s gayest farce comedy, “You Never Can -Tell.” - -I asked an actor, a university graduate, what he thought of the future -of verse drama in acted plays. He inclined to believe that its day had -gone by, even in tragedy; and that the language of the modern serious -drama would be prose, colloquial, never stilted (as it was in “George -Barnwell” and “Richelieu”), but rising, when necessary, into eloquence -and a kind of unmetrical poetry. He instanced several passages in -Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” and later plays. Still, the blank verse -tradition dies hard. Probably the leading representative of ideal or -poetic drama in the contemporary theatre is Stephen Phillips, whose -“Paolo and Francesca” (1899), “Herod” (1900), and “Ulysses” (1902) have -all been shown upon the boards and highly acclaimed, at least by the -critics. There is no doubt that they are fine dramatic poems with many -passages of delicate, and some of noble, beauty. But whether they are -anything more than excellent closet drama is not yet proved. Mr. -Phillips’s experience as an actor has given him a practical knowledge of -technic; and it may be conceded that his plays are nearer the -requirements of the stage than Browning’s or Tennyson’s. They are -simple, as Browning’s are not; and they have quick movement, where -Tennyson’s are lumbering. Neither is it much against them that their -subjects are antique, taken from Dante, Josephus, and Homer. But they -appear to me poetically rather than dramatically imagined. Shakespeare -and Racine dealt with remote or antique life; yet, each in his own way -modernized and realized it. It is a hackneyed observation that Racine’s -Greeks, Romans, and Turks are French gentlemen and ladies of the court -of Louis XIV. Shakespeare’s Homeric heroes are very un-Homeric. There is -little in either of local color or historical perspective: there is in -both a fulness of handling, an explication of sentiments and characters. -The people are able talkers and reasoners. Mr. Phillips’s method is -implicit, and the atmosphere of things old and foreign is kept, the -distance which lends enchantment to mediaeval Italy, or the later Roman -Empire, or the heroic age. It is as if the “Idylls of the King” were -dramatized,—as, indeed, “Elaine” was dramatized for one of the New York -playhouses by George Lathrop,—retaining all their romantic charm and -all their dramatic unreality. - -Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of -these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to -the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,” -Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing -its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple, -unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like -Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more -loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more -lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank -verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus, -an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good -deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in -the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its -romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s -“The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical -gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his -scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after -making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full -view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca, -the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency. -The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope -by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr. -Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean. -Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the -chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his -plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather -than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been -told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent _ad inferos_ was -grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an -infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary -version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment -which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross -soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest -piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in -its first season. - -Among the most interesting of recent dramatic contributions are William -Butler Yeats’s “Plays for an Irish Theatre.” Mr. Yeats’s recent visit to -this country is still fresh in recollection; and doubtless many of my -readers have seen his beautiful little fairy piece, “The Land of Heart’s -Desire.” Probably allegory, or at least symbolism, is the only form in -which the supernatural has any chance in modern drama. The old-fashioned -ghost is too robust an apparition to produce in a sceptical generation -that “willing suspension of disbelief” which, says Coleridge, -constitutes dramatic illusion. Hamlet’s father talks too much; and the -ghosts in “Richard III” are so sociable a company as to quite keep each -other in countenance. The best ghost in Shakespeare is Banquo’s, which -is invisible—a mere “clot on the brain”—and has no “lines” to speak. -The elves in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the elemental spirits in -“The Tempest” are nothing but machinery. The other world is not the -subject of the play. Hauptmann’s “_Die Versunkene Glocke_” is symbolism, -and so is “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” Maeterlinck’s “_Les Aveugles_” -and Yeats’s “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” are more formally allegorical. The -poor old woman, in the latter, who takes the bridegroom from his bride, -is Ireland, from whom strangers have taken her “four beautiful green -fields”—the ancient kingdoms of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and -Connaught. - -These Irish plays, indeed, are the nearest thing we have to the work of -the Belgian symbolist, to dramas like “_Les Aveugles_” and -“_L’Intruse_.” And, as in those, the people are peasants, and the -dialogue is homely prose. No brogue: only a few idioms and sometimes not -even that, the whole being supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic -into standard English. Maeterlinck’s dramas have been played on many -theatres. Mr. William Sharp, who twice saw “_L’Intruse_” at Paris, found -it much less impressive in the acting than in the reading, and his -experience was not singular. As for the more romantic pieces, like “_Les -Sept Princesses_” and “_Aglavaine et Sélysette_,” they are about as -shadowy as one of Tieck’s tales. Those who saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in -“_Pelléas et Mélisande_” will doubtless agree that these dreamlike poems -are hurt by representation. It may be that Maeterlinck, like Baudelaire, -has invented a new shudder. But the matinée audiences laughed at many -things which had thrilled the closet reader. - -Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the _drame intime_, the -_théâtre statique_. The popular drama—what Yeats calls the “theatre of -commerce”—is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière -shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays—say -“_Andromaque_”—how the action moves forward by a series of decisions. -But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do -not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are -the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral -puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make -choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom -in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will -is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique -tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts -in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts -with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about -Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone. - -It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now -great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady -Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“_Eine unbedeutende -Frau_”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which -are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in -the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of -repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady -Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy—can -survive translation or please the German public. - -This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the -translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,” -in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary -drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a -body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and -_read_.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his -printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation -between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years -later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M. -Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If -any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading -English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the -serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be -mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English -drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school -of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.” - -In his book on “The Renaissance of the Drama,” and in many other places, -Mr. Jones has pleaded for a theatre which should faithfully reflect -contemporary life; and in his own plays he has endeavored to furnish -examples of what such a drama should be. His first printed piece, -“Saints and Sinners” (exhibited in 1884), was hardly literature, and did -not stamp its author as a first-class talent. It is a seduction play of -the familiar type, with a set of stock characters: the villain; the -forsaken maid; the steadfast lover who comes back from Australia with a -fortune in the nick of time; the _père noble_, a country clergyman -straight out of “The Vicar of Wakefield”; and a pair of hypocritical -deacons in a dissenting chapel—very much overdone, _pace_ Matthew -Arnold, who complimented Mr. Jones on those concrete examples of -middle-class Philistinism, with its alliterative mixture of business and -bethels. Mr. Jones, like Mr. Shaw, is true to the tradition of the stage -in being fiercely anti-Puritan, and wastes many words in his prefaces in -vindicating the right of the theatre to deal with religious hypocrisy; -as if Tartuffe and Tribulation Wholesome had not been familiar comedy -heroes for nearly three hundred years! - -This dramatist served his apprenticeship in melodrama, as Pinero did in -farce; and there are signs of the difference in his greater seriousness, -or heaviness. Indeed, an honest feeling and an earnest purpose are among -his best qualities. M. Filon thinks him the most English of contemporary -writers for the stage. And, as Pinero’s art has gained in depth, Jones’s -has gained in lightness. Crude at first, without complexity or shading -in his character-drawing, without much art in comic dialogue or much -charm and distinction in serious, he has advanced steadily in grasp and -skill and sureness of touch, and stands to-day in the front rank of -modern British dramatists. “The Crusaders,” “The Case of Rebellious -Susan,” “The Masqueraders,” “Judah,” “The Liars,” are all good -plays—or, at least plays with good features—and certainly fall within -the line which divides literary drama from the mere stage play. “Judah,” -for instance, is a solidly built piece, with two or three strong -situations. The heroine is a fasting girl and miraculous healer, a -subject of a kind which Hawthorne often chose; or reminding one of Mr. -Howells’s charlatans in “The Undiscovered Country” and Mr. James’s in -“The Bostonians.” The characterization of the leading persons is sound, -and there is a brace of very diverting broad comedy figures, a male and -a female scientific prig. They are slightly caricatured—Jones is still -a little heavy-handed—but the theatre must over-accentuate now and -again, just as actresses must rouge. - -In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully -essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable -philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood guilds, and the like. There -is a woman in “The Crusaders,”—a campaigner, a steamboat, a specimen of -the loud, energetic, public, organizing, speech-making, committee and -platform, subscription-soliciting woman,—nearly as good as anything in -our best fiction. Mr. Joseph Knight, who writes a preface to “Judah” -(first put on at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1890), compares its -scientific faddists with the women who swarm to chemistry and biology -lectures in that favorite Parisian comedy, “_Le monde où l’on -s’ennuie_.” There is capital satire of the downright kind in these -plays, but surely it is dangerous to suggest comparison with the gay -irony, the courtly grace, the dash and sparkle of Pailleron’s little -masterpiece. There are no such winged shafts in any English quiver. Upon -the whole, “The Liars” seems to me the best comedy of Mr. Jones’s that I -have read,—I have not read them all,—the most evenly sustained at -every point of character and incident, a fine piece of work in both -invention and construction. The subject, however, is of that -disagreeable variety which the English drama has so often borrowed from -the French, the rescue of a married woman from a compromising position, -by a comic conspiracy in her favor. - -The Puritans have always been halfway right in their opposition to the -theatre. The drama, in the abstract and as a form of literature, is of -an ancient house and a noble. But the professional stage tends naturally -to corruption, and taints what it receives. The world pictured in these -contemporary society plays—or in many of them—we are unwilling to -accept as typical. Its fashion is fast and not seldom vulgar. It is a -vicious democracy in which divorces are frequent and the “woman with a -past” is the usual heroine; in which rowdy peers mingle oddly with -manicurists, clairvoyants, barmaids, adventuresses, comic actresses, -faith-healers, etc., and the contact between high life and low-life has -commonly disreputable motives. Surely this is not English life, as we -know it from the best English fiction. And, if the drama is to take -permanent rank with the novel, it must redistribute its emphasis. - ------ - -[4] This article was printed in the _North American Review_ in two -instalments, in May, 1905, and July, 1907. The growth of the literary -drama in the last fifteen years has been so marked, and plays of such -high quality have been put upon the stage by new writers like Barrie, -Synge, Masefield, Kennedy, Moody, Sheldon, and others, that these -prophecies and reflections may seem out of date. The article is -retained, notwithstanding, for whatever there may be in it that is true -of drama in general. - - - - - SHERIDAN - - -WITH the exception of Goldsmith’s comedy, “She Stoops to Conquer,” the -only eighteenth century plays that still keep the stage are Sheridan’s -three, “The Rivals,” “The Critic,” and “The School for Scandal.” Once in -a while, to be sure, a single piece by one or another of Goldsmith’s and -Sheridan’s contemporaries makes a brief reappearance in the modern -theatre. I have seen Goldsmith’s earlier and inferior comedy, “The -Good-natured Man,” as well as Towneley’s farce, “High Life Below -Stairs,” both given by amateurs; and I have seen Colman’s “Heir at Law” -(1797) acted by professionals. Doubtless other eighteenth century plays, -such as Cumberland’s “West Indian” and Holcroft’s “Road to Ruin,” are -occasionally revived and run for a few nights. Sometimes this happens -even to an earlier piece, such as Farquhar’s “Beaux’ Stratagem” (1707), -which retained its popularity all through the eighteenth century. But -things of this sort, though listened to with a certain respectful -attention, are plainly tolerated as interesting literary survivals, like -an old miracle or morality play, say the “_Secunda Pastorum_” or -“Everyman,” revisiting the glimpses of the moon. They do not belong to -the repertoire. - -Sheridan’s plays, on the other hand, have never lost their popularity as -acting dramas. “The School for Scandal” has been played oftener than any -other English play outside of Shakespeare; and “The Rivals” is not far -behind it. Even “The Critic,” which is a burlesque and depends for its -effect not upon plot and character but upon the sheer wit of the -dialogue and the absurdity of the situations—even “The Critic” -continues to be presented both at private theatricals and upon the -public stage, and seldom fails to amuse. There is no better proof of -Sheridan’s extraordinary dramatic aptitude than is afforded by a -comparison of “The Critic” with its model, Buckingham’s “Rehearsal.” To -Boswell’s question why “The Rehearsal” was no longer played, Dr. Johnson -answered, “Sir, it had not wit enough to keep it sweet”; then paused and -added in good Johnsonese, “it had not vitality sufficient to preserve it -from putrefaction.” “The Rehearsal” did have plenty of wit, but it was -of the kind which depends for its success upon a knowledge of the -tragedies it burlesqued. These are forgotten, and so “The Rehearsal” is -dead. But “The Critic” is not only very much brighter, but it satirizes -high tragedy in general and not a temporary literary fashion or a -particular class of tragedy: and, therefore, nearly a century and a half -after its first performance, “The Critic” is still very much alive. The -enduring favor which Sheridan’s plays have won must signify one of two -things: either that they touch the springs of universal comedy, _la -comédie humaine_—the human comedy, as Balzac calls it: go down to the -deep source of laughter, which is also the fountain of tears; or else -that, whatever of shallowness or artificiality their picture of life may -have, their cleverness and artistic cunning are such that they keep -their freshness after one hundred and fifty years. Such is the -antiseptic power of art. - -The latter, I think, is Sheridan’s case. His quality was not genius, but -talent, yet talent raised to a very high power. His comedy lacks the -depth and mellowness of the very greatest comedy. His place is not among -the supreme creative humorists, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Aristophanes, -Molière. Taine says that in Sheridan all is brilliant, but that the -metal is not his own, nor is it always of the best quality. Yet he -acknowledges the wonderful vivacity of the dialogue, and the animated -movement of every scene and of the play as a whole. Sheridan, in truth, -was inventive rather than original. His art was eclectic, derivative, -but his skill in putting together his materials was unfailing. He wrote -the comedy of manners: not the comedy of character. In the greatest -comedy, in “The Merchant of Venice,” or “_Le Misanthrope_,” or “Peer -Gynt” there is poetry, or at least there is seriousness. But in the -comedy of manners, or in what is called classical comedy, i.e., pure, -unmixed comedy, the purpose is merely to amuse. - -He never drives his plowshare through the crust of good society into the -substratum of universal ideas. We are not to look in the comedy of -manners for wisdom and far-reaching thoughts; nor yet for profound, -vital, subtle studies of human nature. Sheridan’s comedies are the -sparkling foam on the crest of the wave: the bright, consummate flower -of high life: finished specimens of the playwright’s art: not great -dramatic works. - -Yet when all deductions have been made, Sheridan’s is a most dazzling -figure. The brilliancy and versatility of his talents were indeed -amazing. Byron said: “Whatsoever Sheridan has done, or chosen to do, has -been _par excellence_ always the best of its kind. He has written the -best comedy, the best drama, the best farce and the best address; and, -to crown all, delivered the very best oration ever conceived or heard in -this country.” By the best comedy Byron means “The School for Scandal”; -the best drama was “The Duenna,” an opera or music drama; the best -address was the monologue on Garrick; and the best oration was the -famous speech on the Begums of Oude in the impeachment proceedings -against Warren Hastings: a speech which held the attention of the House -of Commons for over five hours at a stretch, and was universally -acknowledged to have outdone the most eloquent efforts of Burke and Pitt -and Fox. - -Sheridan came naturally by his aptitude for the theatre. His father was -an actor and declamation master and had been manager of the Theatre -Royal in Dublin. His mother had written novels and plays. Her unfinished -comedy, “A Journey to Bath,” furnished a few hints towards “The Rivals,” -the scene of which, you will remember, is at Bath, the fashionable -watering place which figures so largely in eighteenth century letters: -in Smollett’s novel, “Humphrey Clinker,” in Horace Walpole’s -correspondence, in Anstey’s satire, “The New Bath Guide,” and in -Goldsmith’s life of Beau Nash, the King of the Pumproom. Histrionic and -even dramatic ability has been constantly inherited. There are families -of actors, like the Kembles and the Booths; and it is noteworthy how -large a proportion of our dramatic authors have been actors, or in -practical touch with the stage: Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Shakespeare, -Otway, Lee, Cibber, the Colmans, father and son, Macklin, Garrick, -Foote, Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Tom Taylor, Pinero, Stephen -Phillips. These names by no means exhaust the list of those who have -both written and acted plays. Sheridan’s career was full of adventure. -He eloped from Bath with a beautiful girl of eighteen, a concert singer, -daughter of Linley, the musical composer, and was married to her in -France. In the course of this affair he fought two duels, in one of -which he was dangerously wounded. Now what can be more romantic than a -duel and an elopement? Yet notice how the identical adventures which -romance uses in one way, classical comedy uses in quite another. These -personal experiences doubtless suggested some of the incidents in “The -Rivals”; but in that comedy the projected duel and the projected -elopement end in farce, and common sense carries it over romance, which -it is the whole object of the play to make fun of, as it is embodied in -the person of Miss Lydia Languish. - -It was Sheridan who said that easy writing was sometimes very hard -reading. Nevertheless, whatever he did had the air of being dashed off -carelessly. All his plays were written before he was thirty. He was a -man of the world, who was only incidentally a man of letters. He sat -thirty years in the House of Commons, was Under Secretary for Foreign -Affairs under Fox, and Secretary to the Treasury under the coalition -ministry. He associated intimately with that royal fribble, the Prince -Regent, and the whole dynasty of dandies, and became, as Thackeray said -of his forerunner, Congreve, a tremendous swell, but on a much slenderer -capital. It is one of the puzzles of Sheridan’s biography where he got -the money to pay for Drury Lane Theatre, of which he became manager and -lessee. He was a shining figure in the world of sport and the world of -politics, as well as in the world of literature and the drama. He had -the sanguine, improvident temperament, and the irregular, -procrastinating habits of work which are popularly associated with -genius. The story is told that the fifth act of “The School for Scandal” -was still unwritten while the earlier acts were being rehearsed for the -first performance; and that Sheridan’s friends locked him up in a room -with pen, ink, and paper, and a bottle of claret, and would not let him -out till he had finished the play. This anecdote is not, I believe, -authentic; but it shows the current impression of his irresponsible -ways. His reckless expenses, his betting and gambling debts resulted in -his arrest and imprisonment, and writs were served upon him in his last -illness. I do not think that Sheridan affected a contempt for the -profession of letters; but there was perhaps a touch of affectation in -his rather _dégagé_ attitude toward his own performances. It is an -attitude not uncommon in literary men who are also—like -Congreve—“tremendous swells.” “I hate your authors who are _all_ -author,” wrote Byron, who was himself a bit of a snob. When Voltaire -called upon Congreve, the latter disclaimed the character of author, and -said he was merely a private gentleman, who wrote for his own amusement. -“If you were merely a private gentleman,” replied Voltaire, “I would not -have thought it worth while to come to see you.” - -Dramatic masterpieces are not tossed off lightly from the nib of the -pen; and doubtless Sheridan worked harder at his plays than he chose to -have the public know and was not really one of that “mob of gentlemen -who write with ease” at whom Pope sneers. Byron and many others testify -to the coruscating wit of his conversation; and it is well-known that he -did not waste his good things, but put them down in his notebooks and -worked them up to a high polish in the dialogue of his plays. It is -noticeable how thriftily he leads up to his jokes, laying little traps -for his speakers to fall into. Thus in “The Rivals,” where Faulkland is -complaining to Captain Absolute about Julia’s heartless high spirits in -her lover’s absence, he appeals to his friend to mark the contrast: - - “Why Jack, have _I_ been the joy and spirit of the company?” - - “No, indeed, you have not,” acknowledges the Captain. - - “Have _I_ been lively and entertaining?” asks Faulkland. - - “O, upon my word, I acquit you,” answers his friend. - - “Have _I_ been full of wit and humor?” pursues the jealous - lover. - - “No, faith, to do you justice,” says Absolute, “you have been - confoundedly stupid.” - -The Captain could hardly have missed this rejoinder; it was fairly put -into his mouth by the wily dramatist. - -Again observe how carefully the way is prepared for the repartee in the -following bit of dialogue from “The School for Scandal”: Sir Peter -Teazle has married a country girl and brought her up to London, where -she shows an unexpected zest for the pleasures of the town. He is -remonstrating with her about her extravagance and fashionable ways. - -Sir Peter: “Madam, I pray had you any of these elegant expenses when you -married me?” - -Lady Teazle: “Lud, Sir Peter, would you have me be out of the fashion?” - -Sir Peter: “The fashion indeed! What had you to do with the fashion -before you married me?” - -Lady Teazle: “For my part—I should think you would like to have your -wife thought a woman of taste.” - -Sir Peter: “Aye, there again—Taste! Zounds, Madam, you had no taste -when you married me.” - -The retort is inevitable and a modern playwriter—say, Shaw or -Pinero—would leave the audience to make it, Lady Teazle answering -merely with an ironical bow. But Sheridan was not addressing subtle -intellects, and he doesn’t let us off from the lady’s answer in good -blunt terms: “That’s very true indeed, Sir Peter! After having married -you I should never pretend to taste again, I allow.” But why expose -these tricks of the trade? All playwrights have them, and Sheridan uses -them very cleverly, if rather transparently. Another time-honored stage -convention which Sheridan practises is the labelling of his characters. -Names like Malaprop, O’Trigger, Absolute, Languish, Acres, etc., are -descriptive; and the realist might ask how their owners came by them, if -he were pedantic enough to cross-question the innocent old comedy -tradition, which is of course unnatural and indefensible enough if we -choose to take such things seriously. - -About the comparative merits of Sheridan’s two best plays, tastes have -differed. “The Rivals” has more of humor; “The School for Scandal” more -of wit; but both have plenty of each. On its first appearance, January -17, 1775, “The Rivals” was a failure, owing partly to its excessive -length, partly to bad acting, partly to a number of outrageous puns and -similar witticisms which the author afterwards cut out, and partly to -the offense given by the supposed caricature of an Irish gentleman in -the person of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Sheridan withdrew the play and -revised it thoroughly, shortening the acting time by an hour and -redistributing the parts among the members of the Covent Garden Theatre -company. At its second performance, eleven days later, it proved a -complete success, and has remained so ever since. It has always been a -favorite play with the actors, because it offers so many fine rôles to -an all-star company. It affords at least four first-class parts to the -comic artist: Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Bob Acres, and Sir -Lucius O’Trigger: while it has an unusually spirited _jeune premier_, a -charming though utterly unreasonable heroine, a good soubrette in Lucy, -and entertaining minor characters in Fag and David. - -As we have no manuscript of the first draft of “The Rivals,” it is -impossible to say exactly what changes the author made in it. But as the -text now stands it is hard to understand why Sir Lucius O’Trigger was -regarded as an insult to the Irish nation. Sheridan was an Irishman and -he protested that he would have been the last man to lampoon his -compatriots. Sir Lucius is a fortune hunter, indeed, and he is always -spoiling for a fight; but he is a gentleman and a man of courage; and -even in his fortune hunting he is sensitive upon the point of honor: he -will get Mrs. Malaprop’s consent to his addresses to her niece, and “do -everything fairly,” for, as he says very finely, “I am so poor that I -can’t afford to do a dirty action.” The comedy Irishman was nothing new -in Sheridan’s time. He goes back to Jonson and Shakespeare. In the -eighteenth century his name was Teague; in the nineteenth, Pat or Mike. -We are familiar with this stock figure of the modern stage, his brogue, -his long-skirted coat and knee breeches, the blackthorn shillalah in his -fist and the dudeen stuck into his hatband. The Irish naturally resent -this grotesque: their history has been tragical and they wish to be -taken seriously. We have witnessed of late their protest against one of -their own comedies, “The Playboy of the Western World.” But perhaps they -have become over touchy. There is not any too much fun in the world, and -if we are to lose all the funny national peculiarities from caricature -and farce and dialect story, if the stage Irishman has got to go, and -also the stage Yankee, Dutchman, Jew, Ole Olsen, John Bull, and the -burnt cork artist of the negro minstrel show, this world will be a -gloomier place. Be that as it may, Sir Lucius O’Trigger is no -caricature: he doesn’t even speak in brogue, and perhaps the nicest -stroke in his portrait is that innocent inconsequence which is the -essence of an Irish bull. “Hah, my little ambassadress,” he says to -Lucy, with whom he has an appointment, “I have been looking for you; I -have been on the South Parade this half hour.” - -“O gemini!” cries Lucy, “and I have been waiting for your worship on the -North.” - -“Faith,” answers Sir Lucius, “maybe that was the reason we did not -meet.” - -A great pleasure in the late sixties and early seventies used to be the -annual season of English classical comedy at Wallack’s old playhouse; -and not the least pleasant feature of this yearly revival was the -performance of “The Rivals,” with John Gilbert cast for the part of Sir -Anthony, Mrs. Gilbert as Mrs. Malaprop, and Lester Wallack himself, if I -remember rightly, in the rôle of the Captain. But, of course, the comic -hero of the piece is Bob Acres; and this, I think, was Jefferson’s great -part. I saw him three times in Bob Acres, at intervals of years, and it -was a masterpiece of high comedy acting: so natural, so utterly without -consciousness of the presence of spectators, that it was less like -acting than like the thing itself. The interpretation of the character, -too, was so genial and sympathetic that one was left with a feeling of -great friendliness toward the unwarlike Bob, and his cowardice excited -not contempt but only amusement. The last time that I saw Joe Jefferson -in “The Rivals,” he was a very old man, and there was a pathetic -impression of fatigue about his performance, though the refinement and -the warm-heartedness with which he carried the part had lost nothing -with age. - -Historically Sheridan’s plays represent a reaction against sentimental -comedy, which had held the stage for a number of years, beginning, -perhaps, with Steele’s “Tender Husband” (1703) and numbering, among its -triumphs, pieces like Moore’s “Foundling” (1748), Kelly’s “False -Delicacy,” and several of Cumberland’s plays. Cumberland, by the way, -who was intensely jealous of Sheridan, was the original of Sir Fretful -Plagiary in “The Critic,” Sheridan’s only condescension to personal -satire. He was seemingly a vain and pompous person, and well deserved -his castigation. The story is told of Cumberland that he took his -children to see “The School for Scandal” and when they laughed rebuked -them, saying that he saw nothing to laugh at in this comedy. When this -was reported to Sheridan, his comment was, “I think that confoundedly -ungrateful, for I went to see Cumberland’s last tragedy and laughed -heartily at it all the way through.” - -With Goldsmith and Sheridan gayety came back to the English stage. In -their prefaces and prologues both of them complain that the comic muse -is dying and is being succeeded by “a mawkish drab of spurious breed who -deals in sentimentals,” genteel comedy, to wit, who comes from France -where comedy has now become so very elevated and sentimental that it has -not only banished humor and Molière from the stage, but it has banished -all spectators too. Goldsmith laments the disgusting solemnity that had -lately infected literature and sneers at the moralizing comedies that -deal with the virtues and distresses of private life instead of -ridiculing its faults. Joseph Surface in “The School for Scandal” is -Sheridan’s portrait of the sentimental, moralizing hypocrite, whose -catchword is “the man of sentiment”; and whose habit of uttering lofty -moralities is so ingrained that he vents them even when no one is -present who can be deceived by them. - -Surface: “The man who does not share in the distresses of a -brother—even though merited by his own misconduct—deserves—” - -“O Lud,” interrupts Lady Sneerwell, “you are going to be moral, and -forget that you are among friends.” - -“Egad, that’s true,” rejoins Joseph, “I’ll keep that sentiment till I -see Sir Peter.” - -“The Critic” has a slap or two at sentimental comedy. A manuscript play -has been submitted to Mr. Dangle, who reads this stage direction, -“_Bursts into tears and exit_,” and naturally asks, “What is this, a -tragedy?” “No,” explains Mr. Sneer, “that’s a genteel comedy, not a -translation—only taken from the French: it is written in a style which -they have lately tried to run down; the true sentimental and nothing -ridiculous in it from the beginning to the end. . . . The theatre, in -proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I -am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their -entertainment.” Another of these moral comedies is entitled “‘The -Reformed Housebreaker’ where, by the mere force of humour, housebreaking -is put in so ridiculous a light, that if the piece has its proper run -. . . bolts and bars will be entirely useless by the end of the season.” - -Sheridan has often been called the English Beaumarchais. The comedies of -Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro” were -precisely contemporaneous with Sheridan’s, and, like the latter, they -were a reaction against sentimentalism, against the so-called _comédie -larmoyante_ or tearful comedies of La Chaussée and other French -dramatists. With Beaumarchais laughter and mirth returned once more to -the French stage. He goes back for a model to Molière, as Sheridan goes -back to English Restoration comedy, and particularly to Congreve, whom -he resembles in the wit of his dialogue and the vivacity of his -character painting, but whom he greatly excels in the invention of plot -and situation. Congreve’s plots are intricate and hard to follow, highly -improbable and destitute of climaxes. On the other hand, Sheridan is a -master of plot. The duel scene in “The Rivals,” the auction scene and -the famous screen scene in “The School for Scandal” are three of the -most skilfully managed situations in English comedy. Congreve’s best -play, “The Way of the World” (1700), was a failure on the stage. But -whatever Sheridan’s shortcomings, a want of practical effectiveness, of -acting quality, was never one of them. Sheridan revived society drama, -what Lamb called the artificial comedy of the seventeenth century. Lydia -Languish, with her romantic notions, and Mrs. Malaprop with her “nice -derangement of epitaphs” are artificial characters. Bob Acres is for the -most part delightfully natural, but his system of referential or -sentimental swearing—“Odds blushes and blooms” and the like—is an -artificial touch. The weakest feature of “The Rivals” is the underplot, -the love affairs of Faulkland and Julia. Faulkland’s particular variety -of jealousy is a “humor” of the Ben Jonsonian sort, a sentimental alloy, -as Charles Lamb pronounced it, and anyway infinitely tiresome. In modern -acting versions this business is usually abridged. As Jefferson played -it, Julia’s part was cut out altogether, and Faulkland makes only one -appearance (Act II, Scene I), where his presence is necessary for the -going on of the main action. - -There is one particular in which Congreve and Sheridan sin alike. They -make all the characters witty. “Tell me if Congreve’s fools are fools -indeed,” wrote Pope. And Sheridan can never resist the temptation of -putting clever sayings into the mouths of simpletons. The romantic Miss -Languish is nearly as witty as the very unromantic Lady Teazle. I need -not quote the good things that Fag and Lucy say, but Thomas the -coachman, and the stupid old family servant David say things equally -good. It is David, e.g., who, when his master remarks that if he is -killed in the duel his honor will follow him to the grave, rejoins, “Now -that’s just the place where I could make shift to do without it.” Sir -Anthony is witty, Bob Acres himself is witty, and even Mrs. -Malaprop—foolish old woman—delivers repartees. Mrs. Malaprop’s verbal -blunders, by the way, are a good instance of that artificial high polish -so characteristic of Sheridan’s art. There are people in earlier -comedies who make ludicrous misapplications of words—Shakespeare’s -Dogberry, e.g., or Dame Quickly, but they do it naturally and -occasionally. Sheridan reduces these accidents to a system—a science. -No one in real life was ever so perseveringly and so brilliantly wrong -as Mrs. Malaprop. - -Dramatically this is out of character and is, therefore, a fault, though -a fault easy to forgive since it results in so much clever talk. It is a -fault, as I have said, which Congreve shares with Sheridan, his heir and -continuator. Perhaps the lines of character are not cut quite so deep in -Sheridan as in Congreve nor has his dialogue the elder dramatist’s -condensed, epigrammatic solidity. But on the whole, “The Rivals” and -“The School for Scandal” are better plays than Congreve ever wrote. - - - - - THE POETRY OF THE CAVALIERS - - -THE spirit of the seventeenth century Cavaliers has been made familiar -to us by historians and romancers, but it did not find very adequate -expression in contemporary verse. There are two perfect songs by -Lovelace, “To Althea from Prison” and “To Lucasta, on Going to the -Wars.” But if we look into collections like Charles Mackay’s “Songs of -the Cavaliers,” we are disappointed. These consist mainly of political -campaign songs little removed from doggerel, satires by Butler and -Cleveland, and rollicking ballad choruses by Alexander Brome, Sir Roger -L’Estrange, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was Prince Rupert’s secretary; or -haply by that gallant royalist gentleman, Arthur Lord Capel, executed, -though a prisoner of war, after the surrender of Colchester. You may -remember Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of -Colchester.” These were the marks of a Cavalier ballad: to abuse the -Roundheads, to be convivial and profane, to profess a reckless daring in -fight, devotion to the ladies, and loyalty to church and king. The gay -courage of the Cavalier contrasted itself with the grim and stubborn -valor of the Roundhead. The bitterest drop in the cup of the defeated -kingsmen was that they were beaten by their social inferiors, by muckers -and religious fanatics who cropped their hair, wore narrow bands instead -of lace collars, and droned long prayers through their noses; people -like the butcher Harrison and the leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones, -and the brewers, cobblers, grocers and like mechanical trades who -figured as the preachers in Cromwell’s New Model army. The usual -commonplaces of anti-Puritan satire, the alleged greed and hypocrisy of -the despised but victorious faction, their ridiculous solemnity, their -illiteracy, contentiousness, superstition, and hatred of all liberal -arts, are duly set forth in such pieces as “The Anarchie,” “The Geneva -Ballad,” and “Hey then, up go we.” The most popular of all these was the -famous song, “When the King enjoys his own again,” which Ritson indeed -calls—but surely with much exaggeration—the most famous song of any -time or country. - - And though today we see Whitehall - With cobwebs hung around the wall, - Yet Heaven shall make amends for all - When the King enjoys his own again. - -But somehow the finer essence of the Cavalier spirit escapes us in these -careless verses. Better are the recorded sayings in prose of many -gallant gentlemen in the King’s service. There, for instance, was Sir -Edmund Verney, the royal standard bearer who was killed at Edgehill. He -was offered his life by a throng of his enemies if he would deliver the -standard. He answered that his life was his own, but the standard was -his and their sovereign’s and he would not deliver it while he lived. At -the outbreak of the war he had said to Hyde: “I have eaten his [the -King’s] bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base -a thing as to forsake him; I choose rather to lose my life—which I am -sure to do—to preserve and defend those things which are against my -conscience to preserve and defend; for I will deal freely with you: I -have no reverence for bishops for whom this quarrel subsists.” - -And there was that high-hearted nobleman, the Marquis of Winchester, -whose fortress of Basing House, with its garrison of five hundred men -and their families, held out for years against the Parliament. It was -continuously besieged from July, 1643, to November, 1645, and at one -time Sir William Waller attacked it in vain, with a force of seven -thousand. At last Cromwell took it by storm, whereupon the Marquis, made -prisoner, “broke out and said that if the King had no more ground in -England but Basing House, he would adventure as he did, and so maintain -it to the uttermost; comforting himself in this disaster that Basing -House was called Loyalty.” The sack of this great stronghold yielded -over 200,000 pounds, and Clarendon says that on its every windowpane was -written with a diamond point “_Aimez Loyauté_.” - -The Cavalier spirit prolonged itself down into the Jacobite songs of the -eighteenth century which centre about the two attempts of the Stuarts to -regain their crown—in 1715 and in “the Forty-five.” - - It was a’ for our rightfu’ King - That we left fair Scotland’s strand: - It was a’ for our rightfu’ King - That we e’er saw Irish land. - He turned his charger as he spake - Beside the river shore: - He gave his bridle rein a shake, - Cried “Adieu for evermore, my love; - Adieu for evermore.” - -The Hanoverians have been good enough constitutional monarchs but -without much appeal to the imagination. “I never can think of that -German fellow as King of England,” says Harry Warrington in “The -Virginians,” who has just been snubbed by George II, the sovereign who -hated “boetry and bainting.” The Stuarts were bad kings, but they -managed to inspire a passionate loyalty in their adherents, a devotion -which went proudly into battle, into exile, and onto the scaffold: which -followed them through their misfortunes and survived their final -downfall. They were a native, or at least a Scottish dynasty; and -Scotland, though upon the whole Presbyterian in religion and Whiggish in -politics, was most tenacious of the Jacobite tradition. Consider the -loss to British romance if the Stuarts had never reigned and sinned and -suffered! Half of the Waverley novels and all the royalist songs, from -Lovelace toasting in prison “the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories -of his King,” down to Burns’s “Lament for Culloden” and the secret -healths to “Charlie over the water.” Three centuries divide Chastelard, -dying for Mary Stuart, from Walter Scott, paralytic, moribund, standing -by the tomb of the Young Pretender in St. Peter’s and murmuring to -himself of “Charlie and his men.” Nay, is there not even to-day a White -Rose Society which celebrates yearly the birthday of St. Charles, the -martyr: some few score gentlemen with their committees, organs, -propaganda, still bent on dethroning the Hanoverians and bringing in -some remote collateral descendant? thinnest ghost of legitimism, walking -in the broad sunlight of the twentieth century, under the nose of crown -and parliament, disregarded of all men except, here and there, a writer -of humorous paragraphs for the newspapers? - -For the passion of loyalty is extinct—extinct as the dodo. It was not -patriotism, as we know it; nor was it the personal homage paid to great -men, to the Cromwells, Washingtons, Bonapartes, and Bismarcks. It was a -loyalty to the king as king, to a symbol, a fetich whom divinity doth -hedge. In the political creed of the Stuarts, such homage was a -prerogative of the crown, and right royally did they exact it, accepting -all sacrifices and repaying them with neglect, ingratitude, and -betrayal. Yes, loyalty is obsolete, and the Stuarts were unworthy of it. -But no matter, it was a fine old passion. - -After all, one of the finest things ever said of Charles I was said by a -political opponent, the poet Andrew Marvell, Milton’s assistant in the -secretaryship for foreign tongues, when speaking of the King’s dignified -behavior upon the scaffold, he wrote:— - - He nothing common did or mean, - Upon that memorable scene - But, with his keener eye, - The axe’s edge did try; - Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite, - To vindicate his helpless right, - But bowed his comely head - Down as upon a bed. - -The Cavalier stood for the church as well as for the king, but he was -not commonly a deeply religions man. The church poetry of that -generation is often sweetly or fervently devout, but it was written -mostly by clergymen, like George Herbert or Herrick—a rather worldly -parson: now and then by a college recluse, like Crashaw—who became a -Roman Catholic priest; or sometimes by a layman like Vaughan—who was a -doctor; or Francis Quarles, whose gloomy religious verses have little to -distinguish them from Puritan poetry. These poets were royalists but -hardly Cavaliers. The real Cavaliers, the courtly and secular poets like -Suckling, Lovelace, Cleveland, and the rest, stood for the church for -social reasons. It was the church of their class, ancient, conservative, -aristocratic. Carlyle, of Scotch Presbyterian antecedents, speaks -disrespectfully of the English Church, “with its singular old rubrics -and its four surplices at All-hallowtide,” and describes the Hampton -Court Conference of 1604 as “decent ceremonialism facing awful, devout -Puritanism.” Charles II tried to persuade the Scotch Earl of Lauderdale -to become an Episcopalian, assuring him that Presbyterianism was no -religion for a gentleman. Says the spirit in Dipsychus:— - - The Church of England I belong to - And think dissenters not far wrong too; - They’re vulgar dogs, but for his _creed_ - I hold that no man will be d——d. - -The Cavalier was the inheritor of the mediaeval knight and the -forerunner of the modern gentleman. To the stern Puritan conscience he -opposed, as his guiding motive, the knightly sense of honor, a sort of -artificial or aristocratic conscience. The Puritan looked upon himself -as an instrument of the divine will. He acted as ever in his great -taskmaster’s eye: his sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. -Hence his sturdy, sublime courage. You cannot lick a Calvinist who knows -that God is with him. But honor is not so much a regard for God as for -oneself—a finer kind of self-respect. Inferior in momentum to the -Puritan’s sense of duty, there is something gallant and chivalrous about -it. The Cavalier spirit was not so grave as the knight’s. Though he -fought for church and king, there was lacking the vow of knighthood, the -religious dedication of oneself to the service of the cross and of one’s -feudal suzerain. But you notice how the Cavalier, like the knight, -relates his honor to the service of his lady. Lovelace’s famous lines:— - - I could not love thee, dear, so much, - Loved I not honour more, - -may stand for the Cavalier motto. - -Like the knight, the chevalier of the Middle Ages, the seventeenth -century Cavalier too, as his name implies, was a horseman. Rupert’s -cavalry was the strongest arm of the King’s service. Prince Rupert or -Ruprecht, the nephew of the King, was the son of that Elizabeth Stuart, -nicknamed the Queen of Hearts, whom Sir Henry Wotton celebrated in his -lofty lines “On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,” - - You meaner beauties of the night - That poorly satisfy our eyes, - More by your number than your light; - You common people of the skies; - What are you when the moon shall rise? - -The impetuous charges of Rupert’s cavalry won the day at Edgehill and -all but won it at Marston Moor. But they were an undisciplined troop and -much given to plunder—a German word, by the way, which Prince Rupert -introduced into England. Perhaps you have seen the once popular -engraving entitled “The Cavalier’s Pets.” A noble staghound is guarding -a pair of riding boots, a pair of gauntlets, a pair of cavalry pistols -and a wide hat with sweeping plume. The careless Cavalier songs have the -air of being composed on horseback and written down on the saddle -leather: riding ballads in a very different sense from the old riding -ballads of the Scottish Border. Robert Browning has reproduced very -exactly the characteristics of the species in his “Cavalier Tunes.” In -“Give a Rouse” he presents the Cavalier drinking; in “Boot and Saddle” -the Cavalier riding, and in all of them the Cavalier swearing, laughing, -and cheering for the King. - - Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, - Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing; - And, pressing a troop unable to stoop - And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, - Marched them along, fifty-score strong, - Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. - God for King Charles! Pym and such carles - To the Devil that prompts ’em their treasonous parles! - Hampden to hell, and his obsequies’ knell - Serve Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well! - Hold by the right, you double your might; - So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight. - -Indeed many modern poets, such as Burns, Scott, Browning, George Walter -Thornbury, and Aytoun in his “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” have -caught and prolonged the ancient note, with a literary skill not often -vouchsafed to the actual, contemporary singers. - -Here, for instance, is a single stanza from Thornbury’s overlong ballad, -“The Three Troopers”:— - - Into the Devil Tavern three booted troopers strode, - From spur to feather spotted and splashed - With the mud of a winter road. - In each of their cups they dropped a crust - And stared at the guests with a frown; - Then drew their swords and roared, for a toast, - “God send this Crum-well-down!” - -The singing and fighting Cavalier was most nobly represented by James -Graham, Marquis of Montrose, a hero of romance and a great partisan -leader. With a handful of wild Irish and West Highland -clansmen,—Gordons, Camerons, McDonalds,—with no artillery, no -commissariat, and hardly any cavalry, Montrose defeated the armies of -the Covenant, took the towns of Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, and -Edinburgh, and in one brief and brilliant campaign, reconquered Scotland -for the King. Nothing more romantic in the history of the Civil War than -Montrose’s descent upon Clan Campbell at Inverlochy, rushing down from -Ben Nevis in the early morning fogs upon the shores of wild Loch Eil. -You may read of this exploit in Walter Scott’s “Legend of Montrose,” as -you may read of the great Marquis’s death in Aytoun’s ballad, “The -Execution of Montrose.” For his success was short. He could not hold his -wild army together: with the coming of harvest the clansmen dispersed to -the glens and hills. Montrose escaped to Holland and, after the death of -the King, venturing once more into the Highlands, with a commission from -Charles II, he was defeated, taken prisoner, sentenced to death in -Edinburgh, hanged, drawn, and quartered. His head was fixed on an iron -spike on the pinnacle of the tollbooth; one hand set over the gate of -Perth and one over the gate of Stirling; one leg over the gate of -Aberdeen, the other over the gate of Glasgow. Montrose wrote only a -handful of poems, rough, soldierly pieces,—one on the night before his -execution, one on learning, at the Hague, of the King’s death. But by -far the best and the best known of these are the famous lines of which I -will quote a part. You will notice that, under the form of a lover -addressing his mistress, it is really the King speaking to his kingdom. -You will notice also the fine Celtic boastfulness of the strain and the -high-hearted courage of its most familiar passage—the gambler’s courage -who stakes his all on a single throw. - - My dear and only love, I pray that little world of thee - Be governed by no other sway than purest monarchy; - For if confusion have a part, which virtuous souls abhor, - I’ll hold a synod in my heart and never love thee more. - As Alexander I will reign and I will reign alone; - My thoughts did ever more disdain a rival on my throne. - He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small, - Who dares not put it to the touch, to gain or lose it all, - But if no faithless action stain thy love and constant word, - I’ll make thee glorious by my pen and famous by my sword: - I’ll serve thee in such noble ways was never heard before: - I’ll crown and deck thee all with bays and love thee more and more. - -I have dwelt almost exclusively upon the military and political aspect -of Cavalier verse. A wider view would include the miscellaneous poetry, -and especially the love poetry of Carew, Herrick, Waller, Haberton, -Lovelace, Suckling, Cowley, and others, who, if not, strictly speaking, -Cavaliers, were royalists. For the only poets in England who took the -Parliament’s side were Milton, George Wither, and Andrew Marvell. Of -those I have named, some had much to do with public affairs and others -had little. Thomas Carew, the court poet, died before the outbreak of -the Civil War. Herrick was a country minister in Devonshire, who was -deprived of his parish by Parliament and spent the interregnum in -London. Edmund Waller, a member of the House of Commons, intrigued for -the king and came near losing his head; but, being a cousin of Oliver -Cromwell and very rich, was let off with a heavy fine and went to -France. Sir John Suckling, a very brilliant and dissipated court -favorite, a very typical Cavalier, had raised a troop of horse for the -King in the Bishops’ War: had conspired against Parliament, fled to the -continent, and died at Paris by his own hand. Colonel Richard Lovelace -fought in the royal armies, was twice imprisoned, spent all his large -fortune in the cause and hung about London in great poverty, dying -shortly before the Restoration. Cowley was a Cambridge scholar who lost -his fellowship and went to France with the exiled court: became -secretary to the queen, Henrietta Maria, and carried on correspondence -in cipher between her and the captive King. - -The love verses of these poets were in many keys: Carew’s polished, -courtly, and somewhat artificial; Herrick’s warm, natural, sweet, but -richly sensuous rather than passionate; Cowley’s coldly ingenious; -Lovelace’s and Haberton’s serious and tender; Suckling’s careless, gay, -and “agreeably impudent,” the poetry of gallantry rather than love, with -a dash of cynicism: on its way to become the poetry of the Restoration -wits. - - - - - ABRAHAM COWLEY - - -COWLEY has been constantly used to point a moral. He is the capital -instance, in our literary history, of the instability of fame; or, -rather, of the wide variation between contemporary rating and the -judgment of posterity. Time has given its ironical answer to the very -first line in the first poem of his collection:— - - What shall I do to be forever known? - -When Cowley died in 1667 and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the -tombs of Chaucer and Spenser, he was, in general opinion, the greatest -English poet since the latter. “Paradise Lost” appeared in that same -year, but at this date Milton’s fame was not comparable with Cowley’s, -his junior by ten years. Milton’s miscellaneous poems, first collected -in 1645, did not reach a second edition till 1673. Meanwhile Cowley’s -works went through eight impressions. - -I believe that the only contemporaries who rivaled him in popularity -were Herbert and Cleveland, for Waller did not come to his own until -after Cowley’s death. Herbert’s “Temple,” posthumously printed in 1634, -had already become a religious classic. Masson computes its annual sale -at a thousand copies for the first twenty years of its publication. Of -Cleveland’s poems eleven editions were issued during his lifetime—and -none afterward. Apropos of the author’s arrest at Norwich in 1655 and -his magniloquent letter to Cromwell on that occasion, Carlyle -caustically remarks: “This is John Cleveland, the famed Cantab scholar, -Royalist Judge Advocate, and thrice illustrious satirist and son of the -muses, who had gone through eleven editions in those times, far -transcending all Miltons and all mortals—and does not now need any -twelfth edition that we hear of.” This was true till 1903 when Professor -Berdan brought out the first modern and critical, and probably the -final, edition of Cleveland. But neither Herbert nor Cleveland enjoyed -anything like Cowley’s literary eminence. Cleveland was a sharp -political lampooner whose verses had a temporary vogue like “M’Fingal” -or “The Gospel according to Benjamin.” A few years later Butler did the -same thing ten times as cleverly. Even “Hudibras” has lost much of its -point, though its originality, learning, and wit have given it a certain -sort of immortality, while Cleveland is utterly extinct. Herbert’s work -is, of course, more permanent than Cleveland’s, and he is a truer poet -than Cowley, though his appeal is to a smaller public, and he has but a -single note. - -For many years after his death, Cowley’s continued to be a great name -and fame; yet the swift decay of his real influence became almost -proverbial. Dryden, who learned much from him; Addison, who uses him as -a dreadful example in his essay on mixed wit; and Pope, who speaks of -him with a traditional respect, all testify to this rapid loss of his -hold upon the community of readers. It was in 1737 that Pope asked, “Who -now reads Cowley?” which is much as if one should ask to-day, “Who now -reads Byron?” or as if our grandchildren should inquire in 1960, “Who -reads Tennyson?” - -Cowley’s literary fortunes have been in marked contrast with those of -his contemporary, Robert Herrick, whose “Hesperides” fell silently from -the press in 1643, and who died unnoticed in his remote Devonshire -vicarage in 1674. You may search the literature of England for a hundred -and fifty years without finding a single acknowledgment of Herrick’s -gift to that literature. The folio edition of Cowley’s works, 1668, was -accompanied with an imposing account of his life and writings by Thomas -Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the -English Poets,” 1779–1781, begins with the life of Cowley, in which he -gives his famous analysis of the metaphysical school, the _locus -classicus_ on that topic. And although Cowley’s poetry had faded long -ago and he had lost his readers, Johnson treats him as a dignified -memory, worthy of a solid monument. No one had thought it worth while to -write Herrick’s biography, to address him in complimentary verse, to -celebrate his death in elegy, to comment on his work, or even to mention -his name. Dryden, Addison, Johnson, all the critics of three successive -generations are quite dumb concerning Herrick. But for the circumstance -that some of his little pieces, with the musical airs to which they were -set, were included in several seventeenth century songbooks, there is -nothing to show that there was any English poet named Herrick, until Dr. -Nott reprinted a number of selections from “Hesperides” in 1810. But now -Herrick is thoroughly revived and almost a favorite. His best things are -in all the anthologies, and many of them are set to music by modern -composers, and sung to the piano, as once to the lute. The critics rank -him with Shelley among our foremost lyrical poets. Swinburne thought him -the best of English song writers. The “Hesperides” is frequently -reprinted, sometimes in _editions de luxe_, with sympathetic -illustrations by Mr. Abbey and other distinguished artists. - -There are several reasons why Cowley cut so disproportionate a figure in -his own generation. In the first place, he was a marvel of precocity. He -wrote an epic at the age of ten and another at twelve. His first volume -of verse, “Poetical Blossoms,” was published in his fifteenth year, and -one or two of the pieces in it were as good as anything that he did -afterward. Chatterton was perhaps equally wonderful; while Milton, Pope, -Keats, and Bryant all produced work, while still under age, which -outranks Cowley’s. Yet none of them showed quite so early maturity. - -Again Cowley’s personal character, learning, and public employments -conferred dignity upon his literary work. He was the darling of -Cambridge; and, when ejected by the parliament, joined the king at -Oxford, and then followed the queen to Paris. He was a steadfast -loyalist; but among the reckless, intriguing, dissolute Cavaliers who -formed the entourage of the exiled court, Cowley’s serious and -thoroughly respectable character stood out in high relief. He took a -medical degree from Oxford, and became proficient in botany, composing a -Latin poem on plants. Dr. Johnson thought his Latin verse better than -Milton’s. After 1660 a member of the triumphant party, he was, -notwithstanding, highly esteemed by political opponents. He held a -position of authority like Addison’s or Southey’s at a later day. When -he died, Charles II said that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man -behind him in England. - -But, after all, the chief reason why Cowley was rated so high by his -contemporaries was that his poetry fell in with the prevailing taste. -Matthew Arnold said that the trouble with the Queen Anne poetry was that -it was conceived in the wits and not in the soul. Cowley’s poetry was -cerebral, “stiff with intellection,” as Coleridge said of another. He -anticipated Dryden in his power of reasoning in verse. He is -pedantically learned, bookish, scholastic, smells of the lamp, crams his -verse with allusions and images drawn from physics, metaphysics, -geography, alchemy, astronomy, history, school divinity, logic, grammar, -and constitutional law. Above all, he had the quality on which his -century placed such an abnormal value—wit: i.e., ingenuity in devising -far-fetched conceits and detecting remote analogies. Without the -subtlety of Donne and the quaintness of Herbert, he coldly carried out -the method of the _concetti_ poets into a system. At its best, this -fashion now and then struck out a brilliant effect, as where Donne says -of Mistress Elizabeth Drury: - - Her pure and eloquent blood - Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought - That one might almost say her body thought. - -Or in Crashaw’s celebrated line about the miracle at Cana: - - Nympha pudica deum vidit et ernbuit, - -Englished by Dryden as - - The conscious water saw its God and blushed. - -But except in such rarely felicitous instances, this manner of writing -is deplorable. Some of its most flagrant offenses are still notorious. -Crashaw’s description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes as: - - Two walking baths, two weeping motions, - Portable and compendious oceans. - -Or Carew’s lines on Maria Wentworth: - - Else the soul grew so fast within - It burst the outward shell of sin, - And so was hatched a cherubin. - -Cowley is full of these tasteless, unnatural conceits. His sins of the -kind have been so insisted upon by Johnson and others that I need give -but a single illustration. In an ode to his friend, Dr. Scarborough, he -thus compliments him upon his skill in operating for calculus: - - The cruel stone, that restless pain, - That’s sometimes rolled away in vain - But still, like Sisyphus his stone, returns again, - Thou break’st and melt’st by learned juices’ force - (A greater work, though short the way appear, - Than Hannibal’s by vinegar). - Oppressed Nature’s necessary course - It stops in vain; like Moses, thou - Strik’st but the rock, and straight the waters freely flow. - -Here, in a passage of nine lines, the stone which the doctor removes -from his patient’s bladder is successively compared to the stone rolled -away from Christ’s sepulchre, the stone of Sisyphus, the Alps that -Hannibal split with vinegar, and the rock which Moses smote for water. -Manifestly this way of writing lends itself least of all to the poetry -of passion. Cowley’s love poems are his very worst failures. One can -take a kind of pleasure in the sheer mental exercise of tracking the -thought through one of his big Pindaric odes—the kind of pleasure one -gets from solving a riddle or an equation, but not the kind which we ask -of poetry. It is as Pope says: his epic and Pindaric art is forgotten; -forgotten the four books, in rimed couplets, of the “Davideis”; -forgotten the odes on Brutus, on the plagues of Egypt, on his Majesty’s -restoration, to Mr. Hobbes, and to the Royal Society. Cowley had a -genius for friendship, and his elegies are among his best things. There -are passages well worthy of remembrance in his elegy on Crashaw, and -several fine stanzas in his memorial verses on his Cambridge friend -Hervey; though the piece, as a whole, is too long, and Dr. Johnson is -probably singular in preferring it to “Lycidas.” A hundred readers are -familiar with the invocation to light in “Paradise Lost,” for one who -knows Cowley’s ingenious and, in many parts, really beautiful “Hymn to -Light.” - -The only writings of Cowley which keep afloat on time’s current are his -simplest and least ambitious—what Pope called “the language of his -heart.” His prose essays may still be read with enjoyment, though Lowell -somewhat cruelly describes them as Montaigne and water. His translations -from the Pseudo-Anacreon are standard, particularly the first ode, Θέλω -λέγειν Ἀτρείδας; the Τέττιξ, or cicada; and the ode in praise of -drinking, Ἡ γῆ μέλαινα πίνει. There is one little poem which remains an -anthology favorite, “The Chronicle,” Cowley’s solitary experiment in -society verse, a catalogue of the quite imaginary ladies with whom he -has been in love. This is well enough, but compared with the “agreeable -impudence,” the Cavalier gayety and ease of a genuine society verser, -like Suckling, it is sufficiently tame. For the Cowleian wit is so -different from the spirit of comedy that one would have predicted that -anything which he might undertake for the stage would surely fail. -Nevertheless, one of his plays, “Cutter of Coleman Street,” has been -selected by Professor Gayley for his series of representative comedies, -as a noteworthy transition drama, with “political and religious satire -of great importance.” - -The scene is London in 1658, the year when Cromwell died, and Cowley, -though under bonds, escaped a second time to Paris. The plot in outline -is this: Colonel Jolly, a gentleman whose estate was confiscated in the -late troubles for taking part with the King at Oxford, finds himself in -desperate straits for money. He has two disreputable hangers-on, “merry, -sharking fellows about the town,” who have been drinking and feasting at -his expense. One of these, Cutter of Coleman Street, pretends to have -been a colonel in the royal army and to have fought at Newbury—the -action, it will be remembered, in which Clarendon’s friend, Lord -Falkland, met his tragic death (1643); or, as Carlyle rather brutally -puts it, “Poor Lord Falkland, in his ‘clean shirt,’ was killed here.” -Worm, the other rascal, professes likewise to have been in the King’s -service and to have been at Worcester and shared in the romantic escape -of the royal fugitive. This precious pair are new types in English -comedy and are evidently from the life. They represent the class of -swashbucklers, impostors, and soldiers of fortune, who lurked about the -lowest purlieus of London during the interregnum, living at free -quarters on loyalist sympathizers. They were parodies of the true -“distressed Cavaliers,” such as Colonel Richard Lovelace, who died in -London in this same year, 1658, in some obscure lodging and in abject -poverty, having spent all his large fortune in the King’s cause. - -When “Cutter of Coleman Street”[5] was first given in 1661, the -characters of Cutter and Worm were ill received by the audience at the -Duke’s Theatre; and, in his preface to the printed play, the author -defended himself against the charge “that it was a piece intended for -abuse and satire against the king’s party. Good God! Against the king’s -party! After having served it twenty years, during all the time of their -misfortunes and afflictions, I must be a very rash and imprudent person -if I chose out that of their restitution to begin a quarrel with them.” -The representation of those two scoundrels, “as pretended officers of -the royal army, was made for no other purpose but to show the world that -the vices and extravagancies imputed vulgarly to the cavaliers were -really committed by aliens who only usurped that name.” - -Colonel Jolly is guardian to his niece, Lucia, who has an inheritance of -five thousand pounds which, by the terms of her father’s will, is to be -forfeited if she marries without her uncle’s consent. This is now a very -stale bit of dramatic convention. Experienced play readers do not need -to be reminded that “forfeited if transferred” is written large over the -fortune of nearly every heiress in eighteenth century comedy. Colonel -Jolly sees through his rascally followers, but is so reduced in purse -that he offers Lucia’s hand to whichever of the two can gain her -consent, on condition that the favored suitor will make over to him one -thousand pounds out of his niece’s dowry. Of course she rejects both of -them. This unprincipled bargain was quite properly censured as out of -keeping with the character of an honorable old Cavalier gentleman who -had fought for the King. And again the dramatist defends himself in his -preface. “They were angry that the person whom I made a true gentleman -and one both of considerable quality and sufferings in the royal party -. . . should submit, in his great extremities, to wrong his niece for -his own relief. . . . The truth is I did not intend the character of a -hero . . . but an ordinary jovial gentleman, commonly called a good -fellow, one not so conscientious as to starve rather than do the least -injury.” - -The failure of his plan puts the colonel upon an almost equally -desperate enterprise, which is no less than to espouse the widow of -Fear-the-Lord Barebottle, a saint and a soap-boiler, who had bought -Jolly’s confiscated estate, and whose name is an evident allusion to the -leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones, who gave baptism to the famous -Barebones’ Parliament. The colonel succeeds in this matrimonial venture; -although, to ingratiate himself with the soap-boiler’s widow, he has to -feign conversion. His daughter Aurelia tries to dissuade him from the -match. “Bless us,” she says, “what humming and hawing will be in this -house; what preaching and howling and fasting and eating among the -saints! Their first pious work will be to banish Fletcher and Ben Jonson -out o’ the parlour, and bring in their rooms Martin Mar Prelate and -Posies of Holy Honeysuckles and A Salve-Box for a wounded Conscience and -a Bundle of Grapes from Canaan. . . . But, Sir, suppose the king should -come in again and you have your own again of course. You’d be very proud -of a soap-boiler’s widow then in Hyde Park, Sir.” “O,” replies her -father, “then the bishops will come in, too, and she’ll away to New -England.” - -Here comes in the satire on the Puritans which is the most interesting -feature of the play. Anti-Puritan satire was nothing new on the stage in -1661, and it had been much better done in Jonson’s “Alchemist” and -“Bartholomew Fair” nearly a half century before. The thing that is new -in Cowley’s play is its picture of the later aspects of the Puritan -revolution; when what had been in Jonson’s time a despised faction had -now been seated in power for sixteen years, and had developed all those -extravagances of fanaticism which Carlyle calls “Calvinistic -Sansculottism.” Widow Barebottle is a Brownist and a parishioner of Rev. -Joseph Knockdown, of the congregation of the spotless in Coleman Street. -But her daughter Tabitha is of the Fifth Monarchy persuasion and was -wont to go afoot every Sunday over the bridge to hear Mr. Feak,[6] when -he was a prisoner in Lambeth House. Visions and prophesyings have been -vouchsafed to Tabitha. And when Cutter, following his patron’s lead, -pays court to her in a puritanical habit, he assures her that it has -been revealed to him that he is no longer to be called Cutter, a name of -Cavalero darkness: “My name is now Abednego. I had a vision, which -whispered to me through a keyhole, ‘Go call thyself Abednego. It is a -name that signifies fiery furnaces and tribulation and martyrdom.’” He -is to suffer martyrdom and return miraculously upon “a purple dromedary, -which signifies magistracy, with an axe in my hand that is called -reformation; and I am to strike with that axe upon the gate of -Westminster Hall and cry ‘Down, Babylon,’ and the building called -Westminster Hall is to run away and cast itself into the river; and then -Major General Harrison is to come in green sleeves from the north upon a -sky-colored mule which signifies heavenly instruction . . . and he is to -have a trumpet in his mouth as big as a steeple and, at the sounding of -that trumpet, all the churches in London shall fall down . . . and then -Venner shall march up to us from the west in the figure of a wave of the -sea, holding in his hand a ship that shall be called the ark of the -reformed.” - -All this is frankly farcical but has a certain historical basis. The -Venner here mentioned was a Fifth Monarchist cooper whose followers held -a rendezvous at Mile-End Green, and who issued a pamphlet entitled “A -Standard Set Up,” adopting as his ensign the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, -with the motto, “Who shall rouse him up?” The passage furthermore seems -to allude to one John Davy, to whom in 1654 the spirit revealed that his -true name was Theauro John; and who was arrested at the door of the -Parliament House for knocking and laying about him with a drawn sword. -“Poor Davy,” comments Carlyle, “his labors, life-adventures, financial -arrangements, painful biography in general, are all unknown to us; till, -on this ‘Saturday, 30th December, 1654,’ he very clearly knocks loud at -the door of the Parliament House, as much as to say, ‘what is this _you_ -are upon?’ and ‘lays about him with a drawn sword.’” - -The dialogue abounds in the biblical phrases and the peculiar cant of -the later Puritanism, familiar in “Hudibras.” Brother Abednego is joined -to Tabitha in the holy bond of sanctified matrimony at a zealous -shoemaker’s habitation by that chosen vessel, Brother Zephaniah Fats, an -opener of revelations to the worthy in Mary White-Chapel. But as soon as -they are safely married, the newly converted Cutter throws off his -Puritan disguise and dons a regular Cavalier costume, hat and feather, -sword and belt, broad laced band and periwig, and proceeds to pervert -his bride. He makes her drink healths in sack, and sing and dance home -after the fiddlers, under the threat of taking coach and carrying her -off to the opera. Tabitha, after a faint resistance, falls into his -humor and proves an apt pupil in the ways of worldliness. For it is a -convention of seventeenth century, as it is of twentieth century, comedy -that all Puritans are hypocrites and that - - Every woman is at heart a rake. - ------ - -[5] An earlier version, entitled “The Guardian,” had been acted in 1641. - -[6] An Anabaptist preacher. See Carlyle’s “Cromwell’s Letters and -Speeches,” iv. 3. - - - - - MILTON’S TERCENTENARY - - -IT is right that this anniversary should be kept in all -English-speaking lands. Milton is as far away from us in time as Dante -was from him; destructive criticism has been busy with his great poem; -formidable rivals of his fame have arisen—Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth -and Byron, Tennyson and Browning, not to speak of lesser names—poets -whom we read perhaps oftener and with more pleasure. Yet still his -throne remains unshaken. By general—by well-nigh universal—consent, he -is still the second poet of our race, the greatest, save one, of all who -have used the English speech. - -The high epics, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, do not appear to us as -they appeared to their contemporaries, nor as they appeared to the -Middle Ages, or to the men of the Renaissance or of the eighteenth -century. These peaks of song we see foreshortened or in changed -perspective or from a different angle of observation. Their parallax -varies from age to age, yet their stature does not dwindle; they tower -forever, “like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved.” “Paradise Lost” does not -mean the same thing to us that it meant to Addison or Johnson or -Macaulay, and much that those critics said of it now seems mistaken. -Works of art, as of nature, have perishable elements, and suffer a loss -from time’s transshifting. Homer’s gods are childish, Dante’s hell -grotesque; and the mythology of the one and the scholasticism of the -other are scarcely more obsolete to-day than Milton’s theology. Yet in -the dryest parts of “Paradise Lost” we feel the touch of the master. Two -things in particular, the rhythm and the style, go on victoriously as by -their own momentum. God the Father may be a school divine and Adam a -member of parliament, but the verse never flags, the diction never -fails. The poem may grow heavy, but not languid, thin, or weak. I -confess that there are traits of Milton which repel or irritate; that -there are poets with whom sympathy is easier. And if I were speaking -merely as an impressionist, I might prefer them to him. But this does -not affect my estimate of his absolute greatness. - -All poets, then, and lovers of poetry, all literary critics and students -of language must honor in Milton the almost faultless artist, the -supreme master of his craft. But there is a reason why, not alone the -literary class, but all men of English stock should celebrate Milton’s -tercentenary. There have been poets whose technique was exquisite, but -whose character was contemptible. John Milton was not simply a great -poet, but a great man, a heroic soul; and his type was -characteristically English, both in its virtues and its shortcomings. Of -Shakespeare, the man, we know next to nothing. But of Milton personally -we know all that we need to know, more than is known of many a modern -author. There is abundance of biography and autobiography. Milton had a -noble self-esteem, and he was engaged for twenty years in hot -controversies. Hence those passages of apologetics scattered through his -prose works, from which the lives of their author have been largely -compiled. Moreover he was a pamphleteer and journalist, as well as a -poet, uttering himself freely on the questions of the day. We know his -opinions on government, education, religion, marriage and divorce, the -freedom of the press, and many other subjects. We know what he thought -of eminent contemporaries, Charles I, Cromwell, Vane, Desborough, -Overton, Fairfax. It was not then the fashion to write critical essays, -literary reviews, and book notices. Yet, aside from his own practice, -his writings are sown here and there with incidental judgments of books -and authors, from which his literary principles may be gathered. He has -spoken now and again of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, of Spenser, Chaucer, -Euripides, Homer, the book of Job, the psalms of David, the Song of -Solomon, the poems of Tasso and Ariosto, the Arthur and Charlemagne -romances: of Bacon and Selden, the dramatic unities, blank verse vs. -rhyme, and similar topics. - -In some aspects and relations, harsh and unlovely, egotistical and -stubborn, the total impression of Milton’s personality is singularly -imposing. His virtues were manly virtues. Of the four cardinal moral -virtues,—the so-called Aristotelian virtues,—temperance, justice, -fortitude, prudence, which Dante symbolizes by the group of stars— - - Non viste mai fuor ch’ alla prima gente— - -Milton had a full share. He was not always, though he was most commonly, -just. Prudence, the only virtue, says Carlyle, which gets its reward on -earth, prudence he had, yet not a timid prudence. Of temperance—the -Puritan virtue—and all that it includes, chastity, self-reverence, -self-control, “Comus” is the beautiful hymn. But, above all, Milton had -the heroic virtue, fortitude; not only passively in the proud and -sublime endurance of the evil days and evil tongues on which he had -fallen; of the darkness, dangers, solitude that compassed him round; but -actively in “the unconquerable will . . . and courage never to submit or -yield”; the courage which “bates no jot of heart or hope, but still -bears up and steers right onward.” - -There is nothing more bracing in English poetry than those passages in -the sonnets, in “Paradise Lost” and in “Samson Agonistes” where Milton -speaks of his blindness. Yet here it is observable that Milton, who is -never sentimental, is also never pathetic but when he speaks of himself, -in such lines, e.g., as Samson’s - - My race of glory run, and race of shame, - And I shall shortly be with them that rest. - -Dante has this same touching dignity in alluding to his own sorrows; but -his hard and rare pity is more often aroused by the sorrows of others: -by Ugolino’s little starving children, or by the doom of Francesca and -her lover. Milton is untender. Yet virtue with him is not always -forbidding and austere. As he was a poet, he felt the “beauty of -holiness,” though in another sense than Archbishop Laud’s use of that -famous phrase. It was his “natural haughtiness,” he tells us, that saved -him from sensuality and base descents of mind. His virtue was a kind of -good taste, a delicacy almost womanly. It is the “Lady of Christ’s” -speaking with the lips of the lady in “Comus,” who says, - - —That which is not good is not delicious - To a well governed and wise appetite. - -But there is a special fitness in this commemoration at this place. For -Milton is the scholar poet. He is the most learned, the most classical, -the most bookish—I was about to say the most academic—of English -poets; but I remember that academic, through its use in certain -connections, might imply a timid conformity to rules and models, a lack -of vital originality which would not be true of Milton. Still, Milton -was an academic man in a broad sense of the word. A hard student of -books, he injured his eyes in boyhood by too close application, working -every day till midnight. He spent seven years at his university. He was -a teacher and a writer on education. I need not give the catalogue of -his acquirements further than to say that he was the best educated -Englishman of his generation. - -Mark Pattison, indeed, who speaks for Oxford, denies that Milton was a -regularly learned man, like Usher or Selden. That is, I understand, he -had made no exhaustive studies in professional fields of knowledge such -as patristic theology or legal antiquities. Of course not: Milton was a -poet: he was studying for power, for self-culture and inspiration, and -had little regard for a merely retrospective scholarship which would not -aid him in the work of creation. - -Be that as it may, all Milton’s writings in prose and verse are so -saturated with learning as greatly to limit the range of their appeal. A -poem like “Lycidas,” loaded with allusions, can be fully enjoyed only by -the classical scholar who is in the tradition of the Greek pastoralists, -who “knows the Dorian water’s gush divine.” I have heard women and young -people and unlettered readers who have a natural taste for poetry, and -enjoy Burns and Longfellow, object to this classical stiffness in Milton -as pedantry. Now pedantry is an ostentation of learning for its own -sake, and none has said harder things of it than Milton. - - . . . Who reads - Incessantly, and to his reading brings not - A spirit and judgment equal or superior . . . - Uncertain and unsettled still remains, - Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself. - -Cowley was the true pedant: his erudition was crabbed and encumbered the -free movement of his mind, while Milton made his the grace and ornament -of his verse. - - How charming is divine philosophy! - Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, - But musical as is Apollo’s lute. - -I think we may attribute Milton’s apparent pedantry, not to a wish for -display, but to an imagination familiarized with a somewhat special -range of associations. This is a note of the Renaissance, and Milton’s -culture was Renaissance culture. That his mind derived its impetus more -directly from books than from life; that his pages swarm with the -figures of mythology and the imagery of the ancient poets is true. In -his youthful poems he accepted and perfected Elizabethan, that is, -Renaissance, forms: the court masque, the Italian sonnet, the artificial -pastoral. But as he advanced in art and life, he became classical in a -severer sense, discarding the Italianate conceits of his early verse, -rejecting rhyme and romance, replacing decoration with construction; and -finally, in his epic and tragedy modelled on the pure antique, applying -Hellenic form to Hebraic material. His political and social, no less -than his literary, ideals were classical. The English church ritual, -with its Catholic ceremonies; the universities, with their scholastic -curricula; the feudal monarchy, the mediaeval court and peerage—of all -these barbarous survivals of the Middle Ages he would have made a clean -sweep, to set up in their stead a commonwealth modelled on the -democracies of Greece and Rome, schools of philosophy like the Academy -and the Porch, and voluntary congregations of Protestant worshippers -without priest, liturgy or symbol, practising a purely rational and -spiritual religion. He says to the parliament: “How much better I find -ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece than the -barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness.” And elsewhere: -“Those ages to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not -yet Goths and Jutlanders.” - -So, in his treatment of public questions, Milton had what Bacon calls -“the humor of a scholar.” He was an idealist and a doctrinaire, with -little historic sense and small notion of what is practicable here and -now. England is still a monarchy; the English church is still prelatical -and has its hireling clergy; parliament keeps its two chambers, and the -bishops sit and vote in the house of peers; ritualism and tractarianism -gain apace upon low church and evangelical; the “Areopagitica” had no -effect whatever in hastening the freedom of the press; and, ironically -enough, Milton himself, under the protectorate, became an official book -licenser. - -England was not ripe for a republic; she was returning to her idols, -“choosing herself a captain back to Egypt.” It took a century and a half -for English liberty to recover the ground lost at the Restoration. -Nevertheless, that little group of republican idealists, Vane, Bradshaw, -Lambert and the rest, with Milton their literary spokesman, must always -interest us as Americans and republicans. Let us, however, not mistake. -Milton was no democrat. His political principles were republican, or -democratic if you please, but his personal feelings were intensely -aristocratic. Even that free commonwealth which he thought he saw so -easy and ready a way to establish, and the constitution of which he -sketched on the eve of the Restoration, was no democracy, but an -aristocratic, senatorial republic like Venice, a government of the -_optimates_, not of the populace. For the trappings of royalty, the pomp -and pageantry, the servility and flunkeyism of a court, Milton had the -contempt of a plain republican: - - How poor their outworn coronets - Beside one leaf of that plain civic wreath! - -But for the people, as a whole, he had an almost equal contempt. They -were “the ungrateful multitude,” “the inconsiderate multitude,” the -_profanum vulgus_, “the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men.” -There was not a popular drop of blood in him. He had no faith in -universal suffrage or majority rule. “More just it is,” he wrote, “that -a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty, than that a -greater number compel a less to be their fellow slaves,” i.e., to bring -back the king by a _plébescite_. And again: “The best affected and best -principled of the people stood not numbering or computing on which side -were most voices in Parliament, but on which side appeared to them most -reason.” - -Milton was a Puritan; and the Puritans, though socially belonging, for -the most part, among the plain people, and though made by accident the -champions of popular rights against privilege, were yet a kind of -spiritual aristocrats. Calvinistic doctrine made of the elect a chosen -few, a congregation of saints, set apart from the world. To this feeling -of religious exclusiveness Milton’s pride of intellect added a personal -intensity. He respects distinction and is always rather scornful of the -average man, the _pecus ignavum silentûm_, the herd of the obscure and -unfamed. - - Nor do I name of men the common rout - That, wandering loose about, - Grow up and perish like the summer fly, - Heads without names, no more remembered. - -Hazlitt insisted that Shakespeare’s principles were aristocratic, -chiefly, I believe, because of his handling of the tribunes and the -plebs in “Coriolanus.” Shakespeare does treat his mobs with a kindly and -amused contempt. They are fickle, ignorant, illogical, thick-headed, -easily imposed upon. Still he makes you feel that they are composed of -good fellows at bottom, quickly placated and disposed to do the fair -thing. I think that Shakespeare’s is the more democratic nature; that -his distrust of the people is much less radical than Milton’s. Walt -Whitman’s obstreperous democracy, his all-embracing _camaraderie_, his -liking for the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd, was a spirit -quite alien from his whose “soul was like a star and dwelt apart.” -Anything vulgar was outside or below the sympathies of this Puritan -gentleman. Falstaff must have been merely disgusting to him; and fancy -him reading Mark Twain! In Milton’s references to popular pastimes there -is always a mixture of disapproval, the air of the superior person. “The -people on their holidays,” says Samson, are “impetuous, insolent, -unquenchable.” “Methought,” says the lady in “Comus,” - - . . . it was the sound - Of riot and ill managed merriment, - Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe - Stirs up among the loose, unlettered hinds - When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, - In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan - And thank the gods amiss. - -Milton liked to be in the minority, to bear up against the pressure of -hostile opinion. “God intended to prove me,” he wrote, “whether I durst -take up alone a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, and found I -durst.” The seraph Abdiel is a piece of self-portraiture; there is no -more characteristic passage in all his works: - - . . . The Seraph Abdiel, faithful found - Among the faithless, faithful only he . . . - Nor number nor example with him wrought - To swerve from truth or change his constant mind, - Though single. From amidst them forth he past - Long way through hostile scorn which he sustained - Superior, nor of violence feared aught; - And with retorted scorn his back he turned - On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed. - -Milton was no democrat; equality and fraternity were not his trade, -though liberty was his passion. Liberty he defended against the tyranny -of the mob, as of the king. He preferred a republic to a monarchy, since -he thought it less likely to interfere with the independence of the -private citizen. Political liberty, liberty of worship and belief, -freedom of the press, freedom of divorce, he asserted them all in turn -with unsurpassed eloquence. He proposed a scheme of education reformed -from the clogs of precedent and authority. Even his choice of blank -verse for “Paradise Lost” he vindicated as a case of “ancient _liberty_ -recovered to heroic song from this troublesome and modern bondage of -riming.” - -There is yet one reason more why we at Yale should keep this -anniversary. Milton was the poet of English Puritanism, and therefore he -is _our_ poet. This colony and this college were founded by English -Puritans; and here the special faith and manners of the Puritans -survived later than at the other great university of New -England—survived almost in their integrity down to a time within the -memory of living men. When Milton left Cambridge in 1632, “church-outed -by the prelates,” it was among the possibilities that, instead of -settling down at his father’s country house at Horton, he might have -come to New England. Winthrop had sailed, with his company, two years -before. In 1635 three thousand Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts, -among them Sir Henry Vane, the younger,—the “Vane, young in years, but -in sage counsels old,” of Milton’s sonnet,—who was made governor of the -colony in the following year. Or in 1638, the year of the settlement of -New Haven, when Milton went to Italy for culture, it would not have been -miraculous had he come instead to America for freedom. It was in that -same year that, according to a story long believed though now -discredited, Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and Hazelrig, despairing of any -improvement in conditions at home, were about to embark for New England -when they were stopped by orders in council. Is it too wild a dream that -“Paradise Lost” might have been written in Boston or in New Haven? But -it was not upon the cards. The literary class does not willingly -emigrate to raw lands, or separate itself from the thick and ripe -environment of an old civilization. However, we know that Vane and Roger -Williams were friends of Milton; and he must have known and been known -to Cromwell’s chaplain, Hugh Peters, who had been in New England; and -doubtless to others among the colonists. It is, at first sight, -therefore rather strange that there is no mention of Milton, so far as I -have observed, in any of our earlier colonial writers. It is said, I -know not on what authority, that there was not a single copy of -Shakespeare’s plays in New England in the seventeenth century. That is -not so strange, considering the Puritan horror of the stage. But one -might have expected to meet with mention of Milton, as a -controversialist if not as a poet. The French Huguenot poet Du Bartas, -whose poem “La Semaine” contributed some items to the account of the -creation in “Paradise Lost,” was a favorite author in New England—I -take it, in Sylvester’s translation, “The Divine Weeks and Works.” It is -also said that the “Emblems” of Milton’s contemporary, Francis Quarles, -were much read in New England. But Tyler supposes that Nathaniel Ames, -in his Almanac for 1725, “pronounced there for the first time the name -of Milton, together with chosen passages from his poems.” And he thinks -it worth noting that Lewis Morris, of Morrisania, ordered an edition of -Milton from a London bookseller in 1739.[7] - -The failure of our forefathers to recognize the great poet of their -cause may be explained partly by the slowness of the growth of Milton’s -fame in England. His minor poems, issued in 1645, did not reach a second -edition till 1673. “Paradise Lost,” printed in 1667, found its fit -audience, though few, almost immediately. But the latest literature -travelled slowly in those days into a remote and rude province. -Moreover, the educated class in New England, the ministers, though a -learned, were not a literary set, as is abundantly shown by their own -experiments in verse. It is not unlikely that Cotton Mather or Michael -Wigglesworth would have thought Du Bartas and Quarles better poets than -Milton if they had read the latter’s works. - -We are proud of being the descendants of the Puritans; perhaps we are -glad that we are their descendants only, and not their contemporaries. -Which side would you have been on, if you had lived during the English -civil war of the seventeenth century? Doubtless it would have depended -largely on whether you lived in Middlesex or in Devon, whether your -parents were gentry or tradespeople, and on similar accidents. We think -that we choose, but really choices are made for us. We inherit our -politics and our religion. But if free to choose, I know in which camp I -would have been, and it would not have been that in which Milton’s -friends were found. The New Model army had the discipline—and the -prayer meetings. I am afraid that Rupert’s troopers plundered, gambled, -drank, and swore most shockingly. There was good fighting on both sides, -but the New Model had the right end of the quarrel and had the victory, -and I am glad that it was so. Still there was more fun in the king’s -army, and it was there that most of the good fellows were. - -The influence of Milton’s religion upon his art has been much discussed. -It was owing to his Puritanism that he was the kind of poet that he was, -but it was in spite of his Puritanism that he was a poet at all. He was -the poet of a cause, a party, a sect whose attitude towards the graces -of life and the beautiful arts was notoriously one of distrust and -hostility. He was the poet, not only of that Puritanism which is a -permanent element in English character, but of much that was merely -temporary and local. How sensitive then must his mind have been to all -forms of loveliness, how powerful the creative instinct in him, when his -genius emerged without a scar from the long struggle of twenty years, -during which he had written pamphlet after pamphlet on the angry -questions of the day, and nothing at all in verse but a handful of -sonnets mostly provoked by public occasions! - -The fact is, there were all kinds of Puritans. There were dismal -precisians, like William Prynne, illiberal and vulgar fanatics, the -Tribulation Wholesomes, Hope-on-high Bombys, and Zeal-of-the-land Busys, -whose absurdities were the stock in trade of contemporary satirists from -Jonson to Butler. But there were also gentlemen and scholars, like -Fairfax, Marvell, Colonel Hutchinson, Vane, whose Puritanism was -consistent with all elegant tastes and accomplishments. Was Milton’s -Puritanism hurtful to his art? No and yes. It was in many ways an -inspiration; it gave him _zeal_, a Puritan word much ridiculed by the -Royalists; it gave refinement, distinction, selectness, elevation to his -picture of the world. But it would be uncritical to deny that it also -gave a certain narrowness and rigidity to his view of human life. - -It is curious how Milton’s early poems have changed places in favor with -“Paradise Lost.” They were neglected for over a century. Joseph Warton -testifies in 1756 that they had only “very lately met with a suitable -regard”; had lain “in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a -few curious readers.” And Dr. Johnson exclaims: “Surely no man could -have fancied that he read ‘Lycidas’ with pleasure, had he not known its -author.” There can be little doubt that nowadays Milton’s _juvenilia_ -are more read than “Paradise Lost,” and by many—perhaps by a majority -of readers—rated higher. In this opinion I do not share. “Paradise -Lost” seems to me not only greater work, more important, than the minor -pieces, but better poetry, richer and deeper. Yet one quality these -early poems have which “Paradise Lost” has not—charm. Milton’s epic -astonishes, moves, delights, but it does not fascinate. The youthful -Milton was sensitive to many attractions which he afterwards came to -look upon with stern disapproval. He went to the theatre and praised the -comedies of Shakespeare and Jonson; he loved the romances of chivalry -and fairy tales; he had no objection to dancing, ale drinking, the music -of the fiddle, and rural sports; he writes to Diodati of the pretty -girls on the London streets; he celebrates the Catholic and Gothic -elegancies of English church architecture and ritual, the cloister’s -pale, the organ music and full-voiced choir, the high embowed roof, and -the storied windows which his military friends were soon to smash at -Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, Lichfield, as popish idolatries. But in -“Iconoclastes” we find him sneering at the king for keeping a copy of -Shakespeare in his closet. In his treatise “Of Reformation” he denounces -the prelates for “embezzling the treasury of the church on painted and -gilded walls of temples, wherein God hath testified to have no delight.” -Evidently the Anglican service was one of those “gay religions, rich -with pomp and gold,” to which he alludes in “Paradise Lost.” A chorus -commends Samson the Nazarite for drinking nothing but water. Modern -tragedies are condemned for “mixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and -gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons”—as Shakespeare -does. In “Paradise Lost” the poet speaks with contempt of the romances -whose “chief mastery” it was - - . . . to dissect, - With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights - In battles feigned. - -And in “Paradise Regained” he even disparages his beloved classics, -preferring the psalms of David, the Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic -law, to the poets, philosophers, and orators of Athens. - -The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, -their imaginations were filled with the wars of Israel and the militant -theocracy of the Jews. In Milton’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward -women, there is something Mosaic—something almost Oriental. He always -remained susceptible to beauty in women, but he treated it as a -weakness, a temptation. The bitterness of his own marriage experience -mingles with his words. I need not cite the well-known passages about -Dalila and Eve, where he who reads between the lines can always detect -the figure of Mary Powell. There is no gallantry in Milton, but a deal -of common sense. The love of the court poets, cavaliers and sonneteers, -their hyperboles of passion, their abasement before their ladies he -doubtless scorned as the fopperies of chivalry, fantastic and unnatural -exaggerations, the insincerities of “vulgar amourists,” the fume of - - . . . court amour, - Mixt dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, - Or serenate which the starved lover sings - To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. - -To the Puritan, woman was at best the helpmate and handmaid of man. Too -often she was a snare, or a household foe, “a cleaving mischief far -within defensive arms.” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are the only -poems of Milton in which he surrenders himself spontaneously to the joy -of living, to “unreproved pleasures free,” with no _arrière pensée_, or -intrusion of the conscience. Even in those pleasant Horatian lines to -Lawrence, inviting him to spend a winter day by the fire, drink wine, -and hear music, he ends with a fine Puritan touch: - - He who of these delights can judge, yet spare - To interpose them oft, is truly wise. - -“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more -cakes and ale?” inquires Sir Toby of Shakespeare’s only Puritan. - -“Yes,” adds the clown, “and ginger shall be hot in the mouth, too.” And -“wives may be merry and yet honest,” asserts Mistress Page. - -It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing, “To this -antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity . . . -laying its chief stress on humility.” Milton had a zeal for -righteousness, a noble purity and noble pride. But if you look for -saintly humility, for the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit -of charity and forgiveness, look for them in the Anglican Herbert, not -in the Puritan Milton. Humility was no fruit of the system which Calvin -begot and which begot John Knox. The Puritans were great invokers of the -sword of the Lord and of Gideon—the sword of Gideon and the dagger of -Ehud. There went a sword out of Milton’s mouth against the enemies of -Israel, a sword of threatenings, the wrath of God upon the ungodly. The -temper of his controversial writings is little short of ferocious. There -was not much in him of that “sweet reasonableness” which Matthew Arnold -thought the distinctive mark of Christian ethics. He was devout, but not -with the Christian devoutness. I would not call him a Christian at all, -except, of course, in his formal adherence to the creed of Christianity. -Very significant is the inferiority of “Paradise Regained” to “Paradise -Lost.” And in “Paradise Lost” itself, how weak and faint is the -character of the Saviour! You feel that he is superfluous, that the poet -did not need him. He is simply the second person of the Trinity, the -executive arm of the Godhead; and Milton is at pains to invent things -for him to do—to drive the rebellious angels out of heaven, to preside -over the six days’ work of creation, etc. I believe it was Thomas -Davidson who said that in “Paradise Lost” “Christ is God’s good boy.” - -We are therefore not unprepared to discover, from Milton’s “Treatise of -Christian Doctrine,” that he had laid aside the dogma of vicarious -sacrifice and was, in his last years, a Unitarian. It was this Latin -treatise, translated and published in 1824, which called out Macaulay’s -essay, so urbanely demolished by Matthew Arnold, and which was -triumphantly reviewed by Dr. Channing in the _North American_. It was -lucky for Dr. Channing, by the way, that he lived in the nineteenth -century and not in the seventeenth. Two Socinians, Leggatt and Wightman, -were burned at the stake as late as James the First’s reign, one at -Lichfield and the other at Smithfield. - -Milton, then, does not belong with those broadly human, all tolerant, -impartial artists, who reflect, with equal sympathy and infinite -curiosity, every phase of life: with Shakespeare and Goethe or, on a -lower level, with Chaucer and Montaigne; but with the intense, austere -and lofty souls whose narrowness is likewise their strength. His place -is beside Dante, the Catholic Puritan. - ------ - -[7] Mr. Charles Francis Adams informs me that a letter of inquiry sent -by him to the _Evening Post_ has brought out three or four references to -Milton in the “Magnalia,” besides other allusions to him in the -publications of the period. Mr. Adams adds, however, that there is -nothing to show that “Paradise Lost” was much read in New England prior -to 1750. The “Magnalia” was published in 1702. - - - - - SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES - - -THE one contribution of the Elizabethan stage to the literature of the -world is the plays of Shakespeare. It seems unaccountable to us to-day -that the almost infinite superiority of his work to that of all his -contemporaries was not recognized in his own lifetime. There is frequent -mention in the literature of his time, of “the excellent dramatic -writer, Master Wm. Shakespeare” and usually in the way of praise, but in -the same category with other excellent dramatic writers, like Jonson, -Chapman, Webster, and Beaumont, and with no apparent suspicion that he -is in a quite different class from these, and forms indeed a class by -himself—is _sui generis_. In explanation of this blindness it should be -said, first that time is required to give the proper perspective to -literary values, and secondly that there is an absence of critical -documents from the Elizabethan period. There were no reviews or book -notices or literary biographies. A man in high place who was -incidentally an author, a great philosopher and statesman like Bacon, a -diplomatist and scholar like Sir Henry Wotton, a bishop or a learned -divine, like Sanderson, Donne or Herbert, might be thought worthy to -have his life recorded. But a mere man of letters—still more a mere -playwriter—was not entitled to a biography. Nowadays every writer of -fair pretensions has his literary portrait in the magazines. His work is -criticized, assayed, analyzed; and as soon as he is dead, his life and -letters appear in two volumes. We do not know what Shakespeare’s -contemporaries thought of him, except for a few complimentary verses, -and a few brief notices scattered through the miscellaneous books and -pamphlets of the time; and these in no wise characterize or distinguish -him, or set him apart from the crowd of fellow playwrights, from among -whom he has since so thoroughly emerged. Aside from the almost universal -verdict of posterity that Shakespeare is one of the greatest, if not -actually the greatest literary genius of all time, there are two -testimonies to his continued vitality. One of these is the fact that his -plays have never ceased to be played. At least twenty of his plays still -belong to the acted drama. Several of the others, less popular, are -revived from time to time. We do not often have a chance in England or -America to see “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Measure for Measure,” or -“Richard II”—all pieces of the highest intellectual interest—to see -them behind the footlights. But all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays -are given annually in Germany. Indeed, the Germans claim to have -appropriated Shakespeare and to have made him their own. - -Now the only seventeenth century play outside of Shakespeare which still -keeps the stage is Massinger’s comedy, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” -This has frequently been given in America, with artists like Edwin Booth -and E. L. Davenport in the leading rôle, Sir Giles Overreach. A number -of the plays of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, -Middleton, and perhaps other Elizabethan dramatists continued to be -played down to the middle of the eighteenth century, and a few of them -as late as 1788. Fletcher’s comedy, “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,” was -acted in 1829; and Dekker’s “Old Fortunatus”[8] enjoyed a run of twelve -performances in 1819. But these were sporadic revivals. Professor Gayley -concludes that of the two hundred and fifty comedies, exclusive of -Shakespeare’s, produced between 1600 and 1625, “only twenty-six survived -upon the stage in the middle of the eighteenth century: in 1825, five; -and after 1850, but one,—‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts,’—while at the -present-day no fewer than sixteen out of Shakespeare’s seventeen -comedies are fixtures upon the stage.” Now and then a favorite -Elizabethan play like Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” or Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s -Holiday,” or Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” is -presented by amateurs before a college audience or a dramatic club, or -some other semi-private bunch of spectators. Middleton’s “Spanish Gipsy” -was thus presented in 1898 before the Elizabethan Stage Society and was -rather roughly handled by the newspaper critics. But these are literary -curiosities and mean something very different from the retention of a -play on the repertoire of the professional public theatres. It is a case -of revival, not of survival. - -But even if Shakespeare’s plays should cease to be shown,—a thing by no -means impossible, since theatrical conditions change,—they would never -cease to be read. Already he has a hundred readers for one spectator. -And one proof of this eternity of fame is the extent to which his -language has taken possession of the English tongue. In Bartlett’s -“Dictionary of Quotations” there are over one hundred and twenty pages -of citations from Shakespeare, including hundreds of expressions which -are in daily use and are as familiar as household words. These include -not merely maxims and sentences universally current, such as “Brevity is -the soul of wit,” “The course of true love never did run smooth,” “One -touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” but detached phrases: “wise -saws and modern instances,” “a woman’s reason,” “the sere, the yellow -leaf,” “damnable iteration,” “sighing like a furnace,” “the funeral -baked meats,” “the primrose path of dalliance,” “a bright, particular -star,” “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,” “the bubble -reputation,” “Richard’s himself again,” “Such stuff as dreams are made -on.” There is only one other book—the English Bible—which has so -wrought itself into the very tissue of our speech. This is not true of -the work of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists. I cannot, at the moment, -recall any words of theirs that have this stamp of universal currency -except Christopher Marlowe’s “Love me little, so you love me long.” -Coleridge prophesied that the works of the other Elizabethan playwrights -would in time be reduced to notes on Shakespeare: i.e., they would be -used simply to illustrate or explain difficult passages in Shakespeare’s -text. This is an extreme statement and I cannot believe it true. For the -dramas of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster, -Middleton, and many others will never lack readers, though they will -find them not among general readers, but among scholars, men of letters, -and those persons, not so very few in number, who have a strong appetite -for plays of all kinds. Moreover, vast as is the distance between -Shakespeare and his contemporaries, historically he was one of them. The -stage was his occasion, his opportunity. Without the Elizabethan theatre -there would have been no Shakespeare. Let us seek to get some idea, -then, of what this Elizabethan drama was, which formed the Shakespearean -background and environment. Of course, in the short space at my -disposal, I cannot take up individual authors, still less individual -plays. I shall have to give a very general outline of the matter as a -whole. - -What is loosely called the Elizabethan drama, consists of the plays -written, performed, or printed in England between the accession of the -queen in 1558 and the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament at -the breaking out of the civil war in 1642. But if we are looking for -work of literary and artistic value, we need hardly go back of 1576, the -date of the building of the first London playhouse. This was soon -followed by others and by the formation of permanent stock companies. -Heretofore there had been bands of strolling players, under the -patronage of various noblemen, exhibiting sometimes at court, sometimes -in innyards, bear-baiting houses, and cockpits, and even in churches. -Plays of an academic character both in Latin and English had also been -performed at the universities and the inns of court. But now the drama -had obtained a local habitation and a certain professional independence. -Actors and playwriters could make a living—some of them, indeed, like -Burbage, Alleyn, and Shakespeare made a very substantial living, or even -became rich and endowed colleges (Dulwich College, e.g.). One Henslow, -an owner and manager, had at one time three theatres going and a long -list of dramatic authors on his payroll; was, in short, a kind of -Elizabethan theatrical syndicate, and from Henslow’s diary we learn most -of what we know about the business side of the old drama. In those days -London was a walled town of not more than 125,000 inhabitants. As five -theatre companies, and sometimes seven, counting the children of Paul’s -and of the Queen’s Chapel, were all playing at the same time, a public -of that size was fairly well served. You have doubtless read -descriptions, or seen pictures, of these old playhouses, The Theatre, -The Curtain, The Rose, The Swan, The Fortune, The Globe, The Belle -Savage, The Red Bull, The Black Friars. They varied somewhat in details -of structure and arrangement, and some points about them are still -uncertain, but their general features are well ascertained. They were -built commonly outside the walls, at Shoreditch or on the Bankside -across the Thames, in order to be outside the jurisdiction of the mayor -and council, who were mostly Puritan and were continually trying to stop -the show business. They were of wood, octagonal on the outside, circular -on the inside, with two or three tiers of galleries, partitioned off in -boxes. The stage and the galleries were roofed, but the pit, or yard, -was unroofed and unpaved; the ordinary, twopenny spectators -unaccommodated with seats but _standing_ on the bare ground and being -liable to a wetting if it rained. The most curious feature of the old -playhouse to a modern reader is the stage. This was not, as in our -theatres, a recessed or picture frame stage, but a platform stage, which -projected boldly out into the auditorium. The “groundlings” or yard -spectators, surrounded it on three sides, and it was about on a level -with their shoulders. The building specifications for The Swan playhouse -called for an auditorium fifty-five feet across, the stage to be -twenty-seven feet in depth, so that it reached halfway across the pit, -and was entirely open on three sides. At the rear of the stage was a -traverse, or draw curtain, with an alcove, or small inner stage behind -it, and a balcony overhead. There was little or no scenery, but -properties of various kinds were in use, chairs, beds, tables, etc. When -it is added to this that shilling spectators were allowed to sit upon -the stage, where for an extra sixpence they were accommodated with -stools, and could send the pages for pipes and tobacco, and that from -this vantage ground they could jeer at the actors, and exchange jokes -and sometimes missiles, like nuts or apples, with the common people in -the pit, why, it becomes almost incomprehensible to the modern mind how -the players managed to carry on the action at all; and fairly marvellous -how under such rude conditions, the noble blank verse declamations and -delicate graces of romantic poetry with which the old dramas abound -could have got past. A modern audience will hardly stand poetry, or -anything, in fact, but brisk action and rapid dialogue. Cut out the -soliloquies, cut out the reflections and the descriptions. Elizabethan -plays are stuffed with full-length descriptions of scenes and places: -Dover Cliff; the apothecary’s shop where Romeo bought the poison; the -brook in which Ophelia drowned herself; the forest spring where -Philaster found Bellario weeping and playing with wild flowers. In this -way they make up for the want of stage scenery. It would seem as if the -seventeenth century audiences were more naïve than twentieth century -ones, more willing to lend their imaginations to the artist, more eager -for strong sensation and more impressible by beauty of language, and -less easily disturbed by the incongruous and the absurd in the external -machinery of the theatre, which would be fatal to illusion in modern -audiences with our quick sense of the ridiculous. You know, for example, -that there were no actresses on the Elizabethan stage, but the female -parts were taken by boys. This is one practical reason for those -numerous plots in the old drama where the heroine disguises herself as a -young man. I need mention only Viola, Portia, Rosalind, Imogen, and -Julia in Shakespeare. And the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher -and many others are full of similar situations. Now if you have seen -college dramatics, where the same practice obtains, you have doubtless -noticed an inclination in the spectators to laugh at the deep bass -voices, the masculine strides, and the muscular arms of the ladies in -the play. But trifles like these did not apparently trouble our simple -forefathers. - -In the eighty-four years from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the -closing of the theatres we know the names of 200 writers who contributed -to the stage, and there were beside many anonymous pieces. All told, -there were produced over 1500 plays; and if we count masques and -pageants, and court and university plays, and other quasi-dramatic -species the number does not fall much short of 2000. Less than half of -these are now extant. It is not probable that any important play of -Shakespeare’s is lost, although no collection of his plays was made -until 1623, seven years after his death. Meanwhile about half of them -had come out singly in small quartos, surreptitiously issued and very -incorrectly printed. We probably have all, or nearly all, of Beaumont -and Fletcher’s fifty-three plays. And Ben Jonson collected his own works -carefully and saw them through the press. But Thomas Heywood wrote, -either alone or in collaboration, upwards of 220, and of these only -twenty-four remain. Dekker is credited with seventy-six and Rowley with -fifty-five, comparatively few of which are now known to exist. One -reason why such a large proportion of the Elizabethan plays is missing, -is that the theatre companies which owned the stage copies were -unwilling to have them printed and thereby made accessible to readers -and liable to be pirated by other companies. Manuscript plays were a -valuable asset, and were likely to remain in manuscript until they were -destroyed or disappeared. There are still many unpublished plays of that -period. Thus the manuscript of one of Heywood’s missing plays was -discovered and printed as late as 1885. A curious feature of the old -drama was the practice of collaboration. A capital instance of this was -the long partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher. But often three, or -sometimes four dramatists collaborated in a single piece. It is -difficult, often impossible, to assign the different parts of the play -to the respective authors and much critical ingenuity has been spent -upon the problem, often with very inconclusive results. To increase the -difficulty of assigning a certain authorship, many old plays were worked -over into new versions. It is surmised that Shakespeare himself -collaborated with Fletcher in “Henry VIII,” as well as in “The Two Noble -Kinsmen,” a tragi-comedy which is not included in the Shakespeare folio; -that in “Henry VI” he simply revamped old chronicle-history plays; that -“Hamlet” was founded on a lost original by Kyd; that “Titus Andronicus” -and possibly “Richard III” owe a great deal to Marlowe; and that the -underplot of “The Taming of the Shrew” and a number of scenes in “Timon -of Athens” were composed, not by Shakespeare but by some unknown -collaborator. In short we are to look upon the Elizabethan theatre as a -great factory and school of dramatic art, producing at its most active -period, the last ten years of the queen’s reign, say, from 1593–1603, -some forty or fifty new plays every year: masters and scholars working -together in partnership, not very careful to claim their own, not very -scrupulous about helping themselves to other people’s literary property: -something like the mediaeval guilds who built the cathedrals; or the -schools of Italian painters in the fifteenth century, where it is not -always possible to determine whether a particular piece of work is by -the master painter or by one of the pupils in his workshop. Instances of -collaboration are not unknown in modern drama. Robert Louis Stevenson -and W. E. Henley wrote several plays in partnership. Charles Reade in -his comedy, “Masks and Faces,” called in the aid of Tom Taylor, who was -an actor and practical maker of plays. But these are exceptions. Modern -dramatic authorship is individual: Elizabethan was largely corporate. -And the mention of Tom Taylor reminds me that Elizabethan drama was, in -an important degree, the creation of the actor-playwright. Peele, -Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday, and Rowley certainly, Marlowe, -Kyd, Greene, and many others probably, were actors as well as authors. -Beaumont’s father was a judge, and Fletcher’s father was the Bishop of -London, but they lodged near the playhouses, and consorted with -Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern or the -Triple Tun or the other old Elizabethan ordinaries which were the -meeting places of the wits. In fact, it is evident that the university -wits; the Bohemians and hack writers in Henslow’s pay; gentlemen and men -with professions, who wrote on the side, such as Thomas Lodge who was a -physician; in short, the whole body of Elizabethan dramatists kept -themselves in close touch with the actual stage. The Elizabethan drama -was a popular, yes, a national institution. All classes of people -frequented the rude wooden playhouses, some of which are reckoned to -have held 3000 spectators. The theatre was to the public of that day -what the daily newspaper, the ten-cent pictorial magazine, the popular -novel, the moving picture show, the concert, and the public lecture all -combined are to us. And I might almost add the club, the party caucus, -and the political speech. For though there were social convivial -gatherings like Ben Jonson’s Apollo Club, which met at the Devil Tavern, -the playhouse was a place of daily resort. And there were political -plays. Middleton’s “A Game at Chess,” e.g., which attracted enormous -crowds and had the then unexampled run of nine successive performances, -was a satirical attack on the foreign policy of the government; in which -the pieces of the game were thinly disguised representatives of -well-known public personages, after the manner of Aristophanes. The -Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who figured as the Black Knight, -remonstrated with the privy council, the further performance of the play -was forbidden, and the author and several of the company were sent to -prison. Similarly the comedy of “Eastward Ho!” written by Jonson, -Chapman, Marston, and Dekker, which made fun of James I’s Scotch -knights, gave great offense to the king, and was stopped and all hands -imprisoned. The Earl of Essex had the tragedy of “Richard II,” perhaps -Shakespeare’s,—or perhaps another play on the same subject,—rehearsed -before his fellow conspirators just before the outbreak of his -rebellion, and the players found themselves arrested for treason. - -The English drama was self-originated and self-developed, like the -Spanish, but unlike the classical stages of Italy and France. Coming -down from the old scriptural and allegorical plays, the miracles and -moralities of the Middle Ages, it began to lay its hands on subject -matter of all sorts: Italian and Spanish romances and pastorals, the -chronicles of England, contemporary French history, ancient history and -mythology, Bible stories and legends of saints and martyrs, popular -ballad and folklore, everyday English life and the dockets of the -criminal courts. It treated all this miscellaneous stuff with perfect -freedom, striking out its own methods. Admitting influences from many -quarters, it naturally owed something to the classic drama, the Latin -tragedies of Seneca, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, but it did -not allow itself to be shackled by classical rules and models, like the -rule of the three unities; or the precedent which forbade the mixture of -tragedy and comedy in the same play; or the other precedents which -allowed only three speakers on the stage at once and kept all violent -action off the scene, to be reported by a messenger, rather than pass -before the eyes of spectators. The Elizabethans favored strong action, -masses of people, spectacular elements: mobs, battles, single combats, -trial scenes, deaths, processions. The English instinct was for quantity -of life, the Greek and the French for neatness of construction. The -ghost which stalks in Elizabethan tragedy: in “Hamlet,” “Richard III,” -Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” and Marston’s “Antonio and Mellida” comes -straight from Seneca. But except for a few direct imitations of Latin -plays like “Gorboduc” and “The Misfortunes of Arthur”—mostly academic -performances—Elizabethan tragedy was not at all Senecan in -construction. Let us take a few forms of drama, which, though not -strictly peculiar to our sixteenth century theatre, were most -representative of it, and were the forms in which native genius -expressed itself most characteristically. I will select the -tragi-comedy, the chronicle-history, and the romantic melodrama or -tragedy of blood. In 1579 Sir Philip Sidney, who was a classical -scholar, complained that English plays were neither right tragedies nor -right comedies, but mongrel tragi-comedies which mingled kings and -clowns, funerals and hornpipes. Nearly a century and a half later, -Addison, also a classical scholar, wrote: “The tragi-comedy, which is -the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous -inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts. An author might as -well think of weaving the adventures of Aeneas and Hudibras into one -poem as of writing such a motley piece of mirth and sorrow.” Sidney’s -and Addison’s principles would have condemned about half the plays of -Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As to the chronicle-history play, -Ben Jonson, who was a classicist writing in a romantic age, had his -fling at those who with “some few foot and half-foot words fight over -York and Lancaster’s long jars.” I do not know that any other nation -possesses anything quite like this series of English kings by -Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bale, Peele, Ford, and many others, which taken -together cover nearly four centuries of English history. You know that -the Duke of Marlboro said that all he knew of English history he had -learned from Shakespeare’s plays; and these big, patriotic military -dramas must have given a sort of historical education to the audiences -of their time. The material, to be sure, was much of it epic rather than -properly dramatic, and in the hands of inferior artists it remained -lumpy and shockingly crude. To obtain comic relief, the playwrights -sandwiched in between the serious parts, scenes of horseplay, -buffoonery, and farce, which had little to do with the history. But in -the hands of a great artist, all this was reduced to harmony. Henry IV, -Part I, is not only a great literary work, but a first-class acting -play. The tragedy is very high tragedy and the Falstaff scenes very -broad comedy, but they are blended so skilfully that each heightens the -effect of the other without disturbing the unity of impression. As to -the romantic melodrama or tragedy of blood, the Elizabethans had a -strong appetite for sensation, and many of their most powerful plays -were of this description: Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” Shakespeare’s “Lear,” -Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy,” Middleton’s “Changeling,” -Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” and scores of others, which employ what -has been called solution by massacre, and whose stage in the fifth act -is as bloody as a shambles. Even in the best of these, great art is -required to reconcile the nerves of the modern reader to the numerous -killings. In the extreme examples of the type, like “Titus Andronicus” -(doubtfully Shakespeare’s), Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta,” or the old -“Spanish Tragedy,” or Cyril Tourneur’s “Revenger’s Tragedy,” the theme -is steeped so deeply in horrors and monstrosities, that it passes over -into farce. For the great defect of Elizabethan drama is excess, -extravagance. In very few plays outside of Shakespeare do we find that -naturalness, that restraint, decorum and moderation which is a part of -the highest and finest art. Too many of the plots and situations are -fantastically improbable: too many of the passions and characters -strained and exaggerated, though life and vigor are seldom wanting. This -is seen in their comedies as well as in their tragedies. Thus, Ben -Jonson, an admirable comic artist, ranking next, I think, after -Shakespeare, a very learned man and exhaustless in observation and -invention; very careful, too, in construction and endeavoring a reform -of comedy along truly classical lines—Ben Jonson, I say, chose for his -province the comedy of humors; i.e., the exhibition of all varieties of -oddity, eccentricity, whim, affectation. Read his “Every Man in His -Humour” or his “Bartholomew Fair” and you will find a satirical picture -of all the queer fashions and follies of his contemporary London. His -characters are sharply distinguished but they are _too_ queer, too -overloaded with traits, so that we seem to be in an asylum for cranks -and monomaniacs, rather than in the broad, natural, open daylight of -Shakespeare’s creations. So the tyrants and villains of Elizabethan -melodrama are too often incredible creatures beyond the limits of -humanity. - -It is perhaps due to their habit of mixing tragedy and comedy that the -Elizabethan dramatists made so much use of the double plot; for the main -plot was often tragical and the underplot comical or farcical. -Shakespeare, who at all points was superior to his fellows, knew how to -knit his duplicate plots together and make them interdependent. But in -pieces like Middleton’s “Changeling” or “The Mayor of Queensboro,” the -main plot and the subplot have nothing to do with each other and simply -run along in alternate scenes, side by side. This is true of countless -plays of the time and is ridiculed by Sheridan in his burlesque play -“The Critic.” Let it also be remembered that an Elizabethan tragedy was -always a poem—always in verse. Prose was reserved for comedy, or for -the comedy scenes in a tragedy. The only prose tragedy that has come -down to us from those times is the singular little realistic piece -entitled “The Yorkshire Tragedy,” the story of a murder. A very constant -feature of the old drama was the professional fool, jester, or kept -clown, with his motley coat, truncheon, and cap and bells. In most plays -he was simply a stock fun maker, though Shakespeare made a profound and -subtle use of him in “As You Like It” and in “Lear.” The last court -jester or king’s fool was Archie Armstrong, fool of Charles I. After the -Restoration he was considered as old-fashioned and disappeared from the -stage along with puns and other obsolete forms of wit. Opera and -pantomime were not introduced into England until late in the seventeenth -century: but the Elizabethans had certain forms of quasi-dramatic -entertainment such as the court masque, the pageant, and the pastoral, -which have since gone out. They were responsible for some fine poetry -like Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdess,” Jonson’s fragment “The Sad -Shepherd” and Milton’s “Comus.” Of late years the pageant has been -locally revived in England, at Oxford, at Coventry, and elsewhere. - -Now since it has ceased to be performed, what is the value of the old -drama, as literature, as a body of reading plays? Of the 200 known -writers for the theatre, ten at least were men of creative genius, -Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, -Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger. At least a dozen more were men of -high and remarkable talents, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marston, Ford, -Heywood, Shirley, Tourneur, Kyd, Day, Rowley, Brome. Scarcely one of -them but has contributed single scenes of great excellence, or invented -one or two original and interesting characters, or written passages of -noble blank verse and lovely lyrics. Even the poorest of them were -inheritors or partakers of a great poetic tradition, a gift of style, so -that, in plays very defective, as a whole, we are constantly coming upon -lines of startling beauty like Middleton’s - - Ha! what art thou that taks’t away the light - Betwixt that star and me? - -or Marston’s - - Night, like a masque, has entered heaven’s high hall, - With thousand torches ushering the way. - -or Beaumont’s - - Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young. - -But when all has been said, and in spite of enthusiasts like Lamb and -Hazlitt and Swinburne, I fear it must be acknowledged that, outside of -Shakespeare, our old dramatists produced no plays of the absolutely -first rank; no tragedies so perfect as those of Sophocles and Euripides; -no comedies equal to Molière’s. Nay, I would go further, and affirm that -not only has the Elizabethan drama—excluding Shakespeare—nothing to -set against the first part of Goethe’s “Faust,” but that its best plays -are inferior, as a whole, to the best of Aristophanes, of Calderon, of -Racine, of Schiller, even perhaps of Victor Hugo, Sheridan and -Beaumarchais. It is as Coleridge said: great beauties, counterbalanced -by great faults. Ben Jonson is heavy-handed and laborious; Beaumont and -Fletcher graceful, fluent and artistic, but superficial and often false -in characterization; Webster, intense and powerful in passion, but -morbid and unnatural; Middleton, frightfully uneven; Marlowe and Chapman -high epic poets but with no flexibility and no real turn for drama. - -Yet unsatisfactory as it is, when judged by any single play, the work of -the Elizabethans, when viewed as a whole, makes an astonishing -impression of fertility, of force, of range, variety, and richness, both -in invention and in expression. - ------ - -[8] “Every Man in his Humor” lasted well down into the nineteenth -century on the stage. And here are a few haphazard dates of late -performances of Elizabethan plays: “The Pilgrim,” 1812; “Philaster,” -1817; “The Chances,” 1820; “The Wild Goose Chase,” 1820; “The City -Madam,” 1822; “The Humorous Lieutenant,” 1817; “The Spanish Curate,” -1840. - - - - - PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY, - BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A. - - - - - TRANSCRIBER NOTES - - -Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple -spellings occur, majority use has been employed. - -Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors -occur. - -[The end of _The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays_, by Henry A. -(Augustin) Beers.] - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays, by -Henry A. 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