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diff --git a/old/66576-0.txt b/old/66576-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 07f1227..0000000 --- a/old/66576-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7611 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, -Volume 10, by Ambrose Bierce - -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 -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10 - -Author: Ambrose Bierce - -Release Date: October 20, 2021 [eBook #66576] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Emmanuel Ackerman, Robert Tonsing and the Online - Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This - file was produced from images generously made available by - The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WORKS OF -AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10 *** - - - - - - THE COLLECTED WORKS - OF AMBROSE BIERCE - - VOLUME X - - [Illustration: N] - - - - _The publishers certify that this edition of_ - - THE COLLECTED WORKS OF - AMBROSE BIERCE - - _consists of two hundred and fifty numbered sets, autographed by - the author, and that the number of this set is_ ...... - - - - - - THE COLLECTED - WORKS OF - AMBROSE BIERCE - - VOLUME X - - TANGENTIAL - VIEWS - - [Illustration] - - NEW YORK & WASHINGTON - THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY - 1911 - - _FREDERICK_ _POLLEY_ - - COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY - THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY - - - - - CONTENTS - - - THE OPINIONATOR - - THE NOVEL - ON LITERARY CRITICISM - STAGE ILLUSION - THE MATTER OF MANNER - ON READING NEW BOOKS - ALPHABÊTES AND BORDER RUFFIANS - TO TRAIN A WRITER - AS TO CARTOONING - THE S. P. W. - PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY AUTHORS - WIT AND HUMOR - WORD CHANGES AND SLANG - THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS - ENGLAND’S LAUREATE - HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING - VISIONS OF THE NIGHT - - THE REVIEWER - - EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS - “THE KREUTZER SONATA” - EMMA FRANCES DAWSON - MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF - A POET AND HIS POEM - - THE CONTROVERSIALIST - - AN INSURRECTION OF THE PEASANTRY - MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS - A DEAD LION - THE SHORT STORY - WHO ARE GREAT? - POETRY AND VERSE - THOUGHT AND FEELING - - THE TIMOROUS REPORTER - - THE PASSING OF SATIRE - SOME DISADVANTAGES OF GENIUS - OUR SACROSANCT ORTHOGRAPHY - THE AUTHOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY - ON POSTHUMOUS RENOWN - THE CRIME OF INATTENTION - FETISHISM - OUR AUDIBLE SISTERS - THE NEW PENOLOGY - THE NATURE OF WAR - HOW TO GROW GREAT - A WAR IN THE ORIENT - A JUST DECISION - THE LION’S DEN - - THE MARCH HARE - - A FLOURISHING INDUSTRY - THE RURAL PRESS - TO “ELEVATE THE STAGE” - PECTOLITE - LA BOULANGÈRE - ADVICE TO OLD MEN - A DUBIOUS VINDICATION - THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE - - - - - THE OPINIONATOR - - - - - THE NOVEL - - -Those who read no books but new ones have this much to say for -themselves in mitigation of censure: they do not read all the new ones. -They can not; with the utmost diligence and devotion—never weary in -ill doing—they can not hope to get through one in a hundred. This, I -should suppose, must make them unhappy. They probably feel as a small -boy of limited capacity would in a country with all the springs running -treacle and all the trees loaded with preserved fruits. - -The annual output of books in this country alone is something -terrible—not fewer, I am told, than from seven thousand to nine -thousand. This should be enough to gratify the patriot who “points -with pride” to the fact that Americans are a reading people, but does -not point with anything to the quality of what they read. There are -apparently more novels than anything else, and these have incomparably -the largest sales. The “best seller” is always a novel and a bad one. - -In my poor judgment there have not been published in any one -quarter-century a half dozen novels that posterity will take the -trouble to read. It is not to be denied that some are worth reading, -for some have been written by great writers; and whatever is written by -a great writer is likely to merit attention. But between that which is -worth reading and that which was worth writing there is a distinction. -For a man who can do great work, to do work that is less great than the -best that he can do is not worthwhile, and novel-writing, I hold, does -not bring out the best that is in him. - -The novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears -to painting. With whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted, -it must lack that basic quality in all art, unity, totality of effect. -As it can not all be seen at once, its parts must be seen successively, -each effacing the one seen before; and at the last there remains no -coherent and harmonious memory of the work. It is the same with a story -too long to be read with a virgin attention at a single sitting. - -A novel is a diluted story—a story cumbered with trivialities and -nonessentials. I have never seen one that could not be bettered by -cutting out a half or three-quarters of it. - -The novel is a snow plant; it has no root in the permanent soil of -literature, and does not long hold its place. It is of the lowest form -of imagination—imagination chained to the perch of probability. What -wonder that in this unnatural captivity it pines and dies? The novelist -is, after all, but a reporter of a larger growth. True, he invents his -facts (which the reporter of the newspaper is known never to do) and -his characters; but, having them in hand, what can he do? His chains -are heavier than himself. The line that bounds his little Dutch garden -of probability, separating it from the golden realm of art—the sun and -shadow land of fancy—is to him a dead-line. Let him transgress it at -his peril. - -In England and America the art of novel-writing (in so far as it is an -art) is as dead as Queen Anne; in America as dead as Queen Ameresia. -(There never was a Queen Ameresia—that is why I choose her for the -comparison.) As a literary method it never had any other element -of vitality than the quality from which it has its name. Having no -legitimate place in the scheme of letters, its end was inevitable. - -When Richardson and Fielding set the novel going, hardly more than -a century-and-a-half ago, it charmed a generation to which it was -new. From their day to ours, with a lessening charm, it has taken the -attention of the multitude, and grieved the judicious, but, its impulse -exhausted, it stops by its inherent inertia. Its dead body we shall -have with us, doubtless, for many years, but its soul “is with the -saints, I trust.” - -This is true, not only locally but generally. So far as I am able -to judge, no good novels are now “made in Germany,” nor in France, -nor in any European country except Russia. The Russians are writing -novels which so far as one may venture to judge (dimly discerning -their quality through the opacity of translation, for one does not -read Russian) are, in their way, admirable; full of fire and light, -like an opal. Tourgenieff, Pushkin, Gogol and the early Tolstoi—these -be big names. In their hands the novel grew great (as it did in -those of Richardson and Fielding, and as it would have done in those -of Thackeray and Pater if greatness in that form of fiction had been -longer possible in England) because, first, they were great men, and -second, the novel was a new form of expression in a world of new -thought and life. In Russia the soil is not exhausted: it produces -without fertilizers. There we find simple, primitive conditions, and -the novel holds something of the elemental passions of the race, -unsophisticated by introspection, analysis of motive, problemism, -dissection of character, and the other “odious subtleties” that -go before a fall. But the blight is upon it even there, with an -encroachment visible in the compass of a single lifetime. Compare -Tolstoy’s _The Cossacks_ with his latest work in fiction, and you will -see an individual decadence prefiguring a national; just as one was -seen in the interval between _Adam Bede_ and _Daniel Deronda_. When the -story-teller is ambitious to be a philosopher there is an end to good -storytelling. Novelists are now all philosophers—excepting those who -have “stumbled to eternal mock” as reformers. - -With the romance—which in form so resembles the novel that many -otherwise worthy persons are but dimly aware of the essential -distinction—matters are somewhat otherwise. The romancist has not -to encounter at a disadvantage the formidable competition of his -reader’s personal experience. He can represent life, not as it is, -but as it might be; character, not as he finds it, but as he wants -it. His plot knows no law but that of its own artistic development; -his incidents do not require the authenticating hand and seal of any -censorship but that of taste. The vitality of his art is eternal; -it is perpetually young. He taps the great permanent mother-lode of -human interest. His materials are infinite in abundance and cosmic -in distribution. Nothing that can be known, or thought, or felt, or -dreamed, but is available if he can manage it. He is lord of two worlds -and may select his characters from both. In the altitudes where his -imagination waves her joyous wing there are no bars for her to beat -her breast against; the universe is hers, and unlike the sacred bird -Simurgh, which is omnipotent on condition of never exerting its power, -she may do as she will. And so it comes about that while the novel -is accidental and transient, the romance is essential and permanent. -The novelist, whatever his ability, writes in the shifting sand; the -only age that understands his work is that which has not forgotten the -social conditions environing his characters—namely, their own period; -but the romancist has cut his work into the living rock. Richardson -and Fielding already seem absurd. We are beginning to quarrel with -Thackeray, and Dickens needs a glossary. Thirty years ago I saw a -list of scores of words used by Dickens that had become obsolete. -They were mostly the names of homely household objects no longer -in use; he had named them in giving “local color” and the sense of -“reality.” Contemporary novels are read by none but the reviewers and -the multitude—which will read anything if it is long, untrue and new -enough. Men of sane judgment and taste still illuminate their minds -and warm their hearts in Scott’s suffusing glow; the strange, heatless -glimmer of Hawthorne fascinates more and more; the Thousand-and-One -Nights holds its captaincy of tale-telling. Whatever a great man does -he is likely to do greatly, but had Hugo set the powers of his giant -intellect to the making of mere novels his superiority to the greatest -of those who have worked in that barren art might have seemed somewhat -less measureless than it is. - - 1897. - - - - - ON LITERARY CRITICISM - - - I - -The saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can -never know, nor hope to know, if he is a good workman. In literary -criticism there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence -by which to test the work. Sainte-Beuve says that the art of criticism -consists in saying the first thing that comes into one’s head. -Doubtless he was thinking of his own head, a fairly good one. There is -a difference between the first thing that comes into one head and the -first thing that comes into another; and it is not always the best kind -of head that concerns itself with literary criticism. - -Having no standards, criticism is an erring guide. Its pronouncements -are more interesting than valuable, and interesting chiefly from the -insight that they give into the mind, not of the writer criticised, -but of the writer criticising. Hence the greater interest that they -have when delivered by one of whom the reader already knows something. -So the newspapers are not altogether unwise when asking an eminent -merchant to pass judgment on a new poet, or a distinguished soldier -to “sit” in the case of a rising young novelist. We learn something -about the merchant or the soldier, and that may amuse. As a guide to -literary excellence even the most accomplished critic’s judgment on his -contemporaries is of little value. Posterity more frequently reverses -than affirms it. - -The reason is not far to seek. An author’s work is usually the product -of his environment. He collaborates with his era; his co-workers are -time and place. All his neighbors and all the conditions in which they -live have a hand in the work. His own individuality, unless uncommonly -powerful and original, is “subdued to what it works in.” But this is -true, too, of his critic, whose limitations are drawn by the same iron -authority. Subject to the same influences, good and bad, following -the same literary fashions, the critic who is contemporary with his -author holds his court in the market-place and polls a fortuitous jury. -In diagnosing the disorder of a person suspected of hydrophobia the -physician ought not to have been bitten by the same dog. - -The taste of the many being notoriously bad and that of the few -dubious, what is the author to do for judgment on his work? He is to -wait. In a few centuries, more or less, may arise a critic that we call -Posterity. This fellow will have as many limitations, probably, as the -other had—will bow the knee to as many literary Baäls and err as widely -from the paths leading to the light. But his false gods will not be -those of to-day, whose hideousness will disclose itself to his undevout -vision, and in his deviations from the true trail he will cross and -chart our tracks. Better than all, he will know and care little about -the lives and characters, the personalities, of those of us whose work -has lasted till his time. On that coign of vantage he will stand and -deliver a juster judgment. It will enable him to judge our work with -impartiality, as if it had fallen from the skies or sprung up from the -ground without human agency. - -One can hardly overrate the advantage to the critic of ignorance of his -author. Biographies of men of action are well enough; the lives that -such men live are all there is of them except themselves. But men of -thought—that is different. You can not narrate thought, nor describe -it, yet it is the only relevant thing in the life of an author. -Anything else darkens counsel. We go to biography for side lights on -an author’s work; to his work for side lights on his character. The -result is confusion and disability, for personal character and literary -character have little to say to each other, despite the fact that -so tremendous a chap as Taine builded an entire and most unearthly -biography of Shakspeare on no firmer foundation than the “internal -evidence” of the plays and sonnets. Of all the influences that make for -incapable criticism the biographer of authors is the most pernicious. -One needs not be a friend to organized labor to wish that the fellow’s -working hours might be reduced from twenty-four to eight. - -Neither the judgment of the populace nor that of the critics being -of value to an author concerned about his rank in the hierarchy of -letters, and that of posterity being a trifle slow, he seems to be -reduced to the expedient of taking his own word for it. And his -opinion of himself may not be so far out of the way. Read Goethe’s -conversations with Eckermann and see how accurately the great man -appraised himself. - -When scratched in a newspaper Heine said: “I am to be judged in the -assizes of literature. I know who I am.” - -About the shrine of every famous author awaits a cloud of critics to -pay an orderly and decorous homage to his genius. There is no crowding: -if one of them sees that he can not perform his prostration until -after his saint shall have been forgotten along with the intellectual -miracles he wrought, that patient worshiper turns aside to level his -shins at another shrine. There are shrines enough for all, God knows! - -The most mischievous, because the ablest, of all this sycophantic -crew is Mr. Howells, who finds every month, and reads, two or three -books—always novels—of high literary merit. As no man who has anything -else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a -month—and I will say for Mr. Howells that he is a conscientious -reader—and as some hundreds are published in the same period, one is -curious to know how many books of high literary merit he would find if -he could read them all. But Mr. Howells is no ordinary sycophant—not -he. True, having by mischance read a book divinely bad, even when -judged according to his own test, and having resolved to condemn -nothing except in a general way—as the artillerists in the early days -of the Civil War used to “shell the woods”—he does not purpose to lose -his labor, and therefore commends the book along with the others; -but as a rule he distributes the distinctions that he has to confer -according to a system—to those, namely, whose work in fiction most -nearly resembles his own. That is his way of propagating the Realistic -faith which his poverty of imagination has compelled him to adopt and -his necessities to defend. “Ah, yes, a beautiful animal,” said the -camel of the horse—“if he only had a hump!” - -To show what literary criticism has accomplished in education of the -public taste I beg to refer the reader to any number of almost any -magazine. Here is one, for instance, containing a paper by one Bowker -on contemporary English novelists—he novelists and she novelists—to -the number of about forty. And only the “eminent” ones are mentioned. -To most American readers some of the books of most of these authors -are more or less familiar, and nine in ten of these readers will -indubitably accept Mr. Bowker’s high estimate of the genius of the -authors themselves. These have one good quality—they are industrious: -most of them have published ten to forty novels each, the latter number -being the favorite at this date and eliciting Mr. Bowker’s lively -admiration. The customary rate of production is one a year, though -two are not unusual, there being nothing in the law forbidding. Mr. -Bowker has the goodness to tell us all he knows about these persons’ -methods of work; that is to say, all that they have told him. The -amount of patient research, profound thought and systematic planning -that go to the making of one of their books is (naturally) astonishing. -Unfortunately it falls just short of the amount that kills. - -Add to the forty eminent English novelists another forty American, -equally eminent—at least in their own country—and similarly -industrious. We have then an average annual output of, say, eighty -novels which have the right to expect to be widely read and -enthusiastically reviewed. This in two countries, in one of which the -art of novel writing is dead, in the other of which it has not been -born. Truly this is an age of growing literary activity; our novelists -are as lively and diligent as maggots in the carcass of a horse. There -is a revival of baseball, too. - -If our critics were wiser than their dupes could this mass of -insufferable stuff be dumped upon the land? Could the little men and -foolish women who write it command the persevering admiration of -their fellow-creatures, who think it a difficult thing to do? I make -no account here of the mere book-reporters of the newspapers, whose -purpose and ambition are, not to guide the public taste but to follow -it, and who are therefore in no sense critics. The persons whom I -am considering are those ingenious gentlemen who in the magazines -and reviews are expected to, and do, write of books with entire -independence of their own market. Are there anywhere more than one, -two or three like Percival Pollard, with “Gifford’s heavy hand” to -“crush without remorse” the intolerable rout of commonplace men and -women swarming innumerous upon the vacant seats of the dead giants and -covering the slopes of Parnassus like a flock of crows? - -Your critic of widest vogue and chief authority among us is he who is -best skilled in reading between the lines; in interpreting an author’s -purpose; in endowing him with a “problem” and noting his degree of -skill in its solution. The author—stupid fellow!—did not write between -the lines, had no purpose but to entertain, was unaware of a problem. -So much the worse for him; so much the better for his expounder. -Interlinear cipher, purpose, problem, are all the critic’s own, and -he derives a lively satisfaction in his creation—looks upon it and -pronounces it good. Nothing is more certain than that if a writer of -genius should “bring to his task” of writing a book the purposes which -the critics would surely trace in the completed work the book would -remain forever unwritten, to the unspeakble advantage of letters and -morals. - -In illustration of these remarks and suggesting them, take these -book reviews in a single number of _The Atlantic_. There we -learn, concerning Mr. Cable, that his controlling purpose in -_The Grandissimes_ was that of “presenting the problem of the -reorganization of Southern society”—that “the book was in effect a -parable”; that in _Dr. Sevier_ he “essayed to work out through personal -relations certain problems [always a problem or two] which vexed him -regarding poverty and labor”; that in _Bonaventure_ he “sets himself -another task,” which is “to work out [always something to ‘work out’] -the regeneration of man through knowledge”—a truly formidable “task.” -Of the author of _Queen Money_, we are told by the same expounder -that she has “set herself no task beyond her power,” but “had it in -mind to trace the influence of the greed for wealth upon a section of -contemporaneous society.” Of Mr. Bellamy, author of _Looking Backward_ -(the heroine of which is not Mrs. Lot) we are confidently assured in -ailing metaphor that “he feels intensely the bitter inequalities of -the present order” of things and “thinks he sees a remedy,”—our old -friends again: the “problem” and the “solution”—both afterthoughts of -Mr. Bellamy. The “task” which in _Marzio’s Crucifix_ Marion Crawford -“sets himself” is admirably simple—by a “characteristic outwardness” -to protect us against “a too intimate and subtle corrosive of life.” -As a savior of the world against this awful peril Crawford may justly -have claimed a vote of thanks; but possibly he was content with that -humbler advantage, the profit from the sale of his book. But (it may be -protested) the critic who is to live by his trade must say _something_. -True, but is it necessary that he live by his trade? - -Carlyle’s prophecy of a time when all literature should be one vast -review is in process of fulfilment. Aubrey de Vere has written a -critical analysis of poetry, chiefly that of Spenser and Wordsworth. An -_Atlantic_ man writes a critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical -analysis. Shall I not write a critical analysis of the _Atlantic_ man’s -critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical analysis of poetry? I -can do so adequately in three words: It is nonsense. - -Spenser, also, it appears, “set himself a task,” had his “problem,” -“worked it out.” “The figures of his embroidered poem,” we are told, -“are conceived and used in accordance with a comprehensive doctrine -of the nature of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly meant to enforce -through the medium of his imagination.” That is to say, the author -of _The Faerie Queene_ did not “sing because he could not choose but -sing,” but because he was burdened with a doctrine. He had a nut to -crack and, faith! he must crack it or he would be sick. “Resolved into -its moral elements” (whether by Aubrey de Vere or the _Atlantic_ man -I can only guess without reading de Vere’s work in two volumes, which -God forbid!) the glowing work of Spenser is a sermon which “teaches -specifically how to attain self-control and how to meet attacks from -without; or rather how to seek those many forms of error which do -mischief in the world, and to overcome them for the world’s welfare.” -Precisely: the animal is a pig and a bird; or rather it is a fish. So -much for Spenser, whom his lovers may re-read if they like in the new -light of this person’s critical analysis. It is rather hard that, being -dead, he can not have the advantage of going over his work with so -intelligent a guide as Aubrey de Vere. He would be astonished by his -own profundity. - -How literary reviewing may be acceptably done in Boston may be judged -by the following passage from the Boston _Literary Review_: - -“When Miss Emma Frances Dawson wrote _An Itinerant House_ she was -plainly possessed of a desire to emulate Poe and turn out a collection -of stories which, once read, the mention of them would make the blood -curdle. There is no need to say that Poe’s position is still secure, -but Miss Dawson has succeeded in writing some very creditable stories -of their kind.” - -The reviewer that can discern in Miss Dawson’s work “a desire to -emulate Poe,” or can find in it even a faint suggestion of Poe, may -justly boast himself accessible to any folly that comes his way. There -is no more similarity between the work of the two writers than there -is between that of Dickens and that of Macaulay, or that of Addison -and that of Carlyle. Poe in his prose tales deals sometimes with the -supernatural; Miss Dawson always. But hundreds of writers do the same; -if that constitutes similarity and suggests intentional “emulation” -what shall be said of those tales which resemble one another in that -element’s omission? The truth probably is that the solemn gentleman -who wrote that judgment had not read Poe since childhood, and did not -read Miss Dawson at all. Moreover, no excellence in her work would -have saved it from his disparaging comparison if he had read it. “Poe’s -position” would still have been a “secure,” for to such minds as his it -is unthinkable that an established fame (no matter how, when or where -established) should not signify an unapproachable merit. If he had -lived in Poe’s time how he would have sneered at that writer’s attempt -to emulate Walpole! And had he been a contemporary of Walpole that -ambitious person would have incurred a stinging rap on the head for -aspiring to displace the immortal Gormley Hobb. - -The fellow goes on: - -“To one steeped in the gruesome weirdness of a master of the gentle art -of blood-curdling the stories are not too impressive, but he who picks -up the book fresh from a fairy tale is apt to become somewhat nervous -in the reading. The tales allow Miss Dawson to weave in some very -pretty verse.” - -The implication that Miss Dawson’s tales are intended to be “gruesome,” -“blood-curdling,” and so forth, is a foolish implication. Their -supernaturalism is not of that kind. The blood that they could curdle -is diseased blood which it would be at once a kindly office and a high -delight to shed. And fancy this inexpressible creature calling Miss -Dawson’s verse “pretty”!—the _ballade_ of “The Sea of Sleep” “pretty”! -My compliments to him: - - Dull spirit, few among us be your days, - The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise; - And God deny, your flesh when you unload, - Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad, - With powers direr than your present sort: - Able the wights you jump on to bewart. - -The latest author of “uncanny” tales to suffer from the ready -reckoner’s short cut to the solution of the problem of literary merit, -the ever-serviceable comparison with Edgar Allan Poe, is Mr. W. C. -Morrow. Doubtless he had hoped that this cup might pass by him—had -implored the rosy goddess Psora, who enjoys the critic’s person and -inspires his pen, to go off duty, but it was not to be; that diligent -deity is never weary of ill doing and her devotees, pursuing the evil -tenor of their way, have sounded the Scotch fiddle to the customary -effect. Mr. Morrow’s admirable book, _The Ape, the Idiot and Other -People_, is gravely ascribed to the paternity of Poe, as was Miss -Dawson’s before it, and some of mine before that. And until Gabriel, -with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last -living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, -every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same -sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps—the -book-butchers of the newspapers—criticism is merely a process of -marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature -of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the -old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write “gruesome -stories”?—they invoke Poe; essays?—they out with their Addison; -satirical verse?—they have at him with Pope—and so on, through the -entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, -learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and -obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, -who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the -slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking -of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write -is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model -the standard name dominating his chosen field—the impeccant hegemon of -the province. - - - II - -Mr. Hamlin Garland, writing with the corn-fed enthusiasm of the -prairies, “hails the dawn of a new era” in literature—an era which is -to be distinguished by dominance of the Western man. That a great new -literature is to “come out of the West” because of broad prairies and -wide rivers and big mountains and infrequent boundary lines—that is a -conviction dear indeed to the Western mind which has discovered that -marks can be made on paper with a pen. A few years ago the Eastern -mind was waiting wide-eyed to “hail the dawn” of a literature that -was to be “distinctively American,” for the Eastern mind in those -days claimed a share in the broad prairies, the wide rivers and the -big mountains, with all the competencies, suggestions, inspirations -and other appurtenances thereunto belonging—a heritage which now Mr. -Garland austerely denies to any one born and “raised” on the morning -side of the Alleghanies. The “distinctively American literature” has -not materialized, excepting in the works of Americans distinctively -illiterate; and there are no visible signs of a distinctively Western -one. Even the Californian sort, so long heralded by prophets blushing -with conscious modesty in the foretelling, seems loth to leave off its -damnable faces and begin. The best Californian, the best Western, the -best American books have the least of geographical “distinctiveness,” -and most closely conform to the universal and immutable laws of the -art, as known to Aristotle and Longinus. - -The effect of physical-geographical environment on literary production -is mostly nil; racial and educational considerations only are of -controlling importance. Despite Madame de Staël’s engaging dictum -that “every Englishman is an island,” the natives of that scanty plot -have produced a literature which in breadth of thought and largeness -of method we sons of a continent, brothers to the broad prairies, -wide rivers and big mountains, have not matched and give no promise -of matching. It is all very fine to be a child o’ natur’ with a home -in the settin’ sun, but when the child o’ natur’ with a knack at -scribbling pays rent to Phœbus by renouncing the incomparable advantage -of strict subjection to literary law he pays too dearly. - -Nothing new is to be learned in any of the great arts—the ancients -looted the whole field. Nor do first-rate minds seek anything new. -They are assured of primacy under the conditions of their art as they -find it—under any conditions. It is the lower order of intelligence -that is ingenious, inventive, alert for original methods and new -forms. Napoleon added nothing to the art of war, in either strategy or -tactics. Shakspeare tried no new meters, did nothing that had not been -done before—merely did better what had been done. In the Parthenon was -no new architectural device, and in the Sistine Madonna all the effects -were got by methods as familiar as speech. The only way in which it is -worth while to differ from others is in point of superior excellence. -Be “original,” ambitious Westerner—always as original as you please. -But know, or if you already know remember, that originality strikes -and dazzles only when displayed within the limiting lines of form. -Above all, remember that the most ineffective thing in literature is -that quality, whatever in any case it may be, which is best designated -in terms of geographical classification. The work of whose form and -methods one naturally thinks as—not “English”; that is a racial -word, but—“American” or “Australian” or (in this country) “Eastern,” -“Mid-Western,” “Southern” or “Californian” is worthless. The writer who -knows no better than to make or try to make his work “racy of the soil” -knows nothing of his art worth knowing. - - - III - -Charles A. Dana held that California could not rightly claim the -glory of such literature as she had, for none of her writers of -distinction—such distinction as they had—was born there. We were -austerely reminded that “even the sheen of gold is less attractive than -the lustre of intellectual genius.” “California!” cried this severe but -not uncompassionate critic—“California! how musical is the word. And -again we cry out, California! Give us the letters of high thought: give -us philosophy and romance and poetry and art. Give us the soul!” - -How many men and women who scorn delights and live laborious days to -glorify our metropolis with “the letters of high thought” are on Fame’s -muster-roll as natives of Manhattan island? Doubtless the state of New -York, as also the city of that name, can make an honorable showing -in the matter of native authors, but it has certain considerable -advantages that California lacks. In the first place, there are many -more births in New York, supplying a strong numerical presumption that -more geniuses will turn up there. Second, it has (I hope) enjoyed that -advantage for many, many years; whereas California was “settled” (and -by the non-genius-bearing sex) a good deal later. In this competition -the native Californian author is handicapped by the onerous condition -that in order to have his nose counted he must have been born in the -pre-Woman period or acquired enough of reputation for the rumor of his -merit to have reached New York’s ears, and for the noise of it to have -roused her from the contemplation of herself, before he has arrived -at middle age. This is not an “impossible” condition; it is only an -exceedingly hard one. How hard it is a little reflection on facts -will show. The rule is, the world over, that the literary army of the -“metropolis” is recruited in the “provinces,” or, more accurately, -_from_ the provinces. The difference denoted by the prepositions is -important: for every provincial writer who, like Bret Harte, achieves -at home enough distinction to be sought out and lured to a “literary -metropolis,” ten unknown ones go there of their own motion, like -Rudyard Kipling, and become distinguished afterward. They wrote equally -well where they were, but they might have continued to write there -until dead of age, and but for some lucky accident or fortuitous -concurrence of favoring circumstances they would never have been heard -of in the “literary metropolis.” - -We may call it so, but New York is not a literary metropolis, nor is -London, nor is Paris. In letters there is no metropolis. The literary -capital is not a mother-city, founding colonies; it is the creature of -its geographical environment, giving out nothing, taking in everything. -If not constantly fed with fresh brains from beyond and about, its -chance of primacy and domination would be merely proportional to its -population. This centripetal tendency—this converging movement of -provincial writers upon the literary capital, is itself the strongest -possible testimony to the disadvantages which they suffer at home; for -in nearly every instance it is made—commonly at a great sacrifice—in -pursuit of recognition. The motive may not be a very creditable one; I -think myself it is ridiculous, as is all ambition, not to excel, but -to be known to excel; but such is the motive. If the provincial writer -could as easily obtain recognition at home he would stay there. - -For my part, I freely admit that “the Golden State can not ‘boast’ -of any native literary celebrities of the first rank,” for I do not -consider the incident of a literary celebrity of the first rank having -been born in one place instead of another a thing to boast of. If -there is an idler and more barren work than the rating of writers -according to merit it is their classification according to birthplace. -A racial classification is interesting because it corresponds to -something in nature, but among authors of the same race—and that -race the restless Americans, who are about as likely to be born in a -railway car as anywhere, and whose first instinct is to get away from -home—this classification is without meaning. If it is ever otherwise -than capitally impudent in the people of a political or geographical -division to be proud of a great writer (as George the Third was of an -abundant harvest) it is least impudent in those of the one in which he -did his worthiest work, most so in those of the one in which he was -born. - - - - - STAGE ILLUSION - - -Such to-day is the condition of the drama that the “scenic artist” -and the carpenter are its hope and its pride. They are the props and -pillars of the theatre, without which the edifice would fall to pieces. -But there are “some of us fellows,” as a Bishop of Lincoln used to say -to his brother prelates, who consider scenery an impertinence and its -painter a creature for whose existence there is no warrant of art nor -justification of taste. - -I am no _laudator temporis acti_, but I submit that in this matter -of the drama the wisdom of the centuries is better than the caprice -of the moment. For some thousands of years, dramatists, actors and -audiences got on very well without recourse to the mechanical devices -that we esteem necessary to the art of stage representation. Æschylus, -Sophocles, Euripides, Shakspeare—what did they know of scenery and -machinery? You may say that the Greeks knew little of painting, so -could have no scenery. They had something better—imagination. Why -did they not use pulleys, and trap-doors, and real water, and live -horses?—they had _them_; and Ben Jonson and Shakspeare could have had -painters enow, God knows. Why, in their time the stage was lighted with -naked and unashamed candles and strewn with rushes, and favored ones of -the audience—“gentlemen of wit and pleasure about town”—occupied seats -upon it! If the action was supposed to be taking place in a street -in Verona did not the play-bill so explain? A word to the wise was -sufficient: the gentlemen of wit and pleasure went to the play to watch -the actor’s face, observe his gestures, critically note his elocution. -They would have resented with their handy hangers an attempt to obtrude -upon their attention the triumphs of the “scenic artist,” the machinist -and the property-man. As for the “groundlings,” they were there by -sufferance only, and might comprehend or not, as it might or might not -please their Maker to work a miracle in their stupid nowls. - -_Now_ it is all for the groundlings; the stage has no longer “patrons,” -and “His Majesty’s Players” are the servants of the masses, to whom -the author’s text must be presented with explanatory notes by those -learned commentators, Messrs. Daub and Toggle—whom may the good devil -besmear with yellows and make mad with a tin moon! - -What! shall I go to the theatre to be pleased with colored canvas, -affrighted with a storm that is half dried peas and t’other half -sheet-iron? Shall I take any part of my evening’s pleasure from the -dirty hands of an untidy anarchist who shakes a blue rag to represent -the Atlantic Ocean, while another sandlot orator navigates a cloth-yard -three-decker across the middle distance? Am I to be interested in the -personal appearance of a centre-table and the adventures of half a -dozen chairs—albeit they are better than the one given me to sit on? - - Shall makers of fine furniture aspire - To scorn my lower needs and feed my higher? - And vile upholsterers be taught to slight - My body’s comfort for my mind’s delight? - -Where is the sense of all these devices for producing an “illusion?” -Illusion, indeed! When you look at art do you wish to persuade yourself -that it is only nature? Take the Laocoön—would it be pleasant or -instructive to forget, for even a moment, that it is a group of -inanimate figures, and think yourself gazing on a living man and two -living children in the folds of two living snakes? When you stand -before a “nativity” by some old master, do you fancy yourself a real -ass at a real manger? Deception is no part of art, for only in its -non-essentials is art a true copy of nature. If it is anything more, -why, then the Shah of Persia was a judicious critic. Shown a picture -of a donkey by Landseer and told that it was worth five hundred -pounds, he contemptuously replied that for five pounds he could buy -the donkey. The man who holds that art should be a certified copy of -nature, and produce an illusion in the mind, has no right to smile at -this anecdote. It is his business in this life not to laugh, but to be -laughed at. - -Seeing that stage illusion is neither desirable nor attainable, the -determined efforts to achieve it that have been making during these -last few decades seem very melancholy indeed. It is as if a dog should -spin himself sick in pursuit of his tail, which he neither can catch -nor could profit by if he caught it. Failure displeases in proportion -to the effort, and it would be judicious to stop a little short of -real water, and live horses, and trains of cars that will work. Nay, -why should we have streets and drawing-rooms (with mantel-clocks and -coal scuttles complete) and castles with battlements? Or if the play -is so vilely constructed as to require them, why must the street -have numbered house-doors, the drawing-room an adjoining library and -conservatory, and the battlements a growth of ivy? Of course no sane -mind would justify poor Boucicault’s wall that sinks to represent the -ascent of the man “climbing it” by standing on the ground and working -his legs, but we are only a trifle less ridiculous when we have any -scenic effects at all. The difference is one of degree, and if we are -to have representations of inanimate objects it is hard to say at what -we should stick. Our intellectual gorge may now rise at the spectacle -of a battered and blood-stained “Nancy” dragging her wrecked carcass -along the stage to escape the club of a “Sykes,” for it is as new as -once were the horrible death-agonies constituting the charm of the -acting of a Croizette; but the line of distinction is arbitrary, and -no one can say how soon we shall expect to see the blood of “Cæsar” -spouting from his wound instead of being content with “Antony’s” rather -graphic description of it. It is of the nature of realism never to stop -till it gets to the bottom. - -Inasmuch as the actor must wear something—a necessity from which the -actress is largely free—he may as well wear the costume appropriate to -his part. But this is about as far as art permits him to go in the way -of “illusion”; another step and he is on the “unsteadfast footing” of -popular caprice and vulgar fashion. Of course if the playwright has -chosen to make a window, a coach, a horse, church spire, or whale one -of his _dramatis personæ_ we must have it in some form, offensive as it -is; the mistake which was his in so constructing the play is ours when -we go to see it. In the old playbooks the “Scene—a Bridge in Venice,” -“Scene—a Cottage in the Black Forest,” “Scene—a Battle Field,” etc., -were not intended as instructions to the manager, but to the spectator. -The author did not expect these things to be shown on the stage, but -imagined in the auditorium. They were mere hints and helps to the -imagination, which, as an artist, it was his business to stimulate -and guide, and the modern playwright, as a fool, decrees it his duty -to discourage and repress. The play should require as few accessories -as possible, and to those actually required the manager should confine -himself. We may grant Shakspeare his open grave in _Hamlet_, but the -impertinence of real earth in it we should resent; while the obtrusion -of adjacent tombs and headstones at large is a capital crime. If -we endure a play in which a man is pitched out of a window we must -perforce endure the window; but the cornice, curtains and tassels; the -three or four similar windows with nobody pitched out of them; the -ancestral portrait on the wall and the suit of armor in the niche; what -have these to do with the matter? We can see them anywhere at any time; -we wish to know how not to see them. They are of the vulgarities. They -distract attention from the actor, and under cover of the diversion he -plays badly. Is it any wonder that he does not care to compete with a -gilt cornice and a rep sofa? - -On the Athenian stage, a faulty gesture, a sin in rhetoric, a false -quantity or accent—these were visited with the dire displeasure of -an audience in whom the art-sense was sweeter than honey and stronger -than a lion; an audience that went to the play to see the play, to -discriminate, compare, mark the conformity of individual practice to -universal principle: in a word, to criticise. They enjoyed that rarest -and ripest of all pleasures, the use of trained imagination. There was -the naked majesty of art, there the severe simplicity of taste. And -there came not the carpenter with his machines, the upholsterer with -his stuffs, nor the painter with blotches of impertinent color, crazing -the eye and grieving the heart. - - - - - THE MATTER OF MANNER - - -I have sometimes fancied that a musical instrument retains among its -capabilities and potentialities something of the character, some hint -of the soul, some waiting echo from the life of each who has played -upon it: that the violin which Paganini had touched was not altogether -the same afterward as before, nor had quite so fine a fibre after some -coarser spirit had stirred its strings. Our language is a less delicate -instrument: it is not susceptible to a debasing contagion; it receives -no permanent and essential impress but from the hand of skill. You may -fill it with false notes, and these will speak discordant when invoked -by a clumsy hand; but when the master plays they are all unheard—silent -in the quickened harmonies of masters who have played before. - -My design is to show in the lucidest way that I can the supreme -importance of words, their domination of thought, their mastery of -character. Had the Scriptures been translated, as literally as now, -into the colloquial speech of the unlearned, and had the originals been -thereafter inaccessible, only direct interposition of the Divine Power -could have saved the whole edifice of Christianity from tumbling to -ruin. - -Max Muller distilled the results of a lifetime of study into two lines: - - No Language without Reason. - No Reason without Language. - -The person with a copious and obedient vocabulary and the will and -power to apply it with precision thinks great thoughts. The mere glib -talker—who may have a meagre vocabulary and no sense of discrimination -in the use of words—is another kind of creature. A nation whose -language is strong and rich and flexible and sweet—such as English was -just before the devil invented dictionaries—has a noble literature -and, compared with contemporary nations barren in speech, a superior -morality. A word is a crystallized thought; good words are precious -possessions, which nevertheless, like gold, may be mischievously used. -The introduction of a bad word, its preservation, the customary misuse -of a good one—these are sins affecting the public welfare. The fight -against faulty diction is a fight against insurgent barbarism—a fight -for high thinking and right living—for art, science, power—in a word, -civilization. A motor without mechanism; an impulse without a medium -of transmission; a vitalizing thought with no means to impart it; a -fertile mind with a barren vocabulary—than these nothing could be more -impotent. Happily they are impossible. They are not even conceivable. - -Conduct is of character, character is of thought, and thought is -unspoken speech. We think in words; we can not think without them. -Shallowness or obscurity of speech means shallowness or obscurity of -thought. Barring a physical infirmity, an erring tongue denotes an -erring brain. When I stumble in my speech I stumble in my thought. -Those who have naturally the richest and most obedient vocabulary -are also the wisest thinkers; there is little worth knowing but what -they have thought. The most brutish savage is he who is most meagrely -equipped with words; fill him with words to the top of his gift and -you would make him as wise as he is able to become. - -The man who can neither write well nor talk well would have us believe -that, like the taciturn parrot of the anecdote, he is “a devil to -think.” It is not so. Though such a man had read the Alexandrian -library he would remain ignorant; though he had sat at the feet of -Plato he would be still unwise. The gift of expression is the measure -of mental capacity; its degree of cultivation is the exponent of -intellectual power. One may choose not to utter one’s mind—that is -another matter; but if he choose he can. He can utter it all. His mind, -not his heart; his thought, not his emotion. And if he do not sometimes -choose to utter he will eventually cease to think. A mind without -utterance is like a lake without an outlet: though fed with mountain -springs and unfailing rivers, its waters do not long keep sweet. - -Human speech is an imperfect instrument—imperfect by reason of its -redundancy, imperfect by reason of its poverty. We have too many words -for our meaning, too many meanings for our words. The effect is so -confusing and embarrassing that the ability to express our thoughts -with force and accuracy is extremely rare. It is not a gift, but a -gift and an accomplishment. It comes not altogether by nature, but is -achieved by hard, technical study. - -In illustration of the poverty of speech take the English word -“literature.” It means the art of writing and it means the things -written—preferably in the former sense by him who has made it a study, -almost universally in the latter by those who know nothing about it. -Indeed, the most of these are unaware that it has another meaning, -because unaware of the existence of the thing which in that sense it -means. Tell them that literature, like painting, sculpture, music and -architecture, is an art—the most difficult of arts—and you must expect -an emphatic dissent. The denial not infrequently comes from persons of -wide reading, even wide writing, for the popular writer commonly utters -his ideas as, if he pursued the vocation for which he is better fitted, -he would dump another kind of rubbish from another kind of cart—pull -out the tailboard and let it go. The immortals have a different method. - -Among the minor trials of one who has a knowledge of the art of -literature is the book of one who has not. It is a light affliction, -for he need not read it. The worthy bungler’s conversation about -the books of others is a sharper disaster, for it can not always -be evaded and must be courteously endured; and, goodness gracious! -how comprehensively he does not know! How eagerly he points out the -bottomless abyss of his ignorance and leaps into it! The _censor -literarum_ is perhaps the most widely distributed species known to -zoology. - -The ignorance of the reading public and the writing public concerning -literary art is the eighth wonder of the world. Even its rudiments -are to these two great classes a thing that is not. From neither the -talk of the one nor the writing of the other would a student from Mars -ever learn, for illustration, that a romance is not a novel; that -poetry is a thing apart from the metrical form in which it is most -acceptable; that an epigram is not a truth tersely stated—is, in fact, -not altogether true; that fable is neither story nor anecdote; that the -speech of an illiterate doing the best he knows how is another thing -than dialect; that prose has its prosody no less exacting than verse. -The ready-made critic and the ready-made writer are two of a kind and -each is good enough for the other. To both, writing is writing, and -that is all there is of it. If we had two words for the two things now -covered by the one word “literature” perhaps the benighted could be -taught to distinguish between, not only the art and the product, but, -eventually, the different kinds of the product itself. As it is, they -are in much the same state of darkness as that of the Southern young -woman before she went North and learned, to her astonishment, that the -term “damned Yankee” was two words—she had never heard either without -the other. - -In literature, as in all art, manner is everything and matter nothing; -I mean that matter, however important, has nothing to do with the _art_ -of literature; that is a thing apart. In literature it makes very -little difference what you say, but a great deal how you say it. It is -precisely this thing called style which determines and fixes the place -of any written discourse; the thoughts may be the most interesting, the -statements the most important, that it is possible to conceive; yet if -they be not cast in the literary mold, the world can not be persuaded -to accept the work as literature. What could be more important and -striking than the matter of Darwin’s books, or Spencer’s? Does anyone -think of Darwin and Spencer as men of letters? Their manner, too, is -admirable for its purpose—to convince. Conviction, though, is not a -literary purpose. What can depose Sterne from literature? Yet who says -less than Sterne, or says it better? - -It is so in painting. One man makes a great painting of a sheepcote; -another, a bad one of Niagara. The difference is not in the subject—in -that the Niagara man has all the advantage; it is in the style. -Art—literary, graphic, or what you will—is not a matter of matter, but -a matter of manner. It is not the What but the How. The master enchants -when writing of a pebble on the beach; the bungler wearies us with a -storm at sea. Let the dullard look to his theme and thought; the artist -sets down what comes. He pickles it sweet with a salt savor of verbal -felicity, and it charms like Apollo’s lute. - - - - - ON READING NEW BOOKS - - -It is hereby confessed too—nay, affirmed—that this our time is as -likely to produce great literary work as any of the ages that have gone -before. There is no reason to suppose that the modern mind is any whit -inferior in creative power to the ancient, albeit the moderns have not, -as the ancients had, “the first rifling of the beauties of nature.” For -our images, our metaphors, our similes and what not we must go a bit -further afield than Homer had to go. We can no longer—at least we no -longer should, though many there be who do—say “as red as blood,” “as -white as snow,” and so forth. Our predecessors harvested that crop and -threshed it out before we had the bad luck to be born. But much that -was closed to them is open to us, for still creation widens to man’s -view. - -No; the _laudatores temporis acti_ are not to be trusted when they -say that the days of great literature are past. At any time a supreme -genius may rise anywhere on the literary horizon and, flaming in the -sky, splendor the world with a new glory. But the readers of new books -need not put on colored spectacles to protect their eyes. It is not -they that will recognize him. They will not be able to distinguish -him from the little luminaries whose advent they are always “hailing” -as the dawn of a new and wonderful day. It is unlikely, indeed, that -he will be recognized at all in his own day for what he is. It may be -that when he “swims into our ken” we shall none of us eye the blue -vault and bless the useful light, but swear that it is a malign and -baleful beam. Nay, worse, he may never be recognized by posterity. -Great work in letters has no inherent quality, no innate vitality, -that will necessarily preserve it long enough to demand judgment from -those qualified by time to consider it without such distractions as -the circumstances and conditions under which it was produced. And only -so can a true judgment be given. It is likely that more great writers -have died and been forever forgotten than have had their fame bruited -about the world. Ah, well, they must take their chances. I, for my -part, am not going to read dozens of the very newest books annually -lest I overlook a genius now and then. Dozens are large numbers when it -is books that one is talking about. Probably not so many worth reading -were written in either half of the Nineteenth Century. - -The reader of new books is in the position of one who, having at hand -a mine of precious metals, easy of working and by his utmost diligence -inexhaustible, suffers it to lie untouched and goes prospecting on the -chance of finding another as good. He may find one, though the odds -are a thousand to one that he will not. If he does, he will find also -that he did not need to be in a hurry about it. Every book that is -worth reading is founded on something permanent in human nature or the -constitution of things, and constructed on principles of art which are -themselves eternal. Whether it is read in one decade or another—even -in one century or another—is of no importance; its value and charm are -unchanging and unchangeable. Reverting to my simile of the mine, a good -book is located on the great mother-lode of human interest; whereas the -work that immediately prospers in the praise of the multitude commonly -taps some “pocket” in the country rock and the accidental deposit is -soon exhausted. - -The world is full of great books in lettered languages. If any one -has lived long enough, and read with sufficient assiduity, to have -possessed his mind of all the literary treasures accessible to him; if -he has mastered all the tongues in which are any masterworks of genius -yet untranslated; if the ages have nothing more to offer him; if he -has availed himself of the utmost advantages that he can derive from -the infallible censorship of time and advice of the posterity which he -calls his ancestors—let him commit himself to the blind guidance of -chance, stand at the tail end of a modern press and devour as much of -its daily output as he can. That will, at least, enable him to shine -in a conversation; and the social _illuminati_ whose achievements in -that way are most admired will themselves assure you that such are the -purpose and advantage of “literary culture”. And of all drawing-room -authorities, he or she is most reverently esteemed who can most readily -and accurately say what dullard wrote the latest and stupidest novel, -but can not say why. - - - - - ALPHABÊTES AND BORDER RUFFIANS - - - I - -It is hoped that Divine Justice may find some suitable affliction -for the malefactors who invent variations upon the letters of the -alphabet of our fathers—our Roman fathers. Within the past thirty -years our current literature has become a spectacle for the gods. -The type-founder, worthy mechanic, has asserted himself with an -overshadowing individuality, defacing with his monstrous creations and -revivals every publication in the land. Everywhere secret, black and -midnight wags are diligently studying the alphabet to see how many of -the letters are susceptible to mutation into something new and strange. -Some of the letters are more tractable than others: the O, for example, -can be made as little as you please and set as far above the line as -desired, with or without a flyspeck in the center or a dash (straight -or curved) below. Why should one think that O looks better when thrown -out of relation to the other letters when Heaven has given him eyes to -see that it does not? - -Then there is the M—the poor M, who for his distinction as the -biggest toad in the alphabetical puddle is subjected to so dreadful -though necessary indignity in typoscript—the wanton barbarity of his -treatment by the type-founders makes one blush for civilization, or -at least wish for it. There are two schools of M-sters; when their -warfare is accomplished we shall know whether that letter is to figure -henceforth as two sides of a triangle or three sides of a square. In -A the ruffians have an easy victim; they can put his cross-bar up or -down at will; it does not matter, so that it is put where it was not. -For it must be understood that all these alterations are made with no -thought of beauty: the sole purpose of the ruffians is to make the -letters, as many as possible of them, different from what they were -before. That is true generally, but not universally: in the titles of -books and weekly newspapers, and on the covers of magazines, there is -frequently an obvious revival, not merely of archaic forms, but of -crude and primitive printing, as if from wooden blocks. Doubtless it -is beautiful, but it does not look so. In our time the reversionaries -have so far prevailed against common sense that in several periodicals -the long-waisted s is restored, and we have a renewal of the scandalous -relations between the c and the t. - -The most fantastic and grotesque of these reversions (happily it has -not yet affected the text of our daily reading) is the restoration of -the ancient form of U, which is now made a V again. This would seem -to be bad enough, but it appears that it has not sated the passion -for change; so the V also has again become a U! What advantage is -got by the transposition those who make it have not condescended to -explain. Altogether the unhappy man who conceives himself obliged to -read the literature of the day—especially the part that shouts and -screams in titles and catalogues, headlines, and so forth—may justly -claim remission of punishment in the next world, so poignant are his -sufferings in this. - - - II - -Coincidently in point of time with these indisposing pranks, came in, -and has remained in, a companion-fad of the artists who illustrate -newspapers, magazines and books. These probably well-meaning but most -undesirable persons, who could be spared by even the most unsparing -critic, are affected with a weakness for borders to pictures. By means -of borders—borders rectangular, borders triangular, borders circular, -borders omniform and nulliform they can put pictures into pictures, -like cards in a loose pack, stick pictures through pictures, and so -confuse, distract and bewilder the attention that it turns its back -upon the display, occupying itself with the noble simplicity and -naturalness of the wish that all artists were at the devil. Nor are -they satisfied with all that: they must make pictures of pictures by -showing an irrelevant background outside their insupportable borders; -by representing their pictures as depending from hooks; nailed upon the -walls; spitted on pins, and variously served right. And still they are -not happy: the picture must, upon occasion, transgress its border—a -mast, a steeple, or a tree thrust through and rejoicing in its escape; -an ocean spilling over and taking to its heels as hard as ever it can -hook it. The taste that accepts this fantastic nonsense is creature -to the taste that supplies it; in an age and country having any sense -of the seriousness of art the taste could not exist long enough to -outlast its victim’s examination on a charge of lunacy. - -No picture should have a border; that has no use, no meaning, and -whatever beauty is given to it the picture pays for through the nose. -It is what may be called a contemporary survival: it stands for the -frame of a detached picture—a picture on a wall. The frame is necessary -for support and protection; but an illustration, like the female of the -period, needs neither protection nor support, and the border would give -none if it were needed. It is an impertinence without a mandate; its -existence is due to unceasing suggestions flowing from the frames into -heads where there is plenty of room. - - - III - -Apropos of illustrations and illustrators, I should like to ask what -is the merit or meaning of that peculiar interpretation of nature -which consists in representing men and women with white clothing -and black faces and hands. I do not say that it is not sufficiently -realistic—that it is too conventional; I only “want to know.” I -should like to know, too, if in illustrating, say, a football match -in Ujiji the gentlemen addicted to that method here would show the -players in black clothing, with white faces and hands? Or in default of -clothing would they be shown white all over? If anybody can endarken -my lightness on this subject I shall be glad to hear from him. I am -groping in a noonday of doubt and plunged in a gulf of white despair. - -Possibly these pictures are called silhouettes—I have heard them called -so. Possibly if they were silhouettes they would be acceptable, for the -genius of a Kanewka may lift the spectator above such considerations -as right and left in the matter of legs and arms. But they are not -silhouettes; the faces and hands are in shadow, the clothing in light. -The figures are like Tennyson’s lotus eaters: “between the sun and -moon”; the former has power upon the skin only, the latter upon the -apparel. The spectator is supposed to be upon the same side as the -moon. That is where the artist is. He draws the figures, the moon draws -him, and I draw a veil over the affecting scene. - - - - - TO TRAIN A WRITER - - -There is a good deal of popular ignorance about writing; it is commonly -thought that good writing comes of a natural gift and that without -the gift the trick can not be turned. This is true of great writing, -but not of good. Any one with good natural intelligence and a fair -education can be taught to write well, as he can be taught to draw -well, or play billiards well, or shoot a rifle well, and so forth; but -to do any of these things greatly is another matter. If one can not do -great work it is worth while to do good work and think it great. - -I have had some small experience in teaching English composition, and -some of my pupils are good enough to permit me to be rather proud of -them. Some I have been able only to encourage, and a few will recall my -efforts to profit them by dissuasion. I should not now think it worth -while to teach a pupil to write merely well, but given one capable of -writing greatly, and five years in which to train him, I should not -permit him to put pen to paper for at least two of them—except to make -notes. Those two years should be given to broadening and strengthening -his mind, teaching him how to think and giving him something to -think about—to sharpening his faculties of observation, dispelling -his illusions and destroying his ideals. That would hurt: he would -sometimes rebel, doubtless, and have to be subdued by a diet of bread -and water and a poem on the return of our heroes from Santiago. - -If I caught him reading a newly published book, save by way of -penance, it would go hard with him. Of our modern education he should -have enough to read the ancients: Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, -Seneca and that lot—custodians of most of what is worth knowing. He -might retain what he could of the higher mathematics if he had been -so prodigal of his time as to acquire any, and might learn enough of -science to make him prefer poetry; but to learn from Euclid that the -three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, yet not to -learn from Epictetus how to be a worthy guest at the table of the gods, -would be accounted a breach of contract. - -But chiefly this fortunate youth with the brilliant future should -learn to take comprehensive views, hold large convictions and make -wide generalizations. He should, for example, forget that he is an -American and remember that he is a Man. He should be neither Christian, -nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshiper. To local -standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the -virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general -expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of -cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose -itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; -art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of -all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life -and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him -a continent should not seem wide, nor a century long. And it would be -needful that he know and have an ever present consciousness that this -is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented -with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with -illusions—frothing mad! - -We learn in suffering what we teach in song—and prose. I should pray -that my young pupil would occasionally go wrong, experiencing the -educational advantages of remorse; that he would dally with some of the -more biting vices. I should be greatly obliged if Fortune would lay -upon him, now and then, a heavy affliction. A bereavement or two, for -example, would be welcome, although I should not care to have a hand -in it. He must have joy, too—O, a measureless exuberance of joy; and -hate, and fear, hope, despair and love—love inexhaustible, a permanent -provision. He must be a sinner and in turn a saint, a hero, a wretch. -Experiences and emotions—these are necessaries of the literary life. To -the great writer they are as indispensable as sun and air to the rose, -or good, fat, edible vapors to toads. When my pupil should have had two -years of this he would be permitted to try his ’prentice hand at a pig -story in words of one syllable. And I should think it very kind and -friendly if Mr. George Sylvester Vierick would consent to be the pig. - - 1899. - - - - - AS TO CARTOONING - - - I - -I wish that the American artists whose lot is cast in the pleasant -domain of caricature would learn something of the charm of moderation -and the strength of restraint. Their “cartoons” yell; one looks at them -with one’s fingers in one’s ears. - -Did you ever observe and consider the dragon in Chinese art? With what -an awful ferocity it is endowed by its creator—the expanded mouth with -its furniture of curling tongue and impossible teeth, its big, fiery -eyes, scaly body, huge claws and spiny back! All the horrible qualities -the artist knows he lavishes upon this pet of his imagination. The -result is an animal which one rather wishes to meet and would not -hesitate to cuff. Unrestricted exaggeration has defeated its own -purpose and made ludicrous what was meant to be terrible. That is, the -artist has lacked the strength of restraint. A true artist could so -represent the common domestic bear, or the snake of the field, as to -smite the spectator with a nameless dread. He could do so by merely -giving to the creature’s eye an expression of malevolence which would -need no assistance from claw, fang or posture. - -The American newspaper cartoonist errs in an infantile way similar -to that of the Chinese; by intemperate exaggeration he fails of his -effect. His men are not men at all, so it is impossible either to -respect or detest them, or to feel toward them any sentiment whatever. -As well try to evoke a feeling for or against a wooden Indian, a -butcher’s-block, or a young lady’s favorite character in fiction. His -deformed and distorted creations are entirely outside the range of -human sympathy, antipathy, or interest. They are not even amusing. They -are disgusting and, as in the case of foul names, the object of the -disgust which they inspire is not the person vilified, but the person -vilifying. - -Perhaps I am not the average reader, but it is a fact that I frequently -read an entire newspaper page of which one of these cartoons is the -most conspicuous object, without once glancing at the picture’s title -or observing what it is all about. I have the same unconscious -reluctance to see it that I have to see anything else offensive. - -I once sat reading a Republican newspaper. The whole upper half of the -page consisted of a cartoon by a well-known artist. It represented -Mr. Bryan, the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, standing on -his head in a crowd (which I think he would do if it would make him -President, and I don’t know that it would not) but I did not then -observe it. The artist himself sat near by, narrowly watching me, which -I did observe. A little while after I had laid down the paper he said -carelessly: “O, by the way, what do you think of my cartoon of Bryan -with his heels in the air?” And—Heaven help me!—I replied that I had -been a week out of town and had not seen the newspapers! - -A peculiarity of American caricature is that few of its “masters” -know how to draw. They are like our great “humorists,” who are nearly -all men of little education and meagre reading. As soon as they have -prospered, got a little polish and some knowledge of books, they cease -to be “humorists.” - -One of the most popular of the “cartoonists” knows so little of anatomy -that in most of his work the human arm is a fourth too short, and -seems to be rapidly dwindling to a pimple; and so little of perspective -that in a certain cartoon one of his figures was leaning indolently -against a column about ten feet from where he stood. - -A fashion has recently come in among the comic artists of getting great -fun out of the lower forms of life. They have discovered and developed -a mine of humor in the beasts and the birds, the reptiles, fishes -and insects. Some of the things they make them say and do are really -amusing. But here is where they all go wrong and spoil their work: they -put upon these creatures some article of human attire—boots, a coat or -a hat. They make them carry umbrellas and walking-sticks. They put a -lightning rod on a bird’s nest, a latch on a squirrel-hole in a tree, -and supply a beehive with a stovepipe. Why? They don’t know why; they -have a vague feeling that incongruity is witty, or that to outfit an -animal with human appurtenances brings it, somehow, closer to one’s -bosom and business. The effect is otherwise. - -When you have drawn your cow with a skirt she has not become a woman, -and is no longer a cow. She is nothing that a sane taste can feel an -interest in. An animal, or any living thing, in its natural state—is -always interesting. Some animals we know to have the sense of humor and -all probably have language; so in making them do and say funny things, -even if their speech has to be translated into ours, there is nothing -unnatural, incongruous or offensive. But a cat in a shirtwaist, a -rabbit with a gun—ah, me! - -Obviously it is futile to say anything to those “dragons of the prime” -who draw the combination map-and-picture—the map whereon cities are -represented by clusters of buildings, each cluster extending half way -to the next. It would be useless to protest that these horrible things -are neither useful as maps nor pleasing as pictures. They are—well, -to put it quite plainly, they sicken. Sometimes the savages who draw -them sketch-in a regiment or so of soldiers—this in “war-maps” of -course—whose height is about five miles each, except that of the -commander, which is ten. And if there is a bit of sea the villain -who draws it will show us a ship two hundred miles long, commonly -sailing up hill or down. It is useless to remonstrate against this -kind of thing. The men guilty of it are little further advanced -intellectually than the worthy cave-dweller who has left us his -masterpieces scratched on rocks and the shoulder blades of victims of -his appetite—the illustrious inventor of the six-legged mammoth and the -feathered pig. - - - II - -When in the course of human events I shall have been duly instated as -head of the art department of an American newspaper, a decent respect -for the principles of my trade will compel me to convene my cartoonists -and utter the hortatory remarks here following: - -“Gentlemen, you will be pleased to understand some of the limitations -of your art, for therein lies the secret of efficiency. To know and -respect one’s limitations, not seeking to transcend them, but ever -to occupy the entire area of activity which they bound—that is to -accomplish all that it is given to man to do. Your limitations are of -two kinds: those inconsiderable ones imposed by nature, and the less -negligible ones for which you will have to thank the tyrant that has -the honor to address you. - -“Your first and highest duty, of course, is to afflict the Eminent -Unworthy. To the service of that high purpose I invite you with -effusion, but shall limit you to a single method—ridicule. You may -not do more than make them absurd. Happily that is the sharpest -affliction that Heaven has given them the sensibility to feel. When one -is conscious of being ridiculous one experiences an incomparable and -immedicable woe. Ridicule is the capital punishment of the unwritten -law. - -“I shall not raise the question of your natural ability to make an -offender hateful, but only say that it is not permitted to you to do -so in this paper. The reason should be obvious: you can not make him -hateful without making a hateful picture, and a paper with hateful -pictures is a hateful paper. Some of you, I am desolated to point out, -have at times sinned so grievously as to make the victim—or attempt -to make him—not only hateful but offensive, not only offensive but -loathsome. Result: hateful, offensive, loathsome cartoons, imparting -their unpleasant character to the paper containing them; for the -contents of a paper are the paper. - -“And, after all, this folly fails of its purpose—does not make its -subject offensive. An eminently unworthy person—a political ‘boss,’ -a ‘king of finance,’ or a ‘gray wolf of the Senate’—is a man of -normal appearance; his face, his figure, his postures, are those of -the ordinary human being. In the attempt to make him offensive the -caricaturist’s art of exaggeration is carried to such an extreme as -to remove the victim from the domain of human interest. The loathing -inspired by the impossible creation is not transferred to the person -so candidly misrepresented; the picture is made offensive, but its -subject is untouched. As well try to hate a faulty triangle, a house -upside down, a vacuum, or an abracadabra. Let there be surcease of so -mischievous work; it is not desired that this paper shall be prosperous -in spite of its artists, but partly because of them. - -“True, to make a man ridiculous you must make a ridiculous picture, -but a ridiculous picture is not displeasing. If well done, with only -the needful, that is to say artistic, exaggeration, it is pleasing. We -like to laugh, but we do not like—pardon me—to retch. The only person -pleased by an offensive cartoon is its author; the only person pained -by a ridiculous one is its victim.” - - 1900. - - - - - THE S. P. W. - - -Will not some Christian gentleman of leisure have the benevolence to -organize The Society for the Protection of Writers? Its work will be -mainly educational; not much permanent good can be done, I fear, by -assassination, though as an auxiliary means, that may be worthy of -consideration. The public must be led to understand, each individual in -his own way, that some part of a writer’s time belongs to himself and -has a certain value to him. If the experience of other writers equally -ill known is the same as mine the sum of our wrongs is something -solemn. Everybody, it would seem, feels at liberty to request a writer -to do whatever the wild and wanton requester may wish to have done—to -criticise (commend) a manuscript; send his photograph, or a copy of his -latest book; write poetry in an album forwarded for the purpose and -already well filled with unearthly sentiments by demons of the pit; -set down a few rules for writing well, and so forth. It is God’s truth -that compliance with one-half of the “requests” made of me would leave -me no time for my meals, and no meals for my time. - -Of course I speak of strangers—persons without the shadow of a claim -to my time and attention, and with very little to those of their -heavenly Father. Indeed, they belong, as a rule, to a class that is -more profited by escaping divine attention than by courting it: nothing -should so fill them with consternation as a glance from the All-seeing -Eye—though some of the finer and freer spirits of their bright band -would think nothing of inviting the Recording Angel to forsake his -accounts and scratch an appropriate sentiment on “the enclosed -headstone.” - -When Mr. Rudyard Kipling once visited Montreal he gave orders at his -hotel that he was not to be disturbed—whereby many worthy persons who -called to “pay their respects” were sadly disappointed. One “prominent -merchant,” a “great admirer,” took the trouble to introduce himself, -and had the infelicitous fate to be informed by Mr. Kipling that he -did not wish any new acquaintances—and sorrow perched upon that -man’s prominent soul. To a club of “literary” folk and “artists” who -“tendered him a reception” he did not deign a reply; and those whose -hope construed his silence as assent were made acquainted with the -taste of their own teeth. In short, Mr. Kipling seems to have acted in -Montreal very much like a modest gentleman desiring to be let alone and -having a gentleman’s fine scorn of vulgarity and intrusion. - -When, I wonder, will Americans—Canadian Americans and United States -Americans—learn that their admiration of a man’s work in letters or -art gives them no right to occupy his time and lengthen the always -intolerably long muster-roll of his acquaintance? One would think that -so wholesome a lesson in manners as Dickens gave us during his first -visit, and later in the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, would -suffice, and that for lack of students he would have no successor in -the Chair of Deportment. But sycophancy, like hope, springs eternal in -the human breast, and, crushed to earth, impudence like truth, will -rise again, inviting a fresh humiliation. Well, as the homely proverb -hath it, there is no great loss without some small gain—albeit the -same usually accrues to the author of the loss. Montreal’s Pen and -Pencil Club having passed through the fire and been purified of its own -respect, is now, by that privation and the affining stress of a common -sorrow, fitted to affiliate with the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, -which also knows the lift of the Kipling superior lip, and how he -kipples. - -Mr. Kipling’s explanation that he did not desire any new acquaintances -goes pretty nearly to the root of the matter. What man of sense -does?—unless he is so ghastly unfortunate as to need them in his -business. A man of brains has commonly a better use for his head than -to make it serve as a rogues’ gallery for an interminable succession -of mental portraits, each of which he must be prepared to outfit with -its appropriate name on demand. One can not, of course, and none but -a fool would wish to, go through life without now and again making -an acquaintance, even a friendship, as circumstances, civility and -character may determine. Even chance may without absolutely uniform -disaster play a part in such matters, though, as a rule, persons in -whose lives accidental meetings entail lasting social relations are -not particularly agreeable to meet. Your man of sense cares to know -those whom he daily meets under such circumstances as would make it -awkward if he did not know them; and he is accessible to all good -souls whose wish to know him is supplemented by the frankness to ask -an introduction and the civility to obtain his assent. It is thus that -he will himself approach those whom he wishes to know, and in some -cases those whom he merely suspects of the wish to know him. As to -that invention of the devil, the purposeless and meaningless “chance -introduction,” it is the hatefulest thing in all the wild welter of -social irritants. As a claim to acquaintance it has about the same -validity as had, in the case of Kipling, the fact that Montreal’s -“prominent merchant” was a “great admirer.” - -If a man, like a red worm, could be multiplied by section he might -perhaps undertake to know all whom the irritating freedom of American -manners permits to be introduced to him, and, if he is a distinguished -writer, all who “greatly admire” him. At least if they were properly -brigaded he might undertake to commit to his multiplied memory the -names or numerals of the several brigades. Even then it should be -understood that failure through preoccupation with his own affairs -should not be counted against him as proof of pride and an evil -disposition. Some allowance should be made, too, for the probability -that a man of letters may be unfitted for prodigious feats of -recollection by the necessity of preserving some part of his time for -use in—well, for example, in letters. As to “receptions,” “banquets,” -and so forth, “tendered” him, and “calls” “paid” him by strangers -not of his profession, unless he is a literary impostor he will not -accept the hospitality, nor, unless he is a social coward, submit to -the intrusion. He knows that beneath these dreary and dispiriting -“attentions” are motives transcending in ugliness a tangle of snakes -under a warm rock. - -There are other reasons why men of letters are not usually hot to make -acquaintances. A good writer is a man of thought, for good writing, -whatever else it may be, is, first of all, clear thinking. However -much or little of his actual opinions he may choose to put into his -work, he necessarily, as a man of thought, has convictions not commonly -entertained by “persons whom one meets”—when one must. He is likely to -be a dissenter from the established order of things—to hold in scant -esteem the institutions, faiths, laws, customs, habits, morals and -manners that are the natural outgrowth and expression of our barbarous -race; the enactments of God’s governing majority, the rogues and fools. -To utter his views in conversation with Philistines and Prudes is to -smite them sick with dismay and fill them topful of resentment and -antagonism; to incite a contention in which the appurtenant stalled ox -itself is imperiled in the bones of it. Yet in making the acquaintance -of even a fairly educated person not a vulgarian and having no outward -and visible signs of an inner disgrace the chances are ten to one that -you are meeting a Philistine and prude by whom natural conduct and -rational convictions are accounted immoral, and with whom conversation -outside the worn ways of commonplace and platitude is impossible. If -it is a woman she will probably insult you, all unconsciously, in a -thousand and fifty ways by savage scruples inherited from a long line -of pithecan ancestresses eared to hear in the rustle of every leaf the -tonguefall of the arboreal Mrs. Grundy. If it is a man there should be -no needless delay in insulting _him_. - -Another imminent peril to him who travels the hard road of letters lies -in the mad desire and iron resolution of his new acquaintances to talk -about his work, with, of course, imperfect knowledge, understanding -and discretion. This if he will not permit he is accounted proud; if -he will, vain. Poor Hawthorne’s experience with the worthy person -who thought it the proper thing to make a graceful reference to his -book, “The Red Letter A,” is typical and the record of that dreadful -encounter comes home to every author’s bosom and business with a -peculiar personal interest. - - - - - PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY AUTHORS - - -If by good or much writing a modest old man have the misfortune to -incur the curiosity of the public regarding his personal appearance, -how shall he gratify it—and gratified it will somehow be—with the least -distress to himself? Every public writer is familiar with the demand, -from editor or publisher, “Please send photograph.” Of course he may -easily decline, but also, alas! editor or publisher may easily decline -the work for embellishment or advertisement of which the photograph -was sought. So what can the poor man do? And what photograph shall he -send—that of yesteryear, or that of a decade or two ago? Concerning -this singularly solemn matter I venture to quote from a letter of one -who conducts an editorium: - -“One sees the printed counterfeit of a dashing young chap whom all know -as the distinguished author of ‘The Bean Pot,’ which, it is true, -appeared twenty years ago. But the portrait is the familiar one always -used by publishers to herald later books by the same author. One day -the author himself calls. You have always thought of him as having a -smooth, high brow topped with a fine cluster of coal-black curls, and -the devil in his eyes. When this wrinkled, bald, and squeaky old man -tells you that he is the author of ‘The Bean Pot’ you suffer a shock. -All your self-restraint is invoked to inhibit contumelious word and -inhospitable act.” - -True, O king, but there is more to the matter. Every writer that -is fore and fit cherishes a natural expectation of being known to -posterity. If that hope is fulfilled he will be known to posterity by -his last portrait. Who knows Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes or -Whitman as other than a venerable ruin? Who has in mind a middle-aged -Hugo, or a young Goethe? It is with an effort that we grasp the fact -that all these excellent gentlemen of letters were not born old. They -were merely indiscreet; they sat for their portraits when they could no -longer stand. By the happy mischance of early death, Byron, Shelley, -Keats and Poe escaped the caricaturing of the years, and can snap -their finger-bones at Age, the merciless cartoonist. - -The portrait of twenty years ago no more faultily represents the old -man as he is than that of yesterday represents him as he was. Either is -false to some period of his life, and he may reasonably enough prefer -that posterity shall know how he looked in his prime, rather than that -his contemporaries shall know how he looked in his decay. It may be -that it was in his prime that he did the characteristic work that begot -the desire to know him. - -With what portrait, then, shall one well stricken in years meet the -contemporary demand? Perhaps it is best, and not unfair, to supply -it with one made in one’s prime, conscientiously and conspicuously -inscribed with its date—and that is what I have usually done myself. -But I grieve to observe that the date is, as a rule, ingeniously -effaced in the reproduction. But what does posterity find that is -peculiarly pleasing in the portrait of a patient in the last stage of -his fatal disorder? - - - - - WIT AND HUMOR - - -If without the faculty of observation one could acquire a thorough -knowledge of literature, the _art_ of literature, one would be -astonished to learn “by report divine” how few professional writers can -distinguish between one kind of writing and another. The difference -between description and narration, that between a thought and a -feeling, between poetry and verse, and so forth—all this is commonly -imperfectly understood, even by most of those who work fairly well by -intuition. - -The ignorance of this sort that is most general is that of the -distinction between wit and humor, albeit a thousand times expounded -by impartial observers having neither. Now, it will be found that, as -a rule, a shoemaker knows calfskin from sole-leather and a black-smith -can tell you wherein forging a clevis differs from shoeing a horse. He -will tell you that it is his business to know such things, so he knows -them. Equally and manifestly it is a writer’s business to know the -difference between one kind of writing and another kind, but to writers -generally that advantage seems to be denied: they deny it to themselves. - -I was once asked by a rather famous author why we laugh at wit. I -replied: “We don’t—at least those of us who understand it do not.” Wit -may make us smile, or make us wince, but laughter—that is the cheaper -price that we pay for an inferior entertainment, namely, humor. There -are persons who will laugh at anything at which they think they are -expected to laugh. Having been taught that anything funny is witty, -these benighted persons naturally think that anything witty is funny. - -Who but a clown would laugh at the maxims of Rochefoucauld, which -are as witty as anything written? Take, for example, this hackneyed -epigram: “There is something in the misfortunes of our friends which -we find not entirely displeasing”—I translate from memory. It is an -indictment of the whole human race; not altogether true and therefore -not altogether dull, with just enough of audacity to startle and just -enough of paradox to charm, profoundly wise, as bleak as steel— a -piece of ideal wit, as admirable as a well cut grave or the headsman’s -precision of stroke, and about as funny. - -Take Rabelais’ saying that an empty stomach has no ears. How pitilessly -it displays the primitive beast alurk in us all and moved to activity -by our elemental disorders, such as the daily stress of hunger! Who -could laugh at the horrible disclosure, yet who forbear to smile -approval of the deftness with which the animal is unjungled? - -In a matter of this kind it is easier to illustrate than to define. -Humor (which is not inconsistent with pathos, so nearly allied are -laughter and tears) is Charles Dickens; wit is Alexander Pope. Humor -is Dogberry; wit is Mercutio. Humor is “Artemus Ward,” “John Phoenix,” -“Josh Billings,” “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Bill” Nye, -“Mark Twain”—their name is legion; for wit we must brave the perils -of the deep: it is “made in France” and hardly bears transportation. -Nearly all Americans are humorous; if any are born witty, Heaven help -them to emigrate! You shall not meet an American and talk with him two -minutes but he will say something humorous; in ten days he will say -nothing witty; and if he did, your own, O most witty of all possible -readers, would be the only ear that would give it recognition. Humor -is tolerant, tender; its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon—and -turns the weapon in the wound. Humor is a sweet wine, wit a dry; we -know which is preferred by the connoisseur. They may be mixed, forming -an acceptable blend. Even Dickens could on rare occasions blend them, -as when he says of some solemn ass that his ears have reached a rumor. - -My conviction is that while wit is a universal tongue (which few, -however, can speak) humor is everywhere a _patois_ not “understanded -of the people” over the province border. The best part of it—its -“essential spirit and uncarnate self,” is indigenous, and will not -flourish in a foreign soil. The humor of one race is in some degree -unintelligible to another race, and even in transit between two -branches of the same race loses something of its flavor. To the -American mind, for example, nothing can be more dreary and dejecting -than an English comic paper; yet there is no reason to doubt that -_Punch_ and _Judy_ and the rest of them have done much to dispel the -gloom of the Englishman’s brumous environment and make him realize his -relationship to Man. - -It may be urged that the great English humorists are as much read in -this country as in their own; that Dickens, for example, has long -“ruled as his demesne” the country which had the unhappiness to kindle -the fires of contempt in him and Rudyard Kipling; that “the excellent -Mr. Twain” has a large following beyond the Atlantic. This is true -enough, but I am convinced that while the American enjoys his Dickens -with sincerity, the gladness of his soul is a tempered emotion compared -with that which riots in the immortal part of John Bull when that -singular instrument feels the touch of the same master. That a jest of -Mark Twain ever got itself all inside the four corners of an English -understanding is a proposition not lightly to be accepted without -hearing counsel. - - 1903. - - - - - WORD CHANGES AND SLANG - - -That respectable words lose caste, becoming the yellow dogs and -very lepers of language, is a familiar fact hospitable to abundant -illustration. One of these words has just fallen from my pen; fifty -or a hundred years from now it will be impossible, probably, for -any writer having a decent regard to the value of words to use the -word “respectable” of anything truly meriting respect. For the past -half-century it has been taking on a new and opprobrious character. -Already the type of the “respectable” man, for example, is the -prosperous, wool-witted Philistine, who complacently interlocks his fat -fingers under the overhang of his stomach, and surveying the world from -the eminence of his own esteem, tries vainly to imagine what it would -be without him. - -The word “respectable” is indubitably doomed: etymology can not save -it, any more than it could save the word “miscreant,” which means by -derivation, as at one time it meant actually, infidel, unbeliever. -In its present abasement we may hear a faint, far whisper of the old, -old days of religious intolerance. It stands in modern speech a verbal -monument to the _odium theologicum_ reposing beneath in the sure and -certain hope of a blessed resurrection. - -A half-century ago the word “awful” was plumped into the mire of -slang, where it has weltered ever since, without actual immersion, but -apparently with no hope of extrication. The writer who would use it -to-day in a serious sense has need to be well assured of his hold upon -the reader’s mood. It may perchance whisk that person away from the -sublime to the ridiculous, with the neat-handed nimbleness of Satan -snatching a soul from the straight and narrow way, to send it spinning -aslant into the red-and-black billows of everlasting damnation! - -There are transformations of a contrary sort—promotions and elevations -of words, as from slang to poetry. Between the extremes of speech which -are the extremes of thought, for speech is thought—between the upper -and the lower deep, the heaven and the earth, is a Jacob’s-ladder which -these winged messengers of mind ascend and descend. - -Grave advocacy of slang is not lacking: Professor Manley, of Harvard, -is afield in defence of it. Some slang, he justly says, is “strong and -poetical.” It is “strong” because graphic and vivid, “poetical” because -metaphorical; for the life and soul of poetry is metaphor. - -Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have -been better told this way: - - The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the - glad hand. - -Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature -might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity -of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that -is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than -avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are -slang. - -Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase “bats in his -belfry,” and would indubitably substitute it for “possessed of a -devil,” the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don’t think the good -man meant to be irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised -Edition. - -Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a -publisher of “rare and curious books,” put out a slang dictionary. -Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus -Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an -authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my -little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick -one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and -suffer) as “slang.” Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the -_Century Dictionary_ thus: “The cant words or jargon used by thieves, -peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally.” - -To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is -no longer the _argot_ of criminals and semi-criminals, “whom one -does not meet,” and whose distance—when they keep it—lends a certain -enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less -worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present -generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority -already quoted: “Colloquial words and phrases which have originated -in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or, -belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given -them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings, -and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant.” - -It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can -choose to utter itself in that kind of speech, yet speech of that -kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use. -Among large classes of our countrymen, it is held in so high esteem -that whole books of it are put upon the market with profit to author -and publisher. One of the most successful of these, reprinted from -many of our leading newspapers, is called, I think, _Fables in -Slang_—containing, by the way, nothing that resembles a fable. This -unspeakable stuff made its author rich, and naturally he “syndicated” -a second series of the same. Another was entitled _Love Sonnets of a -Hoodlum_, and contained not a line of clean English. And it is hardly -an exaggeration to say that in this country the writing of humorous and -satirical verse is a lost art; slang has taken the place of wit; the -jest that smacks not of the slum finds no prosperity in any ear. - -Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its -essential vice is its hideous lack of originality; for until a word -or phrase is common property it is not slang. Wherein, then, is the -sense or humor of repeating it? The dullest dunce in the world may have -an alert and obedient memory for current locutions. For skill in the -use of slang no other mental equipment is required. However apt and -picturesque a particular expression may be, the wit of it is his only -who invented and first used it: in all others its use is forbidden -by the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” A self-respecting writer -would no more parrot a felicitous saying of unknown origin and popular -currency than he would plagiarize a lively sentiment from Catullus or -an epigram from Pope. - - - - - THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS - - -A famous author says that there is some kind of immoral emanation from -the horse, and that it affects the character of every one who has -much to do with the animal. I suppose it is something like that which -suspires from the earth that is thrown out in digging a canal. Perhaps -it is possible to construct a short and shallow waterway without -stirring up enough of this badness to corrupt “all those in authority” -along the line of it, but if the enterprise is of magnitude, like the -Suez or the Panama project, results most disastrous to the morals of -all engaged in the work, excepting those who do it, will certainly -ensue, as we may soon have the happiness to observe. - -A similar phenomenon is seen in the case of Shakspeare, whose -resemblance to a horse and a canal has not, I flatter myself, been -heretofore pointed out. The subtle suspiration from the work of the -great dramatist, however, attacks, not the morals, but the intellect. -It does not prostrate the sense of right and wrong, except in so far as -this is dependent on mental health; it simply lays waste the judgment -by dispersing the faculties, as the shadow of a hawk squanders a flock -of feeding pigeons. Some time we shall perhaps have an English-speaking -critic who will be immune to Shakspearitis, but as yet Heaven has not -seen fit to “raise him up.” And when we have him his inaccessibility to -the infection will do him no good, for we shall indubitably put him to -death. - -The temptation to these reflections is supplied by looking into Mr. -Arlo Bates’s book, _Talks on Writing English_, where I find this -passage quoted from Jeffrey: - - “Everything in him (Shakspeare) is in unmeasured abundance and - unequaled perfection—but everything so balanced and kept in - subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of - another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images and - descriptions are given with such brevity and introduced with - such skill as merely to adorn without loading the sense they - accompany.... All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, - are thrown out together; and, instead of interfering with, support - and recommend each other.” - -This is so fine as to be mostly false. It is true that Shakspeare -throws out his excellences in unmeasured abundance and all together; -and nothing else in this passage is true. His poetical conceptions, -images and descriptions are not “given” at all; they are “turned -loose.” They came from his brain like a swarm of bees. They race out, -as shouting children from a country school. They distract, stun, -confuse. So disorderly an imagination has never itself been imagined. -Shakspeare had no sense of proportion, no care for the strength of -restraint, no art of saying just enough, no art of any kind. He flung -about him his enormous and incalculable wealth of jewels with the -prodigal profusion of a drunken youth mad with the lust of spending. -Only the magnificence and value of the jewels could blind us to the -barbarian method of distribution. They dazzle the mind and confound -all the criteria of the judgment. Small wonder that the incomparable -Voltaire, French, artistic in every fiber and trained in the severe -dignities of Grecian art, called this lawless and irresponsible -spendthrift a drunken savage. - -Of no cultivated Frenchman is the judgment on Shakspeare much milder; -the man’s “art,” his “precision,” his “perfection”— these are -creations of our Teutonic imaginations, heritages of the time when in -the rush-strewn baronial hall our ancestors surfeited themselves on -oxen roasted whole and drank to insensibility out of wooden flagons -holding a gallon each. - -In literature, as in all else—in work, in love, in trade, in every -kind of action or acquisition the Germanic nations are gluttons and -drunkards. We want everything, as we want our food and drink, in savage -profusion. And, by the same token, we rule the world. - - 1903. - - - - - ENGLAND’S LAUREATE - - -Doubtless there are competent critics of poetry in this country, but -it is Mr. Alfred Austin’s luck not to have drawn their attention. Mr. -Austin is not a great poet, but he is a poet. The head and front of his -offending seems to be that he is a lesser poet than his predecessor—his -immediate predecessor—for his austerest critic will hardly affirm his -inferiority to the illustrious Nahum Tate. Nor is Mr. Austin the equal -by much of Mr. Swinburne, who as Poet Laureate was impossible—or at -least highly improbable. If he had been offered the honor Mr. Swinburne -would very likely have knocked off the Prime Minister’s hat and -jumped upon it. He is of a singularly facetious turn of mind, is Mr. -Swinburne, and has to be approached with an orange in each hand. - -Below Swinburne the differences in mental stature among British poets -are inconsiderable; none is much taller than another, though Henley -only could have written the great lines beginning, - - Out of the dark that covers me, - Black as the Pit from pole to pole, - I thank whatever gods may be - For my unconquerable soul— - -and he is not likely to do anything like that again; on that proposition - - You your existence might put to the hazard and turn of a wager. - -I wonder how many of the merry gentlemen who find a pleasure in making -mouths at Mr. Austin for what he does and doesn’t do have ever read, or -reading, have understood, his sonnet on - - - LOVE’S BLINDNESS. - - Now do I know that Love is blind, for I - Can see no beauty on this beauteous earth, - No life, no light, no hopefulness, no mirth, - Pleasure nor purpose, when thou art not nigh. - Thy absence exiles sunshine from the sky, - Seres Spring’s maturity, checks Summer’s birth, - Leaves linnet’s pipe as sad as plover’s cry, - And makes me in abundance find but dearth. - But when thy feet flutter the dark, and thou - With orient eyes dawnest on my distress, - Suddenly sings a bird on every bough, - The heavens expand, the earth grows less and less, - The ground is buoyant as the ether now, - And all looks lovely in thy loveliness. - -The influence of Shakspeare is altogether too apparent in this, and it -has as many faults as merits; but it is admirable work, nevertheless. -To a poet only come such conceptions as “orient eyes” and feet that -“flutter the dark.” - -Here is another sonnet in which the thought, quite as natural, is less -obvious. In some of his best work Mr. Austin runs rather to love (a -great fault, madam) and this is called - - - LOVE’S WISDOM. - - Now on the summit of Love’s topmost peak - Kiss we and part; no further can we go; - And better death than we from high to low - Should dwindle, and decline from strong to weak. - We have found all, there is no more to seek; - All we have proved, no more is there to know; - And Time can only tutor us to eke - Out rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow. - We cannot keep at such a height as this; - For even straining souls like ours inhale - But once in life so rarefied a bliss. - What if we lingered till love’s breath should fail! - Heaven of my earth! one more celestial kiss, - Then down by separate pathways to the vale. - -Will the merry Pikes of the Lower Mississippi littoral and the -gamboling whale-backers of the Duluth hinterland be pleased to say what -is laughable in all this? - -It is not to be denied that Mr. Austin has written a good deal of -“mighty poor stuff,” but I humbly submit that a writer is not to be -judged by his poorest work, but by his best,—as an athlete is rated, -not by the least weight that he has lifted, but by the greatest—not by -his nearest cast of the discus, but by his farthest. Surely a poet, -as well as a race-horse, is entitled to the benefit of his “record -performance.” - - 1903. - - - - - HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING - - -Mr. Hall Caine once took the trouble to explain that he put in three -years of hard work on his novel, _The Christian_, rewriting it many -times and submitting the several and various parts of the work to -experts. One kind of expert he failed to consult—a person having -some knowledge of the English language. Amongst other insupportable -characteristics the very first sentence in the book contains twelve -prepositions and several clashing relatives and concludes with a -sequence of four dactyls! The first sentence is as far as I have gone -into the book, of which I know only that the manuscript was sold for a -considerable fortune and that by many thousands of my fellow-creatures -it is regarded as a distinctly immortaler work than the immortalest -work of the week immediately preceding the date of its publication. Of -Mr. Caine himself I know a little more: for example, that if he were -cast away on an island never before seen by a white man, in a few -months every native would have a brand-new novel and Mr. Caine all the -cowry-shells in the island. - -Following a well-established precedent, he was good enough also -to impart the secret of his success as a writer of “best-selling” -books—novels, of course. The secret is genius. That seems simple enough -and easy enough, but I submit that it was known before. Every author -of a popular novel has been entirely conscious of his genius and the -reviewers have known it as well as he. Nevertheless, it is always -pleasing to find a workman who not only does not quarrel with his -tools, but exhibits them with pride and affection, for we know then -that he is a good workman, or—which means much the same thing—gets a -good price for his product. Mr. Caine gets as good a price as any and -is therefore as fit as any to expound his methods to the curious. - -For it should be said that Mr. Caine does not hold that genius—even -such genius as his—will produce so great work as his without some -assistance from industry; one must take the trouble to write or dictate -the great thoughts that genius inspires. One can not do this without -some degree of application to the homely task. Indeed, Mr. Caine -explains that he writes his novels twice before he permits us to read -them once. One is glad to know that; it shows that, like the country -editor, whose burning office attracted a large and intelligent class of -spectators, he “strives to please.” He took fourteen months to write -_The Eternal City_. That was most commendable, for with him time is -money, but his patient diligence was equaled by that of a man that I -know, who took fourteen months to read it. - -Not only does Mr. Caine work slowly and surely; he advises lesser -mortals to do so. “Write only when in the humor,” he says. This is -good advice to any man, of whatever degree of genius, who is ambitious -to turn out a “best seller,” but better advice would be: Don’t write -at all. There are less fame in that, less profit and less taking of -one’s self seriously; but there must be a feeling of greater security -regarding the next world; for the author of a “best seller” is so -conspicuous a figure in this world that he may be very sure that God -sees him. - -“Some people,” says Mr. Caine, meaning some persons, doubtless—he -writes in Bestsellerese—“say that they can work best when they hurry -most, but it is not the case with me, and I feel that inspiration does -not come to the hurried mind so readily as it does when one is able to -ponder deeply and shape one’s thoughts into some truly perfected form.” - -That is an impressive picture. One can almost see Mr. Caine, sitting -at his table, head in hand, pondering profoundly on his inspiration -and shaping his thoughts into that truly perfected form demanded by -his exacting market. This really great man, with chestnuts in his -lap, arointing the designing witch of spontaneity who would abstract -them, is a spectacle that will linger long in his own memory. It is -one of the most pleasing revelations of self that can be found in the -literature of how to do it. Probably it will have the distinction of -surviving all Mr. Caine’s other work by as much as six months. If done -into bronze by a competent sculptor it may outlast even Mr. Caine -himself, delighting and instructing an entire generation of Indiana -novelists, the best in the world. Of course it is “on the cards” that -he who has given us this solemn picture of himself in the veritable -act of literary parturition may “whack up” something even better. He -is not so very old, and in the years remaining to him (may they be -many and prosperous) he may produce something so incomparably popular -that even the greatest of his previous work will be, in the luminous -French of John Phoenix, “_frappé parfaitment froid!_” Indeed, Mr. -Caine himself discerns that possibility very clearly. He says: “I do -not believe I have yet produced my best work”—best selling work—“by -any means.” It is to be hoped that he has not: yet it is also to be -regretted that he has had the cruelty to add a new terror to death -by saying so. To one engaged in dying, the thought of what he may be -missing by leaving this vale of tears before Mr. Caine has written his -_Eternalest City_ must generate the wrench and stress of an added pang. -It would have been kinder to make that forecast to his publisher only. -Even _in articulo mortis_ (if he have the bad luck to die first) that -gentleman’s tantalizing vision of an unattainable earthly joy will come -with enough of healing in its wings partly to salve the smart: coupled -with the thought of what he will miss will come the consciousness of -what he will not have to pay for it. - - 1905. - - - - - VISIONS OF THE NIGHT - - -I hold the belief that the Gift of Dreams is a valuable literary -endowment—that if by some art not now understood the elusive fancies -that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made to serve we should -have a literature “exceeding fair.” In captivity and domestication -the gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved, as animals bred to -service acquire new capacities and powers. By taming our dreams we -shall double our working hours and our most fruitful labor will be done -in sleep. Even as matters are, Dreamland is a tributary province, as -witness “Kubla Khan.” - -What is a dream? A loose and lawless collocation of memories—a -disorderly succession of matters once present in the waking -consciousness. It is a resurrection of the dead, pell-mell—ancient and -modern, the just and the unjust—springing from their cracked tombs, -each “in his habit as he lived,” pressing forward confusedly to have -an audience of the Master of the Revel, and snatching one another’s -garments as they run. Master? No; he has abdicated his authority and -they have their will of him; his own is dead and does not rise with -the rest. His judgment, too, is gone, and with it the capacity to -be surprised. Pained he may be and pleased, terrified and charmed, -but wonder he can not feel. The monstrous, the preposterous, the -unnatural—these all are simple, right and reasonable. The ludicrous -does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer is your only true -poet; he is “of imagination all compact.” - -Imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that you have -never observed, experienced, heard of or read about. Try to conceive an -animal, for example, without body, head, limbs or tail—a house without -walls or roof. But, when awake, having assistance of will and judgment, -we can somewhat control and direct; we can pick and choose from -memory’s store, taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes -with difficulty, what is not to the purpose; asleep, our fancies -“inherit us.” They come so grouped, so blended and compounded the one -with another, so wrought of one another’s elements, that the whole -seems new; but the old familiar units of conception are there, and none -beside. Waking or sleeping, we get from imagination nothing new but new -adjustments: “the stuff that dreams are made on” has been gathered by -the physical senses and stored in memory, as squirrels hoard nuts. But -one, at least, of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric of the -dream: no one ever dreamed an odor. Sight, hearing, feeling, possibly -taste, are all workers, making provision for our nightly entertainment; -but Sleep is without a nose. It surprises that those keen observers, -the ancient poets, did not so describe the drowsy god, and that their -obedient servants, the ancient sculptors, did not so represent him. -Perhaps these latter worthies, working for posterity, reasoned that -time and mischance would inevitably revise their work in this regard, -conforming it to the facts of nature. - -Who can so relate a dream that it shall seem one? No poet has so light -a touch. As well try to write the music of an Æolian harp. There is a -familiar species of the genus Bore (_Penetrator intolerabilis_) who -having read a story—perhaps by some master of style—is at the pains -elaborately to expound its plot for your edification and delight; then -thinks, good soul, that now you need not read it. “Under substantially -similar circumstances and conditions” (as the interstate commerce law -hath it) I should not be guilty of the like offence; but I purpose -herein to set forth the plots of certain dreams of my own, the -“circumstances and conditions” being, as I conceive, dissimilar in -this, that the dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In -endeavoring to make record of their poorer part I do not indulge the -hope of a higher success. I have no salt to put upon the tail of a -dream’s elusive spirit. - -I was walking at dusk through a great forest of unfamiliar trees. -Whence and whither I did not know. I had a sense of the vast extent -of the wood, a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it. -I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of a forgotten crime -committed, as I vaguely surmised, against the sunrise. Mechanically -and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a -narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came -at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, -and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a -considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in -the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the -center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with -blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All round -the tank, between it and the enclosing forest—a space of perhaps ten -feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble—were dead bodies -of men—a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number -had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly -they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only -recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The -bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank, -radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the -heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its -throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this -unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offence, and did -not affect me; but there was something that filled me with apprehension -and terror—a monstrous pulsation, beating with a slow, inevitable -recurrence. I do not know which of the senses it addressed, or if -it made its way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to -science and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was -maddening. I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and was -a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence. - -Of this dream I have no further recollection. Probably, overcome by a -terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort of an impeded -circulation, I cried out and was awakened by the sound of my own voice. - -The dream whose skeleton I shall now present occurred in my early -youth. I could not have been more than sixteen. I am considerably more -now, yet I recall the incidents as vividly as when the vision was -“of an hour’s age” and I lay cowering beneath the bed-covering and -trembling with terror from the memory. - -I was alone on a boundless level in the night—in my bad dreams I am -always alone and it is usually night. No trees were anywhere in sight, -no habitations of men, no streams nor hills. The earth seemed to be -covered with a short, coarse vegetation that was black and stubbly, as -if the plain had been swept by fire. My way was broken here and there -as I went forward with I know not what purpose by small pools of water -occupying shallow depressions, as if the fire had been succeeded by -rain. These pools were on every side, and kept vanishing and appearing -again, as heavy dark clouds drove athwart those parts of the sky which -they reflected, and passing on disclosed again the steely glitter of -the stars, in whose cold light the waters shone with a black luster. -My course lay toward the west, where low along the horizon burned a -crimson light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of -measureless distance that I have since learned to look for in Doré’s -pictures, where every touch of his hand has laid a portent and a curse. -As I moved I saw outlined against this uncanny background a silhouette -of battlements and towers which, expanding with every mile of my -journey, grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till the -building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed no nearer than -before. Heartless and hopeless I struggled on over the blasted and -forbidding plain, and still the mighty structure grew until I could -no longer compass it with a look, and its towers shut out the stars -directly overhead; then I passed in at an open portal, between columns -of cyclopean masonry whose single stones were larger than my father’s -house. - -Within all was vacancy; everything was coated with the dust of -desertion. A dim light—the lawless light of dreams, sufficient unto -itself—enabled me to pass from corridor to corridor, and from room -to room, every door yielding to my hand. In the rooms it was a long -walk from wall to wall; of no corridor did I ever reach an end. My -footfalls gave out that strange, hollow sound that is never heard but -in abandoned dwellings and tenanted tombs. For hours I wandered in this -awful solitude, conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what -I sought. At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme angle of the -building, I entered a room of the ordinary dimensions, having a single -window. Through this I saw the same crimson light still lying along the -horizon in the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom, -and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking upon the red -menace of its sullen and sinister glare, there came to me the dreadful -truth which years later as an extravagant fancy I endeavored to -express in verse: - - Man is long ages dead in every zone, - The angels all are gone to graves unknown; - The devils, too, are cold enough at last, - And God lies dead before the great white throne! - -The light was powerless to dispel the obscurity of the room, and it -was some time before I discovered in the farthest angle the outlines -of a bed, and approached it with a prescience of ill. I felt that -here somehow the bad business of my adventure was to end with some -horrible climax, yet could not resist the spell that urged me to the -fulfilment. Upon the bed, partly clothed, lay the dead body of a -human being. It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides. -By bending over it, which I did with loathing but no fear, I could -see that it was dreadfully decomposed. The ribs protruded from the -leathern flesh; through the skin of the sunken belly could be seen the -protuberances of the spine. The face was black and shriveled and the -lips, drawn away from the yellow teeth, cursed it with a ghastly grin. -A fulness under the closed lids seemed to indicate that the eyes had -survived the general wreck; and this was true, for as I bent above -them they slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady -regard. Imagine my horror how you can—no words of mine can assist the -conception; the eyes were my own! That vestigial fragment of a vanished -race—that unspeakable thing which neither time nor eternity had wholly -effaced—that hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient -after death of God and the angels, was I! - -There are dreams that repeat themselves. Of this class is one of my -own,[1] which seems sufficiently singular to justify its narration, -though truly I fear the reader will think the realms of sleep are -anything but a happy hunting-ground for my night-wandering soul. This -is not true; the greater number of my incursions into dreamland, -and I suppose those of most others, are attended with the happiest -results. My imagination returns to the body like a bee to the hive, -loaded with spoil which, reason assisting, is transmuted to honey -and stored away in the cells of memory to be a joy forever. But the -dream which I am about to relate has a double character; it is -strangely dreadful in the experience, but the horror it inspires is so -ludicrously disproportionate to the one incident producing it, that in -retrospection the fantasy amuses. - -I am passing through an open glade in a thinly wooded country. Through -the belt of scattered trees that bound the irregular space there are -glimpses of cultivated fields and the homes of strange intelligences. -It must be near daybreak, for the moon, nearly at full, is low in the -west, showing blood-red through the mists with which the landscape is -fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy with dew, and -the whole scene is that of a morning in early summer, glimmering in -the unfamiliar light of a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse, -visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head as I am -about to pass, regards me motionless for a moment, then walks toward -me. It is milk-white, mild of mien and amiable in look. I say to -myself: “This horse is a gentle soul,” and pause to caress it. It keeps -its eyes fixed upon my own, approaches and speaks to me in a human -voice, with human words. This does not surprise, but terrifies, and -instantly I return to this our world. - -The horse always speaks my own tongue, but I never know what it says. I -suppose I vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing -what it has in mind, leaving it, no doubt, as greatly terrified by my -sudden disappearance as I by its manner of accosting me. I would give -value to know the purport of its communication. - -Perhaps some morning I shall understand—and return no more to this our -world. - - -[1] At my suggestion the late Flora Macdonald Shearer put this drama -into sonnet form in her book of poems, _The Legend of Aulus_. - - - - - THE REVIEWER - - - - - EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS - - -In Edwin Markham’s book, _The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems_, -many of the “other poems” are excellent, some are great. If asked -to name the most poetic—not, if you please, the “loftiest” or most -“purposeful”—I think I should choose “The Wharf of Dreams.” I venture -to quote it: - - Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep; - Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light - Flashes a signal fire across the night; - Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep - Their way without a star upon the deep; - And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews, - Come cries of incommunicable news, - While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap— - Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song, - Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong, - Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand, - Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins, - Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns, - And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land. - -Really, one does not every year meet with a finer blending of -imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger -on two better lines in recent work than these: - - And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews, - Come cries of incommunicable news. - -The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical -thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and -indocible to the meaning of it. - -Mr. Markham has said of Poetry—and said greatly: - - She comes like the hush and beauty of the night, - And sees too deep for laughter; - Her touch is a vibration and a light - From worlds before and after. - -But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of -music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of -winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise -of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she -“speaks a various language.” Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he -seemed to be, with interpreting her fluting and warbling and “sweet -jargoning,” learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones -of the temple like the bass of a great organ. - -In his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” Keats has supplied the greatest—almost -the only truly great instance of a genuine poetic inspiration derived -from art instead of nature. In his poems on pictures Mr. Markham shows -an increasingly desperate determination to achieve success, coupled -with a lessening ability to merit it. It is all very melancholy, the -perversion of this man’s high powers to the service of a foolish dream -by artificial and impossible means. Each effort is more ineffectual -than the one that went before. Unless he can be persuaded to desist—to -cease interpreting art and again interpret nature, and turn also from -the murmurs of “Labor” to the music of the spheres—the “surge and -thunder” of the universe—the end of his good literary repute is in -sight. He knows—does he know?—the bitter truth which he might have -learned otherwise than by experience: that the plaudits of “industrial -discontent,” even when strengthened by scholars’ commendations of a few -great lines in the poem that evoked it, are not fame. He should know, -and if he live long will know, that when one begins to be a “labor -leader” one ceases to be a poet. - -In saying to Mr. Markham, “Thou ailest here and here,” Mrs. Atherton -has shown herself better at diagnosis than he is himself in telling -us what is the matter with the rich. “Why,” she asks him, “waste a -beautiful gift in groveling for popularity with the mob?... Striving to -please the common mind has a fatal commonizing effect on the writing -faculty.” It is even so—nothing truer could be said, and Mr. Markham -is the best proof of its truth. His early work, when he was known to -only a small circle of admirers, was so good that I predicted for -him the foremost place among contemporaneous American poets. He sang -because he “could not choose but sing,” and his singing grew greater -and greater. Every year he took wider outlooks from “the peaks of -song”—had already got well above the fools’ paradise of flowers and -song-birds and bees and women and had invaded the “thrilling region” -of the cliff, the eagle and the cloud, whence one looks down upon man -and out upon the world. Then he had the mischance to publish “The Man -with the Hoe,” a poem with some noble lines, but an ignoble poem. In -the first place, it is, in structure, stiff, inelastic, monotonous. One -line is very like another. The cæsural pauses fall almost uniformly in -the same places; the full stops always at the finals. Comparison of the -versification with Milton’s blank will reveal the difference of method -in all its significance. It is a difference analogous to that between -painting on ivory and painting on canvas—between the dead, flat tints -of the one and the lively, changing ones due to inequalities of surface -in the other. If it seem a little exacting to compare Mr. Markham’s -blank with that of the only poet who has ever mastered that medium in -English, I can only say that the noble simplicity and elevation of Mr. -Markham’s work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any -standard lower than the highest that we have. - -My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought -that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry -conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the -most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated -composition has the right to be called great if the message that it -delivers is neither true nor just. All poets, even the little ones, -are feelers, for poetry is emotional; but all the great poets are -thinkers as well. Their sympathies are as broad as the race, but they -do not echo the peasant’s philosophies of the workshop and the field. -In Mr. Markham’s poem the thought is that of the labor union—even to -the workworn threat of rising against the wicked well-to-do and taking -it out of their hides. - - Who made him dead to rapture and despair, - A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, - Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? - Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? - Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? - Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? - -One is somehow reminded by these lines of Coleridge’s questions in the -Chamouni hymn, and one is tempted to answer them the same way: God. -“The Man with the Hoe” is not a product of the “masters, lords and -rulers in all lands”: they are not, and no class of men is, accountable -for him, his limitations and his woes, which are not of those “that -kings or laws can cause or cure.” The “masters, lords and rulers” are -as helpless “in the fell clutch of circumstance” as he—which Mr. -Markham would be speedily made to understand if appointed Dictator. The -notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the -great is “natural,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a -literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish. It will not -carry a poem of whatever excellence through two generations. That a man -of Mr. Markham’s splendid endowments should be chained to the body of -this literary death is no less than a public calamity. - -For his better work in poetry Mr. Markham merits all the praise that -he has received for “The Man with the Hoe,” and more. It is not likely -that he is now under any illusion in the matter. He probably knows the -real nature of his sudden flare of “popularity”; knows that to-morrow -it will be “one with Nineveh and Tyre”; knows that its only service -to him is to arrest attention of competent critics and scholars who -would otherwise have overlooked him for a time. The “plaudits of the -multitude” can not long be held by the poet, and are not worth holding. -The multitude knows nothing of poetry and does not read it. The -multitude will applaud you to-day, calumniate you to-morrow and thwack -you athwart the mazzard the day after. He who builds upon the sea-sand -of its favor holds possession by a precarious tenure; the wind veers -and the wave - - Lolls out his large tongue— - Licks the whole labor flat. - -If the great have left the humble so wise that the philosophies of the -factory and the plow-tail are true; if the sentiments and the taste -of the mob are so just and elevated that its judgment of poetry is -infallible and its approval a precious possession; if “the masses” have -more than “a thin veneering of civilization,” and are not in peace -as fickle as the weather and in anger as cruel as the sea; if these -victims of an absolutely universal oppression “in _all_ lands” are -deep, discriminating, artistic, liberal, magnanimous—in brief, wise -and good—it is difficult to see what they have to complain about. Mr. -Markham, at least, is forbidden to weep for them, for he is a lover -of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. These taught, and taught -truly—one from the throne of an empire, one writing at a gold table, -and one in the intervals of service as a slave—the supreme value of -wisdom and goodness, the vanity of power and wealth, the triviality -of privation, discomfort and pain. Mr. Markham is a disciple of Jesus -Christ, who from the waysides and the fields taught that poverty is -not only a duty, but indispensable to salvation. So my _argumentum ad -hominem_ runs thus: The objects of our poet’s fierce invective and -awful threats have suffered his _protégés_ to remain rather better off -than they are themselves—have appropriated and monopolized only what -is not worth having. In view of this mitigating circumstance I feel -justified in demanding in their behalf a lighter sentence. Let the -portentous effigy of the French Revolution be forbidden to make faces -at them. - -I know of few literary phenomena more grotesque than some of those -growing out of “The Man with the Hoe”—that sudden popularity being -itself a thing which “goes neare to be fonny.” Mr. Markham, whom for -many years those of us who modestly think ourselves _illuminati_ -considered a great poet whose greatness full surely was a-ripening, -wrote many things far and away superior to “The Man,” but these -brought him recognition from the judicious only, with which we -would all have sworn that he was content. All at once he published a -poem which, despite some of its splendid lines, is neither true in -sentiment nor admirable in form—which is, in fact, addressed to peasant -understandings and soured hearts. Instantly follow a blaze and thunder -of notoriety, seen and heard over the entire continent; and even the -coasts of Europe are “telling of the sound.” Straightway before the -astonished vision of his friends the author stands transfigured! The -charming poet has become a demagogue, a “labor leader” spreading that -gospel of hate known as “industrial brotherhood,” a “walking delegate” -diligently inciting a strike against God and clamoring for repeal -of the laws of nature. Saddest of all, we find him conscientiously -promoting his own vogue. He personally appears at meetings of cranks -and incapables convened to shriek against the creed of law and -order; speaks at meetings of sycophants eager to shine by his light; -introduces lecturers to meetings of ninnies and femininnies convened to -glorify themselves. When he is not waving the red flag of discontent -and beating the big drum of revolution I presume he is resting—perched, -St.-Simeon-Styliteswise, atop a lofty capital I, erected in the market -place, diligently and rapturously contemplating his new identity. All -of which is very sad to those of us who find it difficult to unlove him. - -The trouble with Mr. Markham is that he has formed the habit of -thinking of mankind as divided on the property line—as comprising only -two classes, the rich and the poor. When a man has acquired that habit -he is lost to sense and righteousness. Assassins sometimes reform, -and with increasing education thieves renounce the error of theft -to embrace the evangel of embezzlement; but a demagogue never gets -again into shape unless he becomes wealthy. I hope Mr. Markham’s fame -will so promote his pecuniary interest that it will convert him from -the conviction that his birth was significantly coincident in point -of time with the Second Advent. Only one thing is more disagreeable -than a man with a mission, namely a woman with a mission, and the -superior objectionableness of the latter is largely due to her trick of -inspiring the former. - -Mr. Markham seems now to look upon himself as the savior of society; -to believe with entire sincerity that in his light and leading mankind -can be guided out of the wilderness of Self into the promised land -of Altruria; that he can alter the immemorial conditions of human -existence; that a new Heaven and a new Earth can be created by the -power of his song. Most melancholy of all, the song has lost its power -and its charm. Since he became the Laureate of Demagogy he has written -little that is poetry: in the smug prosperity that he reviles in -others, his great gift “shrinks to its second cause and is no more.” -That in the great white light of inevitable disillusion he will recover -and repossess it, giving us again the flowers and fruits of a noble -imagination in which the dream of an impossible and discreditable -hegemony has no part, I should be sorry to disbelieve. - - 1899. - - - - - “THE KREUTZER SONATA” - - - I - -Nothing in this book directly discloses the author’s views of the -marriage relation. The horrible story of Posdnyschew’s matrimonial -experience—an experience which, barring its tragic finale, he affirms -not to be an individual but a general one—is related by himself. There -is no more in it to show directly what Tolstoi thinks of the matters in -hand than there is in a play to show what the playwright thought. We -are always citing the authority of Shakspeare by quotations from his -plays—in which every sentiment is obviously conceived with a view to -its fitness to the character of the imaginary person who utters it, and -supplies no clew to the author’s convictions. - -In _The Kreutzer Sonata_, however, the case is somewhat different. -Whereas Shakspeare had in view an artistic (and commercial) result, -Tolstoi’s intention is clearly moral: his aim is not entertainment, -but instruction. To that end he foregoes the advantage of those -literary effects which he so well knows how to produce, confining his -exceptional powers to bald narrative, overlaid with disquisitions -deriving their only vitality from the moral purpose everywhere visible. - -A man marries a woman. They quarrel of course; their life is of -course wretched beyond the power of words to express. Jealousy -naturally ensuing, the man murders the woman. That is the “plot,” -and it is without embellishment. Its amplification is accomplished -by “preaching”; its episodes are sermons on subjects not closely -related to the main current of thought. Clearly, the aim of a book so -constructed, even by a skilful literary artist, is not an artistic aim. -Tolstoi desires it to be thought that he entertains the convictions -uttered by the lips of Posdnyschew. He has, indeed, distinctly avowed -them elsewhere than in this book. Like other convictions, they must -stand or fall according to the stability of their foundation upon the -rock of truth; but the fact that they are held by a man of so gigantic -powers as Tolstoi gives them an interest and importance which the -world, strange to say, has been quick to recognize. - -Some of these convictions are peculiarly Tolstoi’s own; others he -holds in common with all men and women gifted with that rarest of -intellectual equipments, the faculty of observation, and blessed with -opportunity for its use. Anybody can see, but observation is another -thing. It is something more than discernment, yet may be something -less than accurate understanding of the thing discerned. Such as it -is, Tolstoi has it in the highest degree. Nothing escapes him: his -penetration is astonishing: he searches the very soul of things, -making record of his discoveries with a pitiless frankness which to -feebler understandings is brutal and terrifying. To him nothing is a -mere phenomenon; everything is a phenomenon _plus_ a meaning connected -with a group of meanings. The meanings he may, and in my poor judgment -commonly does, misread, but the phenomenon, the naked fact, he will -see. Nothing can hide it from him nor make it appear to him better -than it is. It is this terrible power of discernment, with this -unsparing illumination compelling the reluctant attention of others, -which environs him with animosities and implacable resentments. His -is the Mont Blanc of minds; about the base of his conspicuous, cold -intelligence the Arve and Arvieron of ignorance and optimism rave -ceaselessly. It is of the nature of a dunce to confound exposure with -complicity. Point out to him the hatefulness of that which he has been -accustomed to admire, and nothing shall thenceforward convince him -that you have not had a guilty hand in making it hateful. Tolstoi, -in intellect a giant and in heart a child, a man of blameless life, -and spotless character, devout, righteous, spectacularly humble and -aggressively humane, has had the distinction to be the most widely -and sincerely detested man of two continents. He has had the courage -to utter a truth of so supreme importance that one-half the civilized -world has for centuries been engaged in a successful conspiracy to -conceal it from the other half—the truth that the modern experiment of -monogamic marriage by the dominant tribes of Europe and America is a -dismal failure. He is not the first by many who has testified to that -effect, but he is the first in our time whose testimony has arrested so -wide and general attention—a result that is to be attributed partly to -his tremendous reputation and partly to his method of giving witness. -He does not in this book deal in argument, is no controversialist. He -says the thing that is in him to say and we can take it or leave it. - -_The Kreutzer Sonata_ is not an obscene nor even an indelicate -book: the mind that finds it so is an indelicate, an obscene mind. -It is not, according to our popular notions, “a book for young -girls.” Nevertheless, it is most desirable that young girls should -know—preferably through their parents who can speak with authority of -experience—the truth which it enforces: namely, that marriage, like -wealth, offers no hope of lasting happiness. Despite the implication -that “they lived happily ever after,” it is not for nothing that the -conventional love story ends with the chime of wedding bells. As the -Genius vanished when Mirza asked him what lay under the cloud beyond -the rock of adamant, so the story teller prudently forestalls further -investigation by taking himself off. He has an innate consciousness -that the course of true love whose troubled current he has been tracing -begins at marriage to assume something of the character of a raging -torrent. - -Tolstoi strikes hard: not one man nor woman a year married but -must wince beneath his blows. They are all members of a dishonest -conspiracy. They conceal their wounds and swear that all is right -and well with them. They give their Hell a good character, but in -their secret souls they chafe and groan under the weight and heat -of their chains. They come out from among their corruption and dead -men’s bones only to give the sepulchre another coating of whitewash -and call attention to its manifold advantages as a dwelling. They are -like the members of some “ancient and honorable order,” who gravely -repeat to others falsehoods by which they were themselves cheated into -membership. The minatory oath alone is lacking, its binding restraint -supplied by the cowardice that dares not brave the resentment of -co-conspirators and the fury of their dupes. - -No human institution is perfect, nor nearly perfect. None comes within -a world’s width of accomplishing the purpose for which it was devised, -and all in time become so perverted as to serve a contrary one. But of -all institutions, marriage as we have it here, and as they evidently -have it in Russia, most lamentably falls short of its design. Nay, it -is the one of them which is become most monstrously wrenched awry to -the service of evil. To have observed this—to have had the intrepidity -to affirm it in a world infested with fools and malevolents who can -not understand how anything can be known except by the feeble and -misleading light of personal experience—that is much. It marks Tolstoi -in a signal way as one eminent above the cloud-region, with a mental -and spiritual outlook unaffected by the ground-reek of darkened counsel -and invulnerable to the slings and arrows of defamation. Nevertheless, -while admiring his superb courage and attesting the clarity of his -vision, I think he imperfectly discerns the underlying causes of the -phenomena that he reports. - -Schopenhauer explains the shamefacedness of lovers, their tendency to -withdraw into nooks and corners to do their wooing, by the circumstance -that they plan a crime—they conspire to bring a human soul into a world -of woe. Tolstoi takes something of the same ground as to the nature -of their offence. Marriage he thinks a sin, and being a religionist -regards the resulting and inevitable wretchedness as its appointed -punishment. - -“Little did I think of her physical and intellectual life,” says -Posdnyschew, in explanation of conjugal antagonism. “I could not -understand whence sprang our mutual hostility, but how clearly I -see now! This hostility was nothing but the protest of human nature -against the beast that threatened to devour it. I could not understand -this hatred. And how could it have been different? This hostility was -nothing else than the mutual hatred of two accessories in a crime—that -of instigation, that of accomplishment.” - -Marriage being a sin, it follows that celibacy is a virtue and a duty. -Tolstoi has the courage of his convictions in this as in other things. -He is too sharp not to see where this leads him and too honest to stop -short of its logical conclusion. Here he is truly magnificent! He -perceives that his ideal, if attained, would be annihilation of the -race. That, as he has elsewhere in effect pointed out, is no affair -of his. He is not concerned for the perpetuity of the race, but for -its happiness through freedom from the lusts of the flesh. What is it -to him if the god whom, oddly enough, he worships has done his work -so badly that his creatures can not be at the same time chaste, happy -and alive? Every one to his business—God as creator and, if he please, -preserver; Tolstoi as reformer. - -For his views on the duty of celibacy, it is only fair to say, Tolstoi -goes directly to the teaching of Jesus Christ, with what accuracy of -interpretation, not being skilled in theology I am unwilling to say. - -From his scorn of physicians it may be inferred that our author is -imperfectly learned in their useful art, and therefore unfamiliar with -whatever physiological side the question of celibacy may have. It is -perhaps sufficient to say that in the present state of our knowledge -the advantages of a life ordered after the Tolstoian philosophy seem -rather spiritual than physical. Doubtless “they didn’t know everything -down in Judee,” but St. Paul appears to have had a glimmering sense of -this fact, if it is a fact. - -To attribute the miseries which are inseparable from marriage as the -modern Caucasian has the heroism to maintain it to any single and -simple cause is most unphilosophical; our civilization is altogether -too complex to admit of any such cheap and easy method. Doubtless there -are many factors in the problem; a few, however, seem sufficiently -obvious to any mind which, having an historical outlook wider than its -immediate environment in time and space, with - - extensive view - Surveys mankind from China to Peru. - -The monogamous marriage ignores, for example, the truth that Man is -a polygamous animal. Of all the men and women who have been born -into this world, only one in many has ever even so much as heard of -any other system than polygamy. To suppose that within a few brief -centuries monogamy has been by law and by talking so firmly established -as effectually to have stayed the momentum of the original instinct -is to hold that the day of miracles is not only not past, but has -really only recently arrived. It implies, too, and entails, a blank -blindness to the most patent facts of easy observation. With admirable -gravity the modern Caucasian has legislated himself into theoretical -monogamy, but he has, as yet, not effected a repeal of the laws of -nature, and has in truth shown very little disposition to disregard -them and observe his own. The men of our time and race are in heart and -life about as polygamous as their good ancestors were before them, and -everybody knows it who knows anything worth knowing. But not she to -whom the knowledge would have the greatest practical value; the person -whom all the powers of modern society seem in league to cheat; the -young girl. - -Another cause of the wretchedness of the married state—but of this -Tolstoi seems inadequately conscious—is that marriage confers rights -deemed incalculably precious which there is no means whatever of -confirming and enforcing. The consciousness that these rights are held -by the precarious tenure of a “vow” which never had, to one of the -parties, much more than a ceremonial significance, and a good faith -liable, in the other, to suspension by resentment and the vicissitudes -of vanity and caprice; the knowledge that these rights are exposed to -secret invasion invincible to the most searching inquiry; the savage -superstition that their invasion “dishonors” the one to whom it is most -hateful, and who of all persons in the world is least an accomplice—all -this begets an apprehension which grows to distrust, and from distrust -to madness. The apprehension is natural because reasonable: its -successive stages of development are what you will, but the culmination -is disaster and the wreck of peace. - -Of the sombre phenomena of the marriage relation observable by men like -Tolstoi, with eyes in their heads, brains behind the eyes and not too -much scruple in selecting points of view outside the obscurity and -confusion of a personal experience, a hundred additional explanations -might be adduced, all more valid, in my judgment, than that to which he -pins his too ready faith; but those noted seem sufficient. With regard -to any matter touching less nearly the unreasoning sensibilities of the -human heart, they would, I think, be deemed more than sufficient. - -What, then—rejecting Tolstoi’s prescription—is the remedy? In view of -the failure of our experiment should we revert to first principles, -adopting polygamy with such modifications as would better adapt it to -the altered situation? Ought we to try free love, requiring the state -to keep off its clumsy hands and let men and women as individuals -manage this affair, as they do their religions, their friendships and -their diet? - -For my part I know of no remedy, nor do I believe that one can be -formulated. It is of the nature of the more gigantic evils to be -irremediable—a truth against which poor humanity instinctively revolts, -entailing the additional afflictions of augmented nonsense and wasted -endeavor. Nevertheless something may be done in mitigation. The -marriage relation that we have we shall probably continue to have, -and its Dead Sea fruits will grow no riper and sweeter with time. But -the lie that describes them as luscious and satisfying is needless. -Let the young be taught, not celibacy, but fortitude. Point out to -them the exact nature of the fool’s paradise into which they will -pretty certainly enter and perhaps ought to enter. Teach them that the -purpose of marriage is whatever the teacher may conceive it to be, but -_not_ happiness. Mercifully reduce the terrible disproportion between -expectation and result. In so far as _The Kreutzer Sonata_ accomplishes -this end, in so far as it teaches this lesson, it is a good book. - - - II - -Tolstoi is a literary giant. He has a “giant’s strength,” and has -unfortunately learned to “use it like a giant”—which, I take it, -means not necessarily with conscious cruelty, but with stupidity. -Excepting when he confines himself to pure romance, and to creation -of works which, after the manner of Dr. Holmes, may be described as -medicated fable—the man seems to write with the very faintest possible -consciousness of anything good or even passably decent, in human -nature. His characters are moved by motives which are redeemed from -monstrous baseness only by being pettily base. In _War and Peace_, for -example,—a book so crowded with characters, historical and imaginary, -that the author himself can not carry them in his memory without -dropping them all along his trail—there is but one person who is not -either a small rascal or a great fool or both. Such a discreditable -multitude of unpleasant persons no one but their maker—in whose image -they are not made—ever collected between the covers of a single book. -From Napoleon down to the ultimate mujik they go through life with -heads full of confusion, hearts distended with selfishness and mouths -running over with lies. If Tolstoi wrote as a satirist, with obvious -cynicism, all this would be easily enough understood; but nothing, -evidently, is further from his intention; he is essentially a preacher -and honestly believes that his powerful caricatures are portraits from -life; or rather—for that we may admit—that the total impression derived -from a comprehensive view of them is a true picture of human character, -charged in its every shadow (there are no lights) with instruction -and edification. I can not say how it goes with others, but all that -is left to me by this hideous “march past” of detestables; this -sombre tableau of the intellectually dead; this fortuitous concourse -of a random rascalry unlawfully begotten of an exuberant fancy and a -pitiless observation—“all of it all” that remains with me is a taste in -the mouth which I can only describe as pallid. - -In his personal character Tolstoi seems to be the only living -Christian, in the sense in which Christ was a Christian—whatever credit -may inhere in that—of whom we have any account; but in judging his -books we have nothing to do with that. He has a superb imagination -and must be master of a matchless style, for we get glimpses of it, -even through the translations of men who are probably familiar enough -with Russian and certainly altogether too familiar with English. The -trouble with him is, as Mr. Matthew Arnold said of Byron, he doesn’t -know enough. He sees everything, but he has not freed his mind from the -captivating absurdity, so dominant in the last generation, that human -events occur without human agency, individual will counting for no more -in the ordering of affairs than does a floating chip in determining -the course of the river. The commander of an army is commanded by -his men. Napoleon was pushed by his soldiers hither and thither all -over Europe; they by some blind, occult impulse which Tolstoi can -not understand. He goes so far as to affirm that an army takes one -route instead of another by silent consent and understanding among -its widely separated fractions; infantinely unaware that not one of -them could move a mile without a dozen sets of detailed instructions -to commanders, quartermasters, chiefs of ordnance, commissaries of -subsistence, engineers and so forth. Tolstoi has entered the camp of -History with a flag of truce and been blindfolded at the outpost. - -When Tolstoi trusts to his imagination and doesn’t need to know -anything, he is inaccessible to censure. _The Cossacks_, one of his -earlier works, is a prodigiously clever novel. About a half of the -book, as I remember it, concerns itself with the killing of a single -Circassian by a single Cossack. The shadow of that event is over it -all, ominous, portentous; and I know of nothing finer nor more dramatic -in its way than the narrative of the death of the dead man’s avengers, -knee to knee among the rain-pools of the steppe, chanting through -their beards their last fierce defiance. What to this was the slaughter -at Austerlitz, the conflagration at Moscow, flinging its black shadows -over half a world, if we have not Hugo’s eyes to see them through? Only -the gods look large upon Olympus. - -But do me the favor to compare Tolstoi at his worst with other popular -writers at their best. It is eagle and hens. It is sun and tallow -candles. From the heights where he sits conspicuous, they are visible -as black beetles. Nay, they are slugs; their brilliant work is a shine -of slime which dulls behind them even as they creep. When one of these -godlets dies the first man to pass his grave will say: “Why has he no -monument?”—the second: “What! a monument?”—the third: “Who the devil -was he?” - - 1890. - - - - - EMMA FRANCES DAWSON - - -In nearly all of Miss Dawson’s work that I have seen is an elusive -something defying analysis, even description—something that is not in -the words. I do not know how she gets it where it is; I never could -either surprise her secret by swift strokes of attention, come upon -it by patient still-hunting, nor in any way get at the trick of it. -I can name it only in metaphor as a light behind the words; a light -like that of Poe’s “red litten eves”; a light such as falls at sunset -upon desolate marshes, tingeing the plumage of the tall heron and -prophesying the joyless laugh of the loon. That selfsame light shines -somewhere through and under Doré’s long parallel cloud-bands along his -horizons, and I have seen it, with an added bleakness, backgrounding -the tall rood in the Lone Mountain cemetery of San Francisco. I dare -say it is all very easy—to Miss Dawson: she simply writes and some -“remote, unfriended, melancholy” ancestor stands by to “do the rest.” - -The publication of Miss Dawson’s _An Itinerant House and Other Stories_ -is an event, doubtless, which does not seem at present—at least not -to that cave-bat, “the general reader”—to cut much of a figure, but I -shall miss my guess if it do not hold attention when Father Time has -much that the world admires snugly tucked away in his wallet—“alms -for oblivion.” This is a guess only: I am not a believer in the -doctrine that good literary work has some inherent quality compelling -recognition and conferring vitality. Good literary work, like anything -else, endures if the conditions favor, perishes if they do not; so my -guess, upon examination, dwindles to a hope compounded of rather more -desire than expectation. - -Miss Dawson’s book is not to be judged as other books. It will help -the reader to a just appreciation of this wonderful woman’s work -in letters if he understand beforehand that the world she sees is -not the world we see; that her men and women are as unearthly as -their environment, making no demands whatever on our sympathies, our -affections, our admiration. Indeed, she cares nothing for them herself, -putting an end to their strange, unhuman existence when done with them -as indifferently as a tired player removes the chessmen from board to -box. This, for example, is how she disposes of a few that have become -superfluous: - -“Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted Cape Cod woman, a scold -and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and -unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year Anson was found -dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a -suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes and the rest were scattered -on the four winds.” - -But when Miss Dawson’s narrative flows with a loitering current you may -commonly hear the sound of slow music and get glimpses of a darkened -stage. - -These stories have all a good deal of the supernatural and very little -of the natural. The lover of “realism” (who is sometimes pleased -to call himself a “veritist”) may with great profit diligently let -them alone; as may also the mere idler, who reads with a delinquent -advertence, to pass the time. Miss Dawson is too true an artist to -write for a slack attention: every page of her book is rich with -significances underlying the narrative like gold in the bed of a -stream. And this is especially true of the poems. - -Those poems, by the way—how came they there? Why is there a poet in -every story, whose verses have nothing to do with the action of the -piece, though always in harmony with its spirit? I think I know the -secret of this irrelevant feature of the work, and a pathetic one it -is: Miss Dawson puts her poetry into her prose because she can not get -it published otherwise—the more shame to our schools and public. Not -all her verse is as good as the prose that carries it. Some of it is -ungrammatical, and two whole pages of one piece have only the finals -“ain” and “aining”—an insupportable performance. Much of it lacks -ease, fluency; but all is worth reading and reading again; and in the -“Ballade of the Sea of Sleep” are an elevation and largeness that no -living poet has excelled. - -The scene of all Miss Dawson’s stories is San Francisco—her San -Francisco—San Francisco as she sees it from her eyrie atop of “Russian -Hill.” To her it is a dream city—a city of wraiths and things forbidden -to the senses—of half-heard whispers from tombs of men long dead and -damned—of winds that sing dirges, clouds that are signs and portents, -fogs peopled with fantastic existences pranking like mad, as is the -habit of all sea-folk on shore leave—a city where it is never morning, -where the birds never sing, where children are unknown, and where at -night the street-lights at the summits of the hills “flare as if out of -the sky,” signaling mysterious messages from another world. In short, -this sister to Hugo has breathed into the gross material San Francisco -so strange a soul that to him who has read her book the name of the -town must henceforth have a meaning that never before attached to any -word of human speech. Wherefore I say of this book that it is a work -of supreme genius; and I try to have faith to believe that whatever -else may befall it, while the language in which it is written remains -intelligible to men it will not fail to challenge the attention and -engage the interest of the judicious. - -To those who have feared the effect upon Miss Dawson’s powers of -time, sorrow, privation and hope deferred, it is a joy to note that -her latest and longest story, “A Gracious Visitation”—the one written -especially for this volume, the others being from twenty to thirty -years old—is the best. It is indeed a marvelous creation, and I know of -nothing in literature having a sufficient resemblance to it to serve -as a basis of comparison. In point of mere originality, I should say -it is unsurpassed and unsurpassable; the ability to figure to oneself -a story more novel and striking would, in a writer, imply the ability -to write one—which I think the most capable writer would be slowest to -claim. The best of the other stories is by no means the one that gives -its title to the book. I shall not undertake to say which is best, but -shall conclude by quoting the “envoy” of “The Ballade of the Sea of -Sleep”; - - Archangels, princes, thrones, dominions, powers, - Which of you dwarf the centuries to hours, - Or swell the moments into æons’ sweep? - Is it the Prince of Darkness, then, who cowers - Below the dream-waves of the Sea of Sleep? - - 1897. - - - - - MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF - - -Upon the cover of the English translation of this young artist’s -journal is displayed Gladstone’s judgment that it is “a book without a -parallel.” That is not very high praise, certainly; it may be said of -many books which the judicious would “willingly let die”; and in this -case the judicious will hope that a parallel work may be long denied to -the taste that craves it. The book from cover to cover is distinctly -unwholesome. It has the merit of candor; its frankness is appalling. -Yet one can not help suspecting the quality of that frankness. Did -this young girl, who began at twelve, and for a dozen years—almost -to the day of her death—poured into her journal her heterogenous and -undigested thoughts, fancies and feelings with a view to publication -and a hope of fame as a result of it—did she after all make as honest -a record as she doubtless supposed herself to be doing? It will hardly -seem so to one who has written much for publication. - -Such a one may justly enough distrust, although he can not altogether -reject, the evidences of the text, which are necessarily studied and -interpreted in the light of the text itself; but knowing something -of the conditions of literary composition he will be slow to believe -that the young diarist could at the same time remember and forget that -she was writing to be read. Nor will it seem to him that his doubt if -she put down all that came into her head is too hardy an assumption -of knowledge of how Russian young women think and feel. Something -doubtless must be allowed for individual character and disposition -in this case as in another, but then, too, one must be permitted to -remember that even a Russian young woman of more or less consuming -self-consciousness and sex-consciousness is merely human, belonging -to the race which daily thanks its Maker for not putting windows in -breasts. Even a Russian maiden with a private method of estimating -her intellectual importance who should write _all_ her thoughts would -probably be invited to stay her steps toward the Temple of Fame long -enough to make acquaintance of the police. - -But if the diarist has not written down all her thoughts and -feelings, how can the reader be quite sure that she has accurately -reported those of them that she professes to give?—how that they are -not afterthoughts, some of them, at least, evolved in the process of -revision for the press? I do not know if upon this point there is any -other than internal evidence and the probabilities; my reading in the -somewhat raw and raucous literature of the subject has not been quite -exhaustive. The internal evidence and the probabilities point pretty -plainly to revision of the text, for which the reader might have been -more grateful if it had been more thoroughly made. Much of the book, in -truth, might advantageously have been revised out of existence—much of -what is left, I mean. - -Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1860 and died of consumption in 1884. -She was given a good education and knew some of the advantages of -travel. Having a love of art—which she mistook for ability to produce -works of art—she became a painter and by dint of study under the -spur of vanity performed some fairly creditable work which, while -the fashion of reading her journal was “on,” commanded fair prices -and brought gladness and sunshine into the homes of good Americans -of long purses and short schooling. She was perhaps rather more than -less successful in painting than in expounding the excellences of the -paintings of others. In such criticism as she gives us in her journal -one does not detect any understanding. “This is not art; it is Nature -herself”; “the face is real; it is flesh and blood”—such judgments -as these are sprinkled all through the book, recalling the dear old -familiar jargon of the “dramatic critics” of the newspapers; “Jonesmith -was no longer himself but Hamlet”; “Brown-Robinson completely -identified himself with his rôle, and it was Julius Cæsar himself that -we saw before our eyes.” The crudest and most meaningless form of art -criticism is to declare the representation the thing represented, and -poor Marie Bashkirtseff seldom goes further in accounting for her -adoration of the works of such masters as Bastien-Lepage, Corot and -Duran. - -There must have been something engaging in the girl, for she seems -to have acquired the friendship of such men, and to have retained -it. Her account of those last days when she and Bastien-Lepage—each -with a leg in the grave, like a caught fox dragging its trap—caused -themselves to be brought together to compare the ravages of their -disorders in silence is pathetic with the pathos of the morgue. One -would rather have been spared it. It leaves a bad taste in the memory -and fitly concludes a book which is morbid, hysterical and unpleasant -beyond anything of its kind in literature—“a book without a parallel.” -It enforces and illustrates a useful truth: that when suffering from -internal disorders one can not afford to turn oneself inside out as an -exercise in literary calisthenics. - - 1887. - - - - - A POET AND HIS POEM - - (_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, September, 1907_) - - -Whatever length of days may be accorded to this magazine, it is not -likely to do anything more notable in literature that it accomplishes -in this issue by publication of Mr. George Sterling’s poem, “A Wine of -Wizardry.” Doubtless the full significance of this event will not be -immediately apprehended by more than a select few, for understanding of -poetry has at no time been a very general endowment of our countrymen. -After a not inconsiderable acquaintance with American men of letters -and men of affairs I find myself unable to name a dozen of whom I -should be willing to affirm their possession of this precious gift—for -a gift it indubitably is; and of these not all would, in my judgment, -be able to discern the light of genius in a poem not authenticated by -a name already famous, or credentialed by a general assent. It is not -commonly permitted to even the luckiest of poets to “set the Thames on -fire” with his first match; and I venture to add that the Hudson is -less combustible than the Thames. Anybody can see, or can think that -he sees, what has been pointed out, but original discovery is another -matter. Carlyle, indeed, has noted that the first impression of a work -of genius is disagreeable—which is unfortunate for its author if he is -unknown, for upon editors and publishers a first impression is usually -all that he is permitted to make. - -From the discouraging operation of these uncongenial conditions Mr. -Sterling is not exempt, as the biography of this poem would show; yet -Mr. Sterling is not altogether unknown. His book, _The Testimony of -the Suns, and Other Poems_, published in 1903, brought him recognition -in the literary Nazareth beyond the Rocky Mountains, whose passes are -so vigilantly guarded by cismontane criticism. Indeed, some sense of -the might and majesty of the book’s title poem succeeded in crossing -the dead-line while watch-worn sentinels slept “at their insuperable -posts.” Of that work I have the temerity to think that in both subject -and art it nicks the rock as high as anything of the generation of -Tennyson, and a good deal higher than anything of the generation of -Kipling; and this despite its absolute destitution of what contemporary -taste insists on having—the “human interest.” Naturally, a dramatist -of the heavens, who takes the suns for his characters, the deeps of -space for his stage, and eternity for his “historic period,” does not -“look into his heart and write” emotionally; but there is room in -literature for more than emotion. In the “other poems” of the book -the lower need is supplied without extravagance and with no admixture -of sentimentality. But what we are here concerned with is “A Wine of -Wizardry.” - -In this remarkable poem the author proves his allegiance to the -fundamental faith of the greatest of those “who claim the holy Muse as -mate”—a faith which he has himself “confessed” thus: - - Remiss the ministry they bear - Who serve her with divided heart; - She stands reluctant to impart - Her strength to purpose, end, or care. - -Here, as in all his work, we shall look in vain for the “practical,” -the “helpful.” The verses serve no cause, tell no story, point no -moral. Their author has no “purpose, end, or care” other than the -writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of -a skylark—it is merely poetry. No one knows what poetry is, but to -the enlightened few who know what is poetry it is a rare and deep -delight to find it in the form of virgin gold. “Gold,” says the miner -“vext with odious subtlety” of the mineralogist with his theories of -deposit—“gold is where you find it.” It is no less precious whether -you have crushed it from the rock, or washed it from the gravel, but -some of us care to be spared the labor of reduction, or sluicing. Mr. -Sterling’s reader needs no outfit of mill and pan. - -I am not of those who deem it a service to letters to “encourage” -mediocrity—that is one of the many ways to starve genius. From the -amiable judgment of the “friendly critic” with his heart in his -head, otherwise unoccupied, and the _laudator literarum_ who finds -every month, or every week—according to his employment by magazine -or newspaper—more great books than I have had the luck to find in a -half-century, I dissent. My notion is that an age which produces a -half-dozen good writers and twenty books worth reading is a memorable -age. I think, too, that contemporary criticism is of small service, -and popular acclaim of none at all, in enabling us to know who are -the good authors and which the good books. Naturally, then, I am not -overtrustful of my own judgment, nor hot in hope of its acceptance. -Yet I steadfastly believe and hardily affirm that George Sterling is a -very great poet—incomparably the greatest that we have on this side of -the Atlantic. And of this particular poem I hold that not in a lifetime -has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much -poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as -any of the “ardent gems” that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all -the imagination of “Comus” and all the fancy of “The Faerie Queene.” -If Leigh Hunt should return to earth to part and catalogue these two -precious qualities he would find them in so confusing abundance and -so inextricably interlaced that he would fly in despair from the -impossible task. - -Great lines are not all that go to the making of great poetry, but a -poem with many great lines is a great poem, even if it have—as usually -it has, and as “A Wine of Wizardry” has not—prosaic lines as well. To -quote all the striking passages in Mr. Sterling’s poem would be to -quote most of the poem, but I will ask the reader’s attention to some -of the most graphic and memorable. - - A cowled magician peering on the damned - Thro’ vials wherein a splendid poison burns. - - ’Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned, - Undominated firmament. - -It is not for me to say what may be meant here by “undominated,” any -more than to explain what Shakspeare meant by - - To lie in cold _obstruction_ and to rot. - -A poet makes his own words and his own definitions: it is for the rest -of us to accept them and see to it that there is no interference by -that feeble folk, the lexicographers. - - a dell where some mad girl hath flung - A bracelet that the painted lizards fear— - Red pyres of muffled light! - - Dull fires of dusty jewels that have bound - The brows of naked Ashtaroth. - - she marks the seaward flight - Of homing dragons dark upon the West. - - Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire - To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire. - - Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom, - Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame. - - silent ghouls, - Whose king hath digged a sombre carcanet - And necklaces with fevered opals set. - - Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light - Dip to the ocean’s phosphorescent caves. - -What other words could so vividly describe gleams of fire on a troubled -sea? Who but a masterful poet could describe them at all? - - There priestesses in purple robes hold each - A sultry garnet to the sea-linkt sun, - Or, just before the colored morning shakes - A splendor on the ruby-sanded beach, - Cry unto Betelgeuze a mystic word. - -Faith! I would give value to know that word! - - Where icy philters brim with scarlet foam. - - Satan, yawning on his brazen seat, - Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed. - - A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse, - Beside a caldron vext with harlots’ blood, - The stars of that red Sign which spells her doom. - - halls - In which dead Merlin’s prowling ape hath spilt - A vial squat whose scarlet venom crawls - To ciphers bright and terrible. - - ere the tomb-thrown echoings have ceased, - The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, - Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon. - -Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the -spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand -it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was -in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the -imagination to Coleridge’s - - A savage place! as holy and enchanted - As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted - By woman wailing for her demon lover, - -or Keats’s - - magic casements, opening on the foam - Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn— - -passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human -thought. - -One of a poet’s most authenticating credentials may be found in his -epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from -which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician, -are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is -worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with -novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt, -spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like -the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than -ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold -iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider -a few of Mr. Sterling’s epithets, besides those in the lines already -quoted: - -“Purpled” realm; “striving” billows; “wattled” monsters; “timid” -sapphires of the snow; “lit” wastes; a “stainèd” twilight of the -South; “tiny” twilight in the jacinth, and “wintry” orb of the -moonstone; “winy” agate and “banded” onyx; “lustrous” rivers; -“glowering” pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth. - -Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made -poet?—to the “poet of the day”—poet by resolution of a “committee -on literary exercises”? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his -pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave -confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve -felicities like these! - - - - - THE CONTROVERSIALIST - - - - - AN INSURRECTION OF THE PEASANTRY - - (_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, December, 1907_) - - -When a man of genius who is not famous writes a notable poem he must -expect one or two of three things: indifference, indignation, ridicule. -In commending Mr. George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” published in -the September number of this magazine, I had this reception of his work -in confident expectation and should have mistrusted my judgment if it -had not followed. The promptitude of the chorus of denunciation and -scorn has attested the superb character of the poet’s work and is most -gratifying. - -The reason for the inevitable note of dissent is not far to seek; it -inheres in the constitution of the human mind, which is instinctively -hostile to what is “out of the common”—and a work of genius is -pretty sure to be that. It is by utterance of uncommon thoughts, -opinions, sentiments and fancies that genius is known. All distinction -is difference, unconformity. He who is as others are—whose mental -processes and manner of expression follow the familiar order—is -readily acceptable because easily intelligible to those whose narrow -intelligence, barren imagination, and meager vocabulary he shares. -“Why, that is great!” says that complacent dullard, “the average man,” -smiling approval. “I have thought that a hundred times myself!”—thereby -providing abundant evidence that it is not great, nor of any value -whatever. To “the average man” what is new is inconceivable, and what -he does not understand affronts him. And he is the first arbiter in -letters and art. In this “fierce democracie” he dominates literature -with a fat and heavy hand—a hand that is not always unfamiliar with the -critic’s pen. - -In returning here to the subject of Mr. Sterling’s poem I have no -intention of expounding and explaining it to persons who know nothing -of poetry and are inaccessible to instruction. Those who, in the -amusing controversy which I unwittingly set raging round Mr. Sterling’s -name, have spoken for them are in equal mental darkness and somewhat -thicker moral, as it is my humble hope to show. - -When the cause to be served is ignorance, the means of service is -invariably misrepresentation. The champion of offended Dulness -falsifies in statement and cheats in argument, for he serves a client -without a conscience. A knowledge of right and wrong is not acquired -to-day, as in the time of Adam and Eve, by eating an apple; and it is -attained by only the highest intelligences. - -But before undertaking the task of pointing out the moral unworth of my -honorable opponents, it seems worth while to explain that the proponent -of the controversy has had the misfortune to misunderstand the question -at issue. He has repeatedly fallen into the error of affirming, with -all the emphasis of shouting capitals, that “Ambrose Bierce says it [“A -Wine of Wizardry”] is the greatest poem ever written in America,” and -at least once has declared that I pronounced it “the only great poem -ever written in America.” If the dispute had been prolonged I shudder -to think that his disobedient understanding might have misled him to -say that I swore it was the only great poem ever written, in all the -world. - -To those who know me it is hardly needful, I hope, to explain that -I said none of the words so generously put into my mouth, for it is -obvious that I have not seen, and could not have seen, all the poems -that have been written in America. To have pronounced such a judgment -without all the evidence would have been to resemble my opponents—which -God forbid! In point of fact, I do not consider the poem the greatest -ever written in America; Mr. Sterling himself, for example, has written -a greater. Exposed to so hardy and impenitent misrepresentation I -feel a need of the consolations of religion: I should like positively -to know where my critics are going to when they die. From my present -faltering faith in their future I derive an imperfect comfort. - -Naturally, not all protagonists of the commonplace who have uttered -their minds about this matter are entitled to notice. The Baseball -Reporter who, says Mr. Brisbane, “like Mr. Sterling, is a poet,” the -Sweet Singer of Slang, the Simian Lexicographer of Misinformation, -and the Queen of Platitudinaria who has renounced the sin-and-sugar -of youth for the milk-and-morality of age must try to forgive me if I -leave them grinning through their respective horse-collars to a not -unkind inattention. - -But Deacon Harvey is a person of note and consequence. On a question -of poetry, I am told, he controls nearly the entire Methodist vote. -Moreover, he has a notable knack at mastery of the English language, -which he handles with no small part of the ease and grace that may have -distinguished the impenitent thief carrying his cross up the slope of -Calvary. Let the following noble sentences attest the quality of his -performance when he is at his best: - - A natural hesitation to undertake analysis of the unanalyzable, - criticism of the uncriticizable, or, if we may go so far, mention - of the unmentionable, yields to your own shrewd forging of the - links of circumstance into a chain of duty. That the greatest poem - ever written on this hemisphere, having forced its way out of a - comfortable lodgment in the brain of an unknown author, should be - discovered and heralded by a connoisseur whose pre-eminence is - yet to be established, is perhaps in itself not surprising, and - yet we must admit that the mere rarity of such a happening would - ordinarily preclude the necessity, which otherwise might exist, of - searching inquiry as to the attributed transcendentalism of merit. - -Surely a man who habitually writes such prose as that must be a -good judge of poetry or he would not be a good judge of anything in -literature. And what does this Prince Paramount of grace and clarity -find to condemn in poor Mr. Sterling’s poem? Listen with at least one -ear each: - - We are willing to admit at the outset that in the whole range - of American, or, for that matter, English, poetry there is no - example of a poem crowded with such startling imagery, ambitiously - marshaled in lines of such lurid impressiveness, all of which at - once arrest attention and would bewilder the esthetic sensibility - of a Titan. The poem is made up of an unbroken series of - sententious and striking passages, any one of which would have - distinguished a whole canto of Dante or Keats, neither of whom - would have ventured within that limit to use more than one—such was - their niggardly economy. - -Here is something “rich and strange” in criticism. Heretofore it has -been thought that “wealth of imagery” was about the highest quality -that poetry could have, but it seems not; that somewhat tiresome phrase -is to be used henceforth to signify condemnation. Of the poem that -we wish to commend we must say that it has an admirable poverty of -imagination. Deacon Harvey’s notion that poets like Dante and Keats -deliberately refrained from using more than one “sententious and -striking passage” to the canto “goes neare to be fonny.” They used as -many as occurred to them; no poet uses fewer than he can. If he has -only one to a canto, that is not economy; it is indigence. - -I observe that even so good a poet and so appreciative a reader of -Mr. Sterling as Miss Ina Coolbrith has fallen into the same error as -Deacon Harvey. Of “the many pictures presented in that wondrous ‘Wine -of Wizardry,’” this accomplished woman says: “I think it is a ‘poem’—a -great poem—but one which, in my humble estimate, might have been -made even greater could its creator have permitted himself to drop a -little of what some may deem a weakening superfluity of imagery and -word-painting.” - -If one is to make “pictures” in poetry one must do so by word-painting. -(I admit the hatefulness of the term “word-painting,” through overuse -of the name in praise of the prose that the thing defaces, but it seems -that we must use it here.) Only in narrative and didactic poetry, -and these are the lowest forms, can there be too much of imagery and -word-painting; in a poem essentially graphic, like the one under -consideration, they are the strength and soul of the work. “A Wine -of Wizardry” is, and was intended to be, a series, a succession, of -unrelated pictures, colored (mostly red, naturally) by what gave them -birth and being—the reflection of a sunset in a cup of ruddy wine. To -talk of too much imagery in a work of that kind is to be like Deacon -Harvey. - -Imagery, that is to say, imagination, is not only the life and soul -of poetry; it is the poetry. That is what Poe had in mind doubtless, -when he contended that there could be no such thing as a long poem. He -had observed that what are called long poems consist of brief poetical -passages connected by long passages of metrical prose—_recitativo_—of -oases of green in deserts of gray. The highest flights of imagination -have always been observed to be the briefest. George Sterling has -created a new standard, another criterion. In “A Wine of Wizardry,” as -in his longer and greater poem, “The Testimony of the Suns,” there is -no _recitativo_. His imagination flies with a tireless wing. It never -comes to earth for a new spring into the sky, but like the eagle and -the albatross, sustains itself as long as he chooses that it shall. -His passages of poetry are connected by passages of poetry. In all -his work you will find no line of prose. Poets of the present and the -future may well “view with alarm” as Statesman Harvey would say—the -work that Sterling has cut out for them, the pace that he has set. -Poetry must henceforth be not only qualitative but quantitative: it -must be _all_ poetry. If wise, the critic will note the new criterion -that this bold challenge to the centuries has made mandatory. The “long -poem” has been shown to be possible; let us see if it become customary. - -In affirming Mr. Sterling’s primacy among living American poets I have -no apology to offer to the many unfortunates who have written to me in -the spirit of the man who once said of another: “What! that fellow a -great man? Why, he was born right in my town!” It is humbly submitted, -however, that unless the supply of great men is exhausted they must be -born somewhere, and the fact that they are seen “close to” by their -neighbors does not supply a reasonable presumption against their -greatness. Shakspeare himself was once a local and contemporary poet, -and even Homer is known to have been born in “seven Grecian cities” -through which he “begged his bread.” Is Deacon Harvey altogether sure -that he is immune to the popular inability to understand that the time -and place of a poet’s nativity are not decisive as to his rating? He -may find a difficulty in believing that a singer of supreme excellence -was born right in _his_ country and period, but in the words that I -have quoted from him he has himself testified to the fact. To be able -to write “an unbroken series of sententious and striking passages”; -to crowd a poem, as no other in the whole range of our literature has -done, with “startling imagery” “in lines of impressiveness,” lurid or -not; to “arrest attention”; to “bewilder the Titans,” Deacon Harvey -at their head—that is about as much as the most ambitious poet could -wish to accomplish at one sitting. The ordinary harpist harping on his -Harpers’ would be a long time in doing so much. How any commentator, -having in those words conceded my entire claim, could afterward have -the hardihood to say, “The poem has no merit,” transcends the limits -of human comprehension and passes into the dark domain of literary -criticism. - -Nine in ten of the poem’s critics complain of the fantastic, grotesque, -or ghastly nature of its fancies. What would these good persons -have on the subject of wizardry?—sweet and sunny pictures of rural -life?—love scenes in urban drawing-rooms?—beautiful sentiments -appropriate to young ladies’ albums?—high moral philosophy with an -“appeal” to what is “likest God within the soul”? Deacon Harvey (O, I -cannot get away from Deacon Harvey: he fascinates me!) would have “an -interpretation of vital truth.” I do not know what that is, but we have -his word for it that nothing else is poetry. And no less a personage -than Mrs. Gertrude Atherton demands, instead of wizardry, an epic of -prehistoric California, or an account of the great fire, preferably -in prose, for, “this is not an age of poetry, anyway.” Alas, poor -Sterling!—damned alike for what he wrote and what he didn’t write. -Truly, there are persons whom one may not hope to please. - -It should in fairness be said that Mrs. Atherton confesses herself no -critic of poetry—the only person, apparently, who is not—but pronounces -Mr. Sterling a “recluse” who “needs to see more and read less.” From a -pretty long acquaintance with him I should say that this middle-aged -man o’ the world is as little “reclusive” as any one that I know, and -has seen rather more of life than is good for him. And I doubt if -he would greatly gain in mental stature by unreading Mrs. Atherton’s -excellent novels. - -Sterling’s critics are not the only persons who seem a bit blinded -by the light of his genius: Mr. Joaquin Miller, a born poet and as -great-hearted a man as ever lived, is not quite able to “place” him. -He says that this “titanic, magnificent” poem is “classic” “in the -Homeric, the Miltonic sense.” “A Wine of Wizardry” is not “classic” in -the sense in which scholars use that word. It is all color and fire and -movement, with nothing of the cold simplicity and repose of the Grecian -ideal. Nor is it Homeric, nor in the Miltonic vein. It is in no vein -but the author’s own; in the entire work is only one line suggesting -the manner of another poet—the last in this passage: - - Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed - In chains so heated at their master’s fire - That one new-damned had thought their bright attire - Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance - So terribly that brilliance shall enhance. - -That line, the least admirable in the poem, is purely Byronic. Possibly -Mr. Miller meant that Sterling’s work is like Homer’s and Milton’s, -not in manner, but in excellence; and it is. - -Mr. Sterling’s critics may at least claim credit for candor. For cause -of action, as the lawyers say, they aver his use of strange, unfamiliar -words. Now this is a charge that any man should be ashamed to make; -first, because it is untrue; second, because it is a confession of -ignorance. There are not a half-dozen words in the poem that are not in -common use by good authors, and none that any man should not blush to -say that he does not understand. The objection amounts to this: that -the poet did not write down to the objector’s educational level—did not -adapt his work to “the meanest capacity.” Under what obligation was he -to do so? There are men whose vocabulary does not exceed a few hundreds -of words; they know not the meaning of the others because they have -not the thoughts that the others express. Shall these Toms, Dicks and -Harrys of the slums and cornfields set up their meager acquirements -as metes and bounds beyond which a writer shall not go? Let them stay -upon their reservations. There are poets enough, great poets, too, whom -they can partly understand; that is, they can understand the simple -language, the rhymes, the meter—everything but the poetry. There -are orders of poetry, as there are orders of architecture. Because a -Grecian temple is beautiful shall there be no Gothic cathedrals? By the -way, it is not without significance that Gothic architecture was first -so called in derision, the Goths having no architecture. It was named -by the Deacon Harveys of the period. - -The passage that has provoked this class of critics to the most -shameless feats of self-exposure is this: - - Infernal rubrics, sung to Satan’s might, - Or chanted to the Dragon in his gyre. - -Upon this they have expended all the powers of ridicule belonging to -those who respect nothing because they know nothing. A person of light -and leading in their bright band[2] says of it: - -“We confess that we had never before heard of a ‘gyre.’ Looking it up -in the dictionary, we find that it means a gyration, or a whirling -round. Rubrics chanted to a dragon while he was whirling ought to be -worth hearing.” - -Now, whose fault is it that this distinguished journalist had never -heard of a gyre? Certainly not the poet’s. And whose that in very -sensibly looking it up he suffered himself to be so misled by the -lexicographer as to think it a gyration, a whirling round? Gyre means, -not a gyration, but the path of a gyration, an orbit. And has the poor -man no knowledge of a dragon in the heavens?—the constellation Draco, -to which, as to other stars, the magicians of old chanted incantations? -A peasant is not to be censured for his ignorance, but when he glories -in it and draws its limit as a dead line for his betters he is the -least pleasing of all the beasts of the field. - -An amusing instance of the commonplace mind’s inability to understand -anything having a touch of imagination is found in a criticism of the -now famous lines: - - The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, - Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon. - -“Somehow,” says the critic, who, naturally, is a book-reviewer, “one -does not associate blue eyes with a vampire.” Of course it did not -occur to him that this was doubtless the very reason why the author -chose the epithet—if he thought of anybody’s conception but his own. -“Blue-eyed” connotes beauty and gentleness; the picture is that of -a lovely, fair-haired woman with the telltale blood about her lips. -Nothing could be less horrible; nothing more terrible. As vampires do -not really exist, everyone is at liberty, I take it, to conceive them -under what outward and visible aspect he will; but this gentleman, -having standardized the vampire, naturally resents any departure from -the type—his type. I fancy he requires goggle-eyes, emitting flame and -perhaps smoke, a mouth well garnished with tusks—long claws, and all -the other appurtenances that make the conventional Chinese dragon so -awful that one naturally wishes to meet it and kick it. - -Between my mind and the minds of those whom Mr. Sterling’s daring -incursions into the realm of the unreal do not affect with a keen -artistic delight there is nothing in common—except a part of my -vocabulary. I cannot hope to convince nor persuade them. Nevertheless, -it is no trouble to point out that their loud pretense of being -“shocked” by some of his fancies is a singularly foolish one. We -are not shocked by the tragic, the terrible, even the ghastly, in -literature and art. We do not flee from the theater when a tragedy is -enacting—the murder of Duncan and the sleeping grooms—the stabbing and -poisoning in “Hamlet.” We listen without discomposure to the beating -to death of Nancy Sykes behind the scenes. The Ancient Mariner’s dead -comrades rise and pull at the ropes without disturbing the reader; -even the “slimy things” “crawl with legs upon a slimy sea” and we do -not pitch the book into the fire. Dante’s underworld, with all its -ingenious horrors, page after page of them, are accounted pretty good -reading—at least Dante is accounted a pretty good poet. No one stands -forth to affirm his distress when Homer’s hero declares that - - Swarms of specters rose from deepest hell - With bloodless visage and with hideous yell. - They scream, they shriek; sad groans and dismal sounds - Stun my scared ears and pierce Hell’s utmost bounds. - -Literature is full of pictures of the terrible, the awful, the ghastly, -if you please; hardly a great author but has given them to us in prose -or verse. They shock nobody, for they produce no illusion, not even on -the stage, or the canvases of Vereshchagin. If they did they would be -without artistic value. - -But it is the fashion to pretend to be horrified—when the terrible -thing is new and by an unfamiliar hand. The Philistine who accepts -without question the horrors of Dante’s Hell professes himself greatly -agitated when Sterling’s - - Satan, yawning on his brazen seat, - Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed. - -In point of fact, the poor Philistine himself yawns as he reads -about it; he is not shocked at all. It is comprehensible how there -may be such a thing as a mollycoddle, but how one can pretend to -be a mollycoddle when one is not—that must be accepted as the most -surprising hypocrisy that we have the happiness to know about. - -Having affirmed the greatness of Mr. Sterling, I am austerely reminded -by a half hundred commentators, some of whom profess admiration for “A -Wine of Wizardry,” that a single poem, of whatever excellence, does -not establish the claim. Like nearly all the others, these gentlemen -write without accuracy, from a general impression. They overlook the -circumstance that I pointed out a book by Sterling, published several -years ago, entitled _The Testimony of the Suns, and Other Poems_. -What, then, becomes of the “single poem” sneer? To its performers -nothing that they have not seen exists. - -That book is dedicated to me—a fact that has been eagerly seized -upon by still another class of critics to “explain” my good opinion -of its author; for nothing is so welcome to our literary hill-tribes -as a chance to cheat by ascription of a foul motive. But it happens, -unhappily for the prosperity of their hope, that the dedication was -made in gratitude for my having already set the crown of praise upon -its author’s head. I will quote the first lines of the dedication, not -only in proof of this, but to show the noble seriousness and sincerity -with which a great poet regards his ministry at the altar of his art: - - Ah! glad to thy decree I bow, - From whose unquestioned hand did fall, - Beyond a lesser to recall, - The solemn laurels on my brow. - - I tremble with the splendid weight. - To my unworth ’tis given to know - How dread the charge I undergo - Who claim the holy Muse as mate. - -It is to be hoped that Mr. Sterling’s reverent attitude toward his art -has suffered no abatement from his having been thrown to the swine for -allegiance to an alien faith hateful to his countrymen. - - -[2] Mr. Arthur Brisbane. - - - - - MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS - - -I have not the happiness to know if Mr. George Bernard Shaw has ever -written as good a play as “As You Like It.” He says he has, and -certainly he ought to be able to remember what plays he has written. I -don’t know that blank verse is, as Mr. Shaw declares, “a thing that you -could teach a cat if it had an ear.” My notion is that blank verse—good -blank verse—is the most difficult of all metrical forms, and that -among English poets Milton alone has mastered it. I don’t know that -Mr. Shaw is right in his sweeping condemnation of the blank verse of -that indubitable “master of tremendous prose,” Shakspeare. As a critic, -Mr. Shaw ought to know that Shakspeare wrote very little blank verse, -technically and properly so called, his plays being, naturally, mostly -in what the prosodian knows, and what as a playwright Mr. Shaw might be -expected to know, as dramatic blank, a very different thing. - - But this I know, and know full well— - -that in ridiculing the blind, unreasoning adoration of Shakspeare as an -infallible and impeccable god in whose greater glory all _dii minores_ -must hide their diminished heads and pale their uneffectual fires, Mr. -Shaw does well and merits sympathetic attention. Without going so far -as Voltaire, one may venture without irreverence to hold an opinion -of one’s own as to the great Englishman’s barbarous exuberance of -metaphor, pure and mixed, his poverty of invention in the matter of -plots, his love of punning, his tireless pursuit of a quibble to the -ultimate ramifications of its burrow, and a score of other faults which -in others his thick-and-thin protagonists freely condemn. Many of these -sins against art were doubtless the offspring of a giant indolence, and -sole desire to draw the rabble of the streets into his theater. For -literature he cared nothing, of literary ambition knew nothing—just -made plays, played them and flung away the manuscript. Even the sonnets -were left unsigned—which is fortunate, for his unearthly signature -would have misled the compiler. - -Whatever may be the other qualities of “As You Like It,” Mr. Shaw will -perhaps admit that in point of mere decency it is pretty fair, which is -more than any but a Shakspearolater will say of “Romeo and Juliet,” -for example. Not greatly caring for the theater, I am not familiar -with “acting versions,” but this play as it came from the hand of its -author is, in a moral sense, detestable. All its men are blackguards, -all its women worse, and worst of all is Juliet herself, who makes no -secret of the nature of her passion for Romeo, but discloses it with -all the candor of a moral idiot insensible to the distinction between -propensity and sentiment. Her frankness is no less than hideous. Yet -one may read page after page by reputable authors in praise of her as -one of the sweetest of Shakspeare’s fascinating heroines. Babes are -named for her and drawing-room walls adorned with ideal portraits of -her, engraved from paintings of great artists. One has only to read -Taine’s description of an Elizabethan theater audience to understand -why dramatists of those “spacious times” did not need seriously to -concern themselves with morality; but that Shakspeare’s wit, pathos and -poetry can make such characters as those of this drama acceptable to -modern playgoers and readers is the highest possible attestation of the -man’s consummate genius. - - - - - A DEAD LION - - - I - -In the history of religious controversy it has sometimes occurred that -a fool has risen and shouted out views so typical and representative as -to justify a particular attention denied to his less absurd partisans. -That was the situation relative to the logomachy that raged over the -ashes of the late Col. Robert Ingersoll. Through the ramp and roar -of the churches, the thunder of the theological captains and the -shouting, rose the penetrating treble of a person so artlessly pious, -so devoid of knowledge and innocent of sense, that his every utterance -credentialed him as a child of candor, and arrested attention like -the wanton shrilling of a noontide locust cutting through the cackle -of a hundred hens. That he happened to be an editorial writer was -irrelevant, for it was impossible to suspect so ingenuous a soul of -designs upon what may be called the Christian vote; he simply poured -out his heart with the unpremeditated sincerity of a wild ass uttering -its view of the Scheme of Things. I take it the man was providentially -“raised up”, and spoke by inspiration of the Spirit of Religion. - -“Robert G. Ingersoll,” says this son of nature, “was not a _great_ -atheist, nor a _great_ agnostic. Dissimilar though they are, he aspired -in his published lectures and addresses to both distinctions.” - -As it is no distinction to be either atheist or agnostic, this must -mean that Col. Ingersoll “aspired” to be a great atheist and a great -agnostic. Where is the evidence? May not a man state his religious -or irreligious views with the same presumption of modesty and mere -sincerity that attaches to other intellectual action? Because one -publicly affirms the inveracity of Moses must one be charged with -ambition, that meanest of all motives? By denying the sufficiency of -the evidences of immortality is one self-convicted of a desire to be -accounted great? - -Col. Ingersoll said the thing that he had to say, as I am saying -this—as a clergyman preaches his sermon, as an historian writes his -romance: partly for the exceeding great reward of expression, partly, -it may be, for the lesser profit of payment. We all move along lines -of least resistance; because a few of us find that this leads up to the -temple of fame it does not follow that all are seeking that edifice -with a conscious effort to achieve distinction. If any Americans have -appraised at its true and contemptible value the applause of the people -Robert Ingersoll did. If there has been but one such American he was -the man. - -Now listen to what further this ineffable dolt had to say of him: - - His irreverence, however, his theory of deistical brutality, was - a mere phantasy, unsustained by scholarship or by reason, and - contradicted by every element of his personal character. His love - for his wife and his children, his tenderness towards relatives and - friends, would have been spurious and repulsive if in his heart he - had not accepted what in speech he derided and contemned. - -Here’s richness indeed! Whatever may be said by scholarship and reason -of a “theory of deistical brutality”, I do not think—I really have -not the civility to admit—that it is contradicted by a blameless -life. If it were really true that the god of the Christians is not a -particularly “nice” god the love of a man for wife and child would not -necessarily and because of that be spurious and repulsive. Indeed, -in a world governed by such a god, and subject therefore to all the -evils and perils of the divine caprice and malevolence, such affection -would be even more useful and commendable than it is in this actual -world of peace, happiness and security. As the stars burn brightest in -a moonless night, so in the gloom of a wrath-ruled universe all human -affections and virtues would have an added worth and tenderness. In -order that life might be splendored with so noble and heroic sentiments -as grow in the shadow of disaster and are nourished by the sense of -a universal peril and sorrow, one could almost wish that some malign -deity, omnipotent and therefore able to accomplish his purposes without -sin and suffering for his children, had resisted the temptation to do -so and had made this a Vale of Tears. - - The Nineteenth Century has produced great agnostics. Strauss the - German and Renan the Frenchman were specimens of this particular - cult. But Robert G. Ingersoll belonged to a lower range of - scholarship and of thought. He had never studied the great German - and French critics of the Bible. His “Mistakes of Moses” were - pervaded by misapprehensions of the text of the Pentateuch. - -It is indubitably true that Ingersoll was inferior in scholarship to -Strauss and Renan, and in that and genius to the incomparable Voltaire; -but these deficiencies were not disabilities in the work that he -undertook. He knew his limitations and did not transgress them. He was -not self-tempted into barren fields of scholastic controversy where -common sense is sacrificed to “odious subtlety”. In the work that he -chose he had no use for the dry-as-dust erudition of the modern German -school of Biblical criticism—learned, ingenious, profound, admirable -and futile. He was accomplished in neither Hebrew nor Greek. Aramaic -was to him an unknown tongue, and I dare say that if asked he would -have replied that Jesus Christ, being a Jew, spoke Hebrew. The “text -of the Pentateuch” was not “misapprehended” by him; he simply let it -alone. What he criticised in “The Mistakes of Moses” is the English -version. If that is not a true translation let those concerned to -maintain its immunity from criticism amend it. They are not permitted -to hold that it is good enough for belief and acceptance, but not -good enough to justify an inexpert dissent. Ingersoll’s limitations -were the source of his power; at least they confined him to methods -that are “understanded of the people”; and to be comprehended by the -greatest number of men should be the wish of him who tries to destroy -what he thinks a popular delusion. By the way, I observe everywhere -the immemorial dog’s-eared complaint that he could “tear down” (we -Americans always prefer to say this when we mean pull down) but could -not “build up.” I am not aware that he ever tried to “build up.” -Believing that no religion was needful, he would have thought his work -perfect if all religions had been effaced. The clamor of weak minds for -something to replace the errors of which they may be deprived is one -that the true iconoclast disregards. What he most endeavors to destroy -is not idols, but idolatry. If in the place of the image that he breaks -he set up another he would be like a physician who having cured his -patient of a cramp should inoculate him with an itch. It is only just -to say that the devout journalist whose holy utterance I am afflicting -myself with the unhappiness of criticising nowhere makes the hoary -accusation that Ingersoll could “tear down” but not “build up.” He must -have overlooked it. - -What Ingersoll attacked was the Bible as we have it—the English -Bible—not the Bible as it may, can, must, might, would or should be in -Hebrew and Greek. He had no controversy with scholars—not only knew -himself unable to meet them on their own ground (where is plenty of -room for their lonely feet) but was not at all concerned with their -faiths and convictions, nor with the bases of them. Hoping to remove or -weaken a few popular errors, he naturally examined the book in which he -believed them to be found—the book which has the assent and acceptance -of those who hold them and derive them from it. He did not go behind -the record as it reads—nobody does excepting its advocates when it -has been successfully impugned. What has influenced (mischievously, -Ingersoll believed) the thought and character of the Anglo-Saxon race -is not the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Testament, but the English -Bible. The fidelity of that to its originals, its self-sufficiency and -independence of such evidences as only scholarship can bring to its -exposition, these, as Aristotle would say, are matters for separate -consideration. If God has really chosen to give his law to his children -in tongues that only an infinitesimal fraction of them can hope to -understand—has thrown it down amongst them for ignorant translators to -misread, interested priesthoods to falsify and hardy and imaginative -commentators to make ridiculous—has made no provision against all this -debauching of the text and the spirit of it, this must be because he -preferred it so; for whatever occurs must occur because the Omniscience -and Omnipotence permitting it wishes it to occur. Such are not the -methods of our human legislators, who take the utmost care that the -laws be unambiguous, printed in the language of those who are required -to obey them and accessible to them in the original text. I’m not -saying that this is the better and more sensible way; I only say that -if the former is God’s way the fact relieves us all of any obligation -to “restore” the text before discussing it and to illuminate its -obscurities with the side-lights of erudition. Ingersoll had all the -scholarship needful to his work: he knew the meaning of English words. - -Says the complacent simpleton again: - - It was idle for a man to deny the existence of God who confessed - and proclaimed the principle of fraternity.... The hard conception - of annihilation had no place in sentences that were infused with - the heat of immortality. - -As logic, this has all the charm inhering in the syllogism, All cows -are quadrupeds; this is a quadruped; therefore, this is a cow. The -author of that first sentence would express his thought, naturally, -something like this: All men are brothers; God is their only father; -therefore, there is a God. The other sentence is devoid of meaning, and -is quoted only to show the view that this literary lunatic is pleased -to think that he entertains of annihilation. It is to him a “hard -conception”; that is to say, the state of unconsciousness which he -voluntarily and even eagerly embraces every night of his life, and in -which he remained without discomfort for countless centuries before his -birth, is a most undesirable state. It is, indeed, so very unwelcome -that it shall not come to him—he’ll not have it so. Out of nothingness -he came, but into nothingness he will not return—he’ll die first! Life -is a new and delightful toy and, faith! he means to keep it. If you’d -ask him he would say that his immortality is proved by his yearning for -it; but men of sense know that we yearn, not for what we have, but for -what we have not, and most strongly for what we have not the shadow of -a chance to get. - - - II - -Mr. Harry Thurston Peck is different: he is a scholar, a professor of -Latin in a leading college, an incisive if not very profound thinker, -and a charming writer. He is a capable editor, too, and has conducted -one of our foremost literary magazines, in which, as compelled by the -nature of the business, he has commonly concerned himself mightily -with the little men capering nimbly between yesterday the begetter and -to-morrow the destroyer. Sometimes a larger figure strides into the -field of his attention, but not for long, nor with any very notable -accretion of clarity in the view. The lenses are not adjusted for large -objects, which accordingly seem out of focus and give no true image. -So the observer turns gladly to his ephemera, and we who read him are -the gainers by his loyalty to his habit and to his public who fixed it -upon him. But he so far transcended his limitations as to review in -the late Col. Ingersoll’s the work of a pretty large man. The result -is, to many of Prof. Peck’s admirers, of whom I am one, profoundly -disappointing. In both spirit and method it suggests the question, Of -what real use are the natural gifts, the acquirements and opportunities -that do so little for the understanding? Surely one must sometimes -dissent from the generally accepted appraisement of “the things we -learn in college,” when one observes a man like Prof. Peck (a collegian -down to the bone tips) feeling and thinking after the fashion of a -circuit-riding preacher in Southwestern Missouri. Let us examine some -of his utterances about the great agnostic. Speaking of the purity of -his personal character, this critic says: - - No one has questioned this; and even had it been so questioned - the fact could not be pertinent to our discussion. Indeed, it is - not easy to perceive just why his private virtues have been so - breathlessly brought forward and detailed with so much strenuous - insistence; for surely husbands who are faithful, fathers who are - loving, and friends who are generous and sympathetic are not so - rare in this our world as to make of them phenomena to be noted in - the annals of the age. - -It seems to me entirely obvious why Ingersoll’s friends and supporters -have persisted in putting testimony on these matters into the forefront -of the discussion; and entirely relevant such testimony is. Churchmen -and religionists in all ages and countries have affirmed the necessary -and conspicuous immorality of the irreligious. No notable unbeliever -has been safe from the slanders of the pulpit and the church press. And -in this country to-day ninety-nine of every one hundred “professing -Christians” hold that public and personal morality has no other basis -than the Bible. In this they are both foolish and wise: foolish because -it is so evidently untrue, and wise because to concede its untruth -would be to abandon the defense of religion as a moral force. If men -can be good without religion, and scorning religion, then it is not -religion that makes men good; and if religion does not do this it is -of no practical value and one may as well be without it as with it, -so far as concerns one’s relations with one’s fellow men. We are told -that Christianity is something more than a body of doctrine, that it -is a system of ethics, having a divine origin; that it has a close and -warm relation to conduct, generating elevated sentiments and urging to -a noble and unselfish life. If in support of that view it is relevant -to point to the blameless lives of its “Founder” and his followers it -is equally relevant in contradiction to point to the blameless lives -of its opponents. If Prof. Peck finds it “not easy to perceive” this -he might profitably make some experiments in perception on a big, red -Pennsylvanian barn. - -Prof. Peck tries to be fair; he concedes the honesty of Ingersoll’s -belief and acknowledges that - - It is entitled to the same respect that we accord to the unshaken - faith of other men. Indeed, for the purpose of the moment we - may even go still further and assume that he was right; that - Christianity is in truth a superstition and its history a fable; - that it has no hold on reason; and that the book from which - it draws in part its teaching and its inspiration is only an - inconsistent chronicle of old-world myths. Let us assume all this - and let us still inquire what final judgment should be passed - upon the man who held these views and strove so hard to make them - universal. - -Prof. Peck is not called upon to make any such concessions and -assumptions. As counsel for the defense, I am as willing to make -admissions as he, and “for the sake of argument,” as the meaningless -saying goes, to confess that the religion attacked by my client is -indubitably true. His justification depends in no degree upon the -accuracy of his judgment, but upon his honest confidence in it; and -that is unquestioned; that is no assumption; it is not conceded but -affirmed. If he believed that in these matters he was right and a -certain small minority of mankind, including a considerable majority -of his living countrymen, wrong it was merely his duty as a gentleman -to speak his views and to strive, as occasion offered or opportunity -served, to “make them universal.” In our personal affairs there is -such a thing as righteous suppression of the truth—even such another -thing as commendable falsehood. In certain circumstances avowal of -convictions is as baleful and mischievous as in other circumstances -dissimulation is. But in all the large matters of the mind—in -philosophy, religion, science, art and the like, a lesser service to -the race than utterance of the truth as he thinks he sees it, leaving -the result to whatever powers may be, a man has no right to be content -with having performed, for it is only so that truth is established. It -was only so that Prof. Peck’s religion was enthroned upon the ruins of -others—among them one so beautiful that after centuries of effacement -its myths and memories stir with a wonderful power the hearts of -scholars and artists of the later and conquering faith. Of that -religion it might once have been said in deprecation of St. Paul, as, -in deprecation of Ingersoll, Prof. Peck now says of religion in general: - - Its roots strike down into the very depths of human consciousness. - They touch the heart, the sympathies and the emotions. They lay - strong hold on life itself, and they are the chords to which all - being can be made to vibrate with a passionate intensity which - nothing else could call to life. - -I have said that Prof. Peck tries to be fair; if he had altogether -succeeded he would have pointed out, not only that Ingersoll sincerely -believed the Christian religion false, but that he believed it -mischievous, and that he was persuaded that its devotees would be -better off with no religion than with any. Had Prof. Peck done that -he could have spared himself the trouble of writing, and many of -his admirers the pain of reading, his variants of the ancient and -discreditable indictment of the wicked incapable who can “tear down,” -but not “build up.” Agnosticism may be more than a mere negation. -It may be, as in Ingersoll it was, a passionate devotion to Truth, -a consecration of self to her service. Of such a one as he it is -incredibly false to say that he can only “destroy” and “has naught to -give.” As well and as truthfully could that be said of one who knocks -away the chains of a slave and goes his way, imposing no others. One -may err in doing so. There are as many breeds of men as of dogs and -horses; and as a cur can not be taught to retrieve nor herd sheep, -nor a roadster to hunt, so there are human tribes unfit for liberty. -One’s zeal in liberation may be greater than one’s wisdom, but faith -in all mankind is at least an honorable error, even when manifested by -hammering at the shackles of the mind. What Ingersoll thought he had -to “give” was Freedom—and that, I take it, is quite as positive and -real as bondage. The reproach of “tearing down” without “building up” -is valid against nobody but an idolatrous iconoclast. Ingersoll was -different. - -Prof. Peck has a deal to say against Ingersoll’s methods; he does not -think them sufficiently serious, not to say reverent. This objection -may be met as Voltaire met it—by authorizing his critic to disregard -the wit and answer the argument. But Prof. Peck will not admit that -Ingersoll was witty. He sees nothing in his sallies but “buffoonery,” -a word meaning wit directed against one’s self or something that one -respects. This amazing judgment from the mouth of one so witty himself -could, but for one thing, be interpreted no otherwise than as evidence -that he has not read the works that he condemns. That one thing is -religious bigotry which, abundantly manifest everywhere in the article -under review, is nowhere so conspicuous as in the intemperate, not -to say low, language in which the charge of “buffoonery” is made. -Who that has an open mind would think that it was written of Robert -Ingersoll that he “burst into the sacred silence of their devotion with -the raucous bellowing of an itinerant stump-speaker and the clowning -of a vulgar mountebank”? To those who really know the character of -Robert Ingersoll’s wit—keen, bright and clean as an Arab’s scimetar; -to those who know the clear and penetrating mental insight of which -such wit is the expression and the proof; to those who know how much -of gold and how little of mud clung to the pebbles that he slung at -the Goliaths of authority and superstition; to those who have noted -the astonishing richness of his work in elevated sentiments fitly -expressed, his opulence of memorable aphorism and his fertility of -felicitous phrase—to these it will not seem credible that such a man -can be compared to one who, knowing the infidelity of a friend’s wife, -would “slap his friend upon the back and tell the story with a snicker, -in the coarsest language of the brothel, interspersed with Rabelaisian -jokes.” It is of the nature of wit mercifully to veil its splendors -from the eyes of its victim. The taken thief sees in his captor an -unheroic figure. The prisoner at the bar is not a good judge of the -prosecution. But it is difficult distinctly to conceive a scholar, -a wit, a critic, an accomplished editor of a literary magazine, -committing himself to such judgments as these upon work accessible to -examination and familiar to memory. To paraphrase Pope, - - Who would not laugh if such a man there be? - Who would not weep if Harry Peck were he? - -Another “point” that Prof. Peck is not ashamed to make is that -Ingersoll lectured on religion for money—“in the character of a -paid public entertainer, for his own personal profit.” And in what -character, pray, does anybody lecture where there is a charge for -admittance? In what character have some of the world’s greatest -authors, scientists, artists and masters of crafts generally lectured -when engaged to do so by “lyceums,” “bureaus,” or individual -“managers”? In what character does Prof. Peck conduct his valuable and -entertaining magazine for instruction and amusement of those willing to -pay for it? In what character, indeed, does the Defender of the Faith -put upon the market his austere sense of Ingersoll’s cupidity? - -Obviously the agnostic’s offence was not lecturing for pay. It was not -lecturing on religion. It was not sarcasm. It was that, lecturing for -pay on religion, his sarcasm took a direction disagreeable to Prof. -Peck, instead of disagreeable to Prof. Peck’s opponents. As a ridiculer -of infidels and agnostics Ingersoll might have made a great fame and -not one of his present critics would have tried to dim its lustre with -a breath, nor “with polluted finger tarnish it.” - -Religions are human institutions; at least those so hold who belong to -none of “the two-and-seventy jarring sects.” Religious faiths, like -political and social, are entitled to no immunity from examination and -criticism; all the methods and weapons that are legitimate against -other institutions and beliefs are legitimate against them. Their -devotees have not the right to shield themselves behind some imaginary -special privilege, to exact an exceptional exemption. A religion of -divine origin would have a right to such exemption; its devotees might -with some reason assist God to punish the crime of _lèse majesté_; but -the divinity of the religion’s origin is the very point in dispute, -and in holding that it shall be settled his way as an assurance of -peace its protagonist is guilty of a hardy and impenitent impudence. -Blasphemy has been defined as speaking disrespectfully of _my_ phemy; -one does not observe among the followers of one faith any disposition -to accord immunity from ridicule to the followers of another faith. The -devoutest Christian can throw mud at Buddha without affecting his own -good standing with the brethren; and if Mahomet were hanged in effigy -from the cross of St. Paul’s, Protestant Christianity would condemn the -act merely as desecration of a sacred edifice. - -Here is one more quotation from Prof. Peck, the concluding passage of -his paper: - - Robert Ingersoll is dead. Death came to him with swiftness and - without a warning. Whether he was even conscious of his end no - man can say. It may be that before the spark grew quite extinct - there was for him a moment of perception—that one appalling moment - when, within a space of time too brief for human contemplation, - the affrighted mind, as it reels upon the brink, flashes its vivid - thought through all the years of its existence and perceives the - final meaning of them all. If such a moment came to him, and as - the light of day grew dim before his dying eyes his mind looked - backward through the past, there can have been small consolation in - the thought, that in all the utterances of his public teaching, and - in all the phrases of his fervid eloquence, there was nothing that - could help to make the life of a man on earth more noble, or more - spiritual, or more truly worth living. - -This of a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight!—who -stood, as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty, -for honor, for good will toward men, for truth as it was given to him -to see it, for love!—who by personal example taught patience under -falsehood and silence under vilification!—who when slandered in debate -answered not back, but addressed himself to the argument!—whose entire -life was an inspiration to high thought and noble deed, and whose -errors, if errors they are, the world can not afford to lose for the -light and reason that are in them! - -The passage quoted is not without eloquence and that literary -distinction which its author gives to so much of what he writes. Withal -it is infinitely discreditable. There is in it a distinct undertone -of malice—of the same spirit which, among bigots of less civility and -franker speech, affirms of an irreligious person’s sudden death that -it was “a judgment of Heaven,” and which gloats upon the possibility -that he suffered the pangs of a penitence that came, thank God! too -late to command salvation. It is in the same spirit that conceived -and keeps in currency the ten-thousand-times-disproved tales of the -deathbed remorse of Thomas Paine, Voltaire and all the great infidels. -Indubitably posterity will enjoy the advantage of believing the same -thing of Ingersoll; and I can not help thinking that in suggesting -his remorse as only a possibility, instead of relating it as a fact -attested by piteous appeals for divine mercy, Prof. Peck has committed -a sin of omission for which on his own deathbed he will himself suffer -the keenest regret. - - 1899. - - - - - THE SHORT STORY - - -“The short story is always distinctly a sketch. It can not express what -is the one greatest thing in all literature—intercommunion of human -characters, their juxtapositions, their contrasts.... It is not a high -form of art, and its present extreme popularity bespeaks decadence far -more than advance.” - -So said Edgar Fawcett, an author of no small note and consequence in -his day. The one-greatest-things-in-all-literature are as plentiful -and obvious, apparently, as the sole causes of the decline of the -Roman power, yet new ones being continually discovered, it is a fair -presumption that the supply is inexhaustible; and Fawcett, an ingenious -man, could hardly have failed to find one and catalogue it. The one -that he would discover was pretty sure to be as good as another and to -abound in his own work—and Fawcett did not write short stories, but -exceedingly long ones. So “the intercommunion of human characters,” -and so forth, stands. Nevertheless, one fairly great thing in all -literature is the power to interest the reader. Perhaps the author -having the other thing can afford to forego that one, but its presence -is observable, somehow, in much of the work that is devoid of that -polyonymous element noted by Messrs. Fawcett, Thomas, Richard and -Henry. Having that fact in mind, and the added fact that in his own -admirable sonnets (for example) the intercommunion is an absent factor, -I am disposed to think that Edgar was facetious. - -The short story, quoth’a, “is not a high form of art”; and inferably -the long story—the novel—is. Let us see about that. As all the arts -are essentially one, addressing the same sensibilities, quickening the -same emotions and subject to the same law and limitations of human -attention, it may be helpful to consider some of the arts other than -literary and see what we can educe from the comparison. It will be -admitted, I hope, that even in its exterior aspect St. Peter’s Church -is a work of high art. But is Rome a work of high art? Was it ever, -or could it by rebuilding be made such? Certainly not, and the reason -is that it can not all take attention at once. We may know that the -several parts are coördinated and interrelated, but we do not discern -and feel the coördination and interrelation. An opera, or an oratorio, -that can be heard at a sitting may be artistic, but if in the manner -of a Chinese play it were extended through the evenings of a week or a -month what would it be? The only way to get unity of impression from a -novel is to shut it up and look at the covers. - -Not only is the novel, for the reason given, and for others, a faulty -form of art, but because of its faultiness it has no permanent place -in literature. In England it flourished less than a century and a -half, beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, since whose -death no novels, probably, have been written that are worth attention; -though as to this, one can not positively say, for of the incalculable -multitude written only a few have been read by competent judges, and of -these judges few indeed have uttered judgment that is of record. Novels -are still produced in suspicious abundance and read with fatal acclaim -but the novel of to-day has no art broader and better than that of -its individual sentences—the art of style. That would serve if it had -style. - -Among the other reasons why the novel is both inartistic and -impermanent is this—it is mere reporting. True, the reporter creates -his plot, incidents and characters, but that itself is a fault, putting -the work on a plane distinctly inferior to that of history. Attention -is not long engaged by what could, but did not, occur to individuals; -and it is a canon of the trade that nothing is to go into the novel -that might not have occurred. “Probability”—which is but another name -for the commonplace—is its keynote. When that is transgressed, as in -the fiction of Scott and the greater fiction of Hugo, the work is -romance, another and superior thing, addressed to higher faculties with -a more imperious insistence. The singular inability to distinguish -between the novel and the romance is one of criticism’s capital -ineptitudes. It is like that of a naturalist who should make a single -species of the squirrels and the larks. Equally with the novel, the -short story may drag at each remove a lengthening chain of probability, -but there are fewer removes. The short story does not, at least, cloy -attention, confuse with overlaid impressions and efface its own effect. - -Great work has been done in novels. That is only to say that great -writers have written them. But great writers may err in their choice -of literary media, or may choose them wilfully for something else than -their artistic possibilities. It may occur that an author of genius is -more concerned for gain than excellence—for the nimble popularity that -comes of following a literary fashion than for the sacred credentials -to a slow renown. The acclamation of the multitude may be sweet in his -ear, the clink of coins, heard in its pauses, grateful to his purse. To -their gift of genius the gods add no security against its misdirection. -I wish they did. I wish they would enjoin its diffusion in the novel, -as for so many centuries they did by forbidding the novel to be. And -what more than they gave might we not have had from Virgil, Dante, -Tasso, Camoëns and Milton if they had not found the epic poem ready to -their misguided hands? May there be in Elysium no beds of asphodel and -moly for its hardy inventor, whether he was Homer or “another man of -the same name.” - -The art of writing short stories for the magazines of the period -can not be acquired. Success depends upon a kind of inability that -must be “born into” one—it does not come at call. The torch must be -passed down the line by the thumbless hands of an illustrious line of -prognathous ancestors unacquainted with fire. For the torch has neither -light nor heat—is, in truth, fireproof. It radiates darkness and all -shadows fall toward it. The magazine story must relate nothing: like -Dr. Hern’s “holes” in the luminiferous ether, it is something in which -nothing can occur. True, if the thing is written in a “dialect” so -abominable that no one of sense will read, or so unintelligible that -none who reads will understand, it may relate something that only the -writer’s kindred spirits care to know; but if told in any human tongue -action and incident are fatal to it. It must provoke neither thought -nor emotion; it must only stir up from the shallows of its readers’ -understandings the sediment which they are pleased to call sentiment, -murking all their mental pool and effacing the reflected images of -their natural environment. - -The master of this school of literature is Mr. Howells. Destitute of -that supreme and almost sufficient literary endowment, imagination, -he does, not what he would, but what he can—takes notes with his eyes -and ears and “writes them up” as does any other reporter. He can -tell nothing but something like what he has seen or heard, and in his -personal progress through the rectangular streets and between the trim -hedges of Philistia, with the lettered old maids of his acquaintance -curtseying from the doorways, he has seen and heard nothing worth -telling. Yet tell it he must and, having told, defend. For years he -conducted a department of criticism with a purpose single to expounding -the after-thought theories and principles which are the offspring of -his own limitations. - -Illustrations of these theories and principles he interpreted with -tireless insistence as proofs that the art of fiction is to-day a finer -art than that known to our benighted fathers. What did Scott, what -did even Thackeray know of the subtle psychology of the dear old New -England maidens? - -I want to be fair: Mr. Howells has considerable abilities. He is -insufferable only in fiction and when, in criticism, he is making -fiction’s laws with one eye upon his paper and the other upon a -catalogue of his own novels. When not carrying that heavy load, -himself, he has a manly enough mental stride. He is not upon very -intimate terms with the English language, but on many subjects, and -when you least expect it of him, he thinks with such precision as -momentarily to subdue a disobedient vocabulary and keep out the wrong -word. Now and then he catches an accidental glimpse of his subject -in a side-light and tells with capital vivacity what it is not. The -one thing that he never sees is the question that he has raised by -inadvertence, deciding it by implication against his convictions. If -Mr. Howells had never written fiction his criticism of novels would -entertain, but the imagination which can conceive him as writing a good -story under any circumstances would be a precious literary possession, -enabling its owner to write a better one. - -In point of fiction, all the magazines are as like as one vacuum to -another, and every month they are the same as they were the month -before, excepting that in their holiday numbers at the last of the year -their vacuity is a trifle intensified by that essence of all dulness, -the “Christmas story.” To so infamous a stupidity has popular fiction -fallen—to so low a taste is it addressed, that I verily believe it is -read by those who write it! - -As certain editors of newspapers appear to think that a trivial -incident has investiture of dignity and importance by being -telegraphed across the continent, so these story-writers of the -Reporter School hold that what is not interesting in life becomes -interesting in letters—the acts, thoughts, feelings of commonplace -people, the lives and loves of noodles, nobodies, ignoramuses and -millionaires; of the village vulgarian, the rural maiden whose -spiritual grace is not incompatible with the habit of falling over -her own feet, the somnolent nigger, the clay-eating “Cracker” of -the North Carolinian hills, the society person and the inhabitant -of south-western Missouri. Even when the writers commit infractions -of their own literary Decalogue by making their creations and -creationesses do something picturesque, or say something worth while, -they becloud the miracle with such a multitude of insupportable -descriptive details that the reader, like a tourist visiting an -artificial waterfall at a New England summer place of last resort, -pays through the nose at every step of his way to the Eighth Wonder. -Are we given dialogue? It is not enough to report what was said, but -the record must be authenticated by enumeration of the inanimate -objects—commonly articles of furniture—which were privileged to be -present at the conversation. And each dialogian must make certain -or uncertain movements of the limbs or eyes before and after saying -his say. All this in such prodigal excess of the slender allusions -required, when required at all, for _vraisemblance_ as abundantly to -prove its insertion for its own sake. Yet the inanimate surroundings -are precisely like those whose presence bores us our whole lives -through, and the movements are those which every human being makes -every moment in which he has the misfortune to be awake. One would -suppose that to these gentry and ladry everything in the world except -what is really remarkable is “rich and strange.” They only think -themselves able to make it so by the sea-change that it will suffer by -being thrown into the duck-pond of an artificial imagination and thrown -out again. - -Amongst the laws which Cato Howells has given his little senate, and -which his little senators would impose upon the rest of us, is an -inhibitory statute against a breach of this “probability”—and to them -nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man’s -most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men -and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and -women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is -consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions. It is -known to them that “truth is stranger than fiction,” but not that this -has any practical meaning or value in letters. It is to him of widest -knowledge, of deepest feeling, of sharpest observation and insight, -that life is most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with spirits -of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves that yawn in pathways -leading to the light, with existences not of earth, both malign and -benign—ministers of grace and ministers of doom. The truest eye is that -which discerns the shadow and the portent, the dead hands reaching, the -light that is the heart of the darkness, the sky “with dreadful faces -thronged and fiery arms.” The truest ear is that which hears - - Celestial voices to the midnight air, - Sole, or responsive each to the other’s note, - Singing— - -not “their great Creator,” but not a negro melody, either; no, nor the -latest favorite of the drawing-room. In short, he to whom life is not -picturesque, enchanting, astonishing, terrible, is denied the gift -and faculty divine, and being no poet can write no prose. He can tell -nothing because he knows nothing. He has not a speaking acquaintance -with Nature (by which he means, in a vague general way, the vegetable -kingdom) and can no more find - - Her secret meaning in her deeds - -than he can discern and expound the immutable law underlying -coincidence. - -Let us suppose that I have written a novel—which God forbid that I -should do. In the last chapter my assistant hero learns that the -hero-in-chief has supplanted him in the affections of the shero. He -roams aimless about the streets of the sleeping city and follows his -toes into a silent public square. There after appropriate mental -agonies he resolves in the nobility of his soul to remove himself -forever from a world where his presence can not fail to be disagreeable -to the lady’s conscience. He flings up his hands in mad disquietude -and rushes down to the bay, where there is water enough to drown all -such as he. Does he throw himself in? Not he—no, indeed. He finds a tug -lying there with steam up and, going aboard, descends to the fire-hold. -Opening one of the iron doors of the furnace, which discloses an -aperture just wide enough to admit him, he wriggles in upon the -glowing coals and there, with never a cry, dies a cherry-red death of -unquestionable ingenuity. With that the story ends and the critics -begin. - -It is easy to imagine what they say: “This is too much”; “it insults -the reader’s intelligence”; “it is hardly more shocking for its -atrocity than disgusting for its cold-blooded and unnatural defiance of -probability”; “art should have some traceable relation to the facts of -human experience.” - -Well, that is exactly what occurred once in the stoke-hold of a -tug lying at a wharf in San Francisco. _Only_ the man had not been -disappointed in love, nor disappointed at all. He was a cheerful sort -of person, indubitably sane, ceremoniously civil and considerate enough -(evidence of a good heart) to spare whom it might concern any written -explanation defining his deed as “a rash act.” - -Probability? Nothing is so improbable as what is true. It is the -unexpected that occurs; but that is not saying enough; it is also -the unlikely—one might almost say the impossible. John, for example, -meets and marries Jane. John was born in Bombay of poor but detestable -parents; Jane, the daughter of a gorgeous hidalgo, on a ship bound -from Vladivostok to Buenos Ayres. Will some gentleman who has written -a realistic novel in which something so nearly out of the common as -a wedding was permitted to occur have the goodness to figure out -what, at their birth, were the chances that John would meet and marry -Jane? Not one in a thousand—not one in a million—not one in a million -million! Considered from a view-point a little anterior in time, it -was almost infinitely unlikely that any event which has occurred would -occur—any event worth telling in a story. Everything being so unearthly -improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the -audacity to relate anything at all. And right heartily do I wish they -had not. - -Fiction has nothing to say to probability; the capable writer -gives it not a moment’s attention, except to make what is related -_seem_ probable in the reading—_seem_ true. Suppose he relates the -impossible; what then? Why, he has but passed over the line into the -realm of romance, the kingdom of Scott, Defoe, Hawthorne, Beckford and -the authors of the _Arabian Nights_—the land of the poets, the home -of all that is good and lasting in the literature of the imagination. -Do these little fellows, the so-called realists, ever think of the -goodly company which they deny themselves by confining themselves to -their clumsy feet and pursuing their stupid noses through the barren -hitherland, while just beyond the Delectable Mountains lies in light -the Valley of Dreams, with its tall immortals, poppy-crowned? Why, the -society of the historians alone would be a distinction and a glory! - - 1897. - - - - - WHO ARE GREAT? - - -The question having been asked whether Abraham Lincoln was the greatest -man this country ever produced, a contemporary writer signifies his own -view of the matter thus: - -“Abraham Lincoln was a great man, but I am inclined to believe that -history will reckon George Washington a greater.” - -But that is an appeal to an incompetent arbiter. History has always -elevated to primacy in greatness that kind of men—men of action, -statesmen and soldiers. In my judgment neither of the men mentioned is -entitled to the distinction. I should say that the greatest American -that we know about, if not George Sterling, was Edgar Allan Poe. I -should say that the greatest man is the man capable of doing the most -exalted, the most lasting and most beneficial intellectual work—and the -highest, ripest, richest fruit of the human intellect is indubitably -great poetry. The great poet is the king of men; compared with him, any -other man is a peasant; compared with his, any other man’s work is a -joke. What is it likely that remote ages will think of the comparative -greatness of Shakspeare and the most eminent of all Britain’s warriors -or statesmen? Nothing, for knowledge of the latter’s work will have -perished. Who was the greatest of Grecians before Homer? Because you -are unable to mention offhand the names of illustrious conquerors or -empire-builders of the period do you suppose there were none? Their -work has perished, that is all—as will perish the work of Washington -and Lincoln. But the _Iliad_ is with us. - -Their work has perished and our knowledge of it. Why? Because no -greater man made a record of it. If Homer had celebrated their deeds -instead of those of his dubious Agamemnon and impossible Achilles, we -should know about them—all that he chose to tell. For a comparison -between their greatness and his the data would be supplied by himself. -Men of action owe their fame to men of thought. The glory of the ruler, -the conqueror or the statesman belongs to the historian or the poet -who made it. He can make it big or little, at his pleasure; he upon -whom it is bestowed is as powerless in the matter as is any bystander. -If there were no writers how would you know that there was a Washington -or a Lincoln? How would you know that there is a Joseph Choate, who -was American Ambassador to Great Britain, or a Nelson Miles, sometime -Commander of our army? Suppose the writers of this country had in 1896 -agreed never again to mention the name of William J. Bryan; where would -have been his greatness? - -Great writers make great men or unmake them—or can if they like. They -kindle a glory where they please, or quench it where it has begun to -shine. History’s final judgment of Washington and Lincoln will depend -upon the will of the immortal author who chooses to write of them. -Their deeds, although a thousand times more distinguished, their -popularity, though a thousand times greater, can not save from oblivion -even so much as their names. And nothing that they built will abide. Of -the “topless towers” of empire that the one assisted to erect, and the -other to buttress, not a vestige will remain. But what can efface “The -Testimony of the Suns”? Who can unwrite “To Helen”? - -If there had been no Washington, American independence would -nevertheless have been won and the American republic established. But -suppose that he alone had taken up arms. He was neither indispensable -nor sufficient. Without Lincoln the great rebellion would have been -subdued and negro slavery abolished. What kind of greatness is that—to -do what another could have done, what was bound to be done anyhow? -I call it pretty cheap work. Great statesmen and great soldiers are -as common as flies; the world is lousy with them. We recognize their -abundance in the saying that the hour brings the man. We do not say -that of a literary emergency. There the demand is always calling for -the supply, and usually calling in vain. Once or twice in a century, it -may be, the great man of thought comes, unforeseen and unrecognized, -and makes the age and the glory thereof all his own by saying what none -but he could say—delivering a message which none but he could bear. All -round him swarm the little great men of action, laying sturdily about -them with mace and sword, changing boundaries which are afterward -changed back again, serving fascinating principles from which posterity -turns away, building states that vanish like castles of cloud, founding -thrones and dynasties with which Time plays at pitch-and-toss. But -through it all, and after it all, the mighty thought of the man of -words flows on and on with the resistless sweep of “the great river -where De Soto lies”—an unchanging and unchangeable current of eternal -good. - - They say the Lion and the Lizard keep - The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep; - And Bahram, that great Hunter—the wild ass - Stamps o’er his Head, but can not break his sleep. - -But the courts that Omar reared still stand, perfect as when he “hewed -the shaft and laid the architrave.” Not the lion and the lizard—we -ourselves keep them and glory in them and drink deep in them, as did -he. O’er his head, too, that good man and considerable poet, Mr. Edgar -Fawcett, stamped in vain; but a touch on a book, and lo! old Omar is -broad awake and with him wakens Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a -lute.” - -Art and literature are the only things of permanent interest in this -world. Kings and conquerors rise and fall; armies move across the -stage of history and disappear in the wings; mighty empires are evolved -and dissolved; religions, political systems, civilizations flourish, -die and, except in so far as gifted authors may choose to perpetuate -their memory, are forgotten and all is as before. But the thought of -a great writer passes from civilization to civilization and is not -lost, although his known work, his very name, may perish. You can -not unthink a thought of Homer, but the deeds of Agamemnon are long -undone, and the only value that he has, the only interest, is that he -serves as material for poets. Of Cæsar’s work only that of the pen -survives. If a statue by Phidias, or a manuscript by Catullus, were -discovered to-day the nations of Europe would be bidding against one -another for its possession to-morrow—as one day the nations of Africa -may bid for a newly discovered manuscript of some one now long dead -and forgotten. Literature and art are about all that the world really -cares for in the end; those who make them are not without justification -in regarding themselves as masters in the House of Life and all others -as their servitors. In the babble and clamor, the pranks and antics -of its countless incapables, the tremendous dignity of the profession -of letters is overlooked; but when, casting a retrospective eye into -“the dark backward and abysm of time” to where beyond these voices -is the peace of desolation, we note the majesty of the few immortals -and compare them with the pigmy figures of their contemporary kings, -warriors and men of action generally—when across the silent battle -fields and hushed _fora_ where the dull destinies of nations were -determined, nobody cares how, we hear, - - like ocean on a western beach, - The surge and thunder of the Odyssey— - -then we appraise literature at its true value; and how little worth -while seems all else with which Man is pleased to occupy his fussy soul -and futile hands! - - 1901. - - - - - POETRY AND VERSE - - -Love of poetry is universal, but this is not saying much; for men -in general love it not as poetry, but as verse—the form in which -it commonly finds utterance, and in which its utterance is most -acceptable. Not that verse is essential to poetry; on the contrary, -some of the finest poetry extant (some of the passages of the Book -of Job, in the English version, for familiar examples) is neither -metric nor rhythmic. I am not quite sure, indeed, but the best test of -poetry yet discovered might not be its persistence or disappearance -when clad in the garb of prose. In this opinion I differ, though with -considerable reluctance, with General Lucius Foote, who asserts that -“every feature which makes poetry to differ from prose is the result -of expression.” This dictum he has fortified by but a single example: -he puts a stanza of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” into very -good prose. Now, for one who has at times come so perilously near to -writing genuine poetry as has General Foote, this is a little too bad. -Surely no man of so competent literary judgment ever before affected -to believe that Tennyson’s resonant patriotic lines were poetry, in -any sense. They are, however, a little less distant from it in General -Foote’s prose version—“There were some cannons on the right, and some -on the left, and some in front, and they fired with a great noise”—than -they are in the original. And I have the hardihood to add that as a -rule the “old favorites” of the lyceum—the ringing and rhetorical -curled darlings of the public—the “Address to the American Flag,” -“The Bells,” the “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night,” and all the ghastly -lot of them, are very rubbishy stuff, indeed. There are exceptions, -unfortunately, but to a cultivated taste—the taste of a mind that not -only knows what it likes, but knows and can definitely state why it -likes it—nine in ten of them are offencive. I say it is unfortunate -that there are exceptions. It is unfortunate as impairing the beauty -and symmetry of the rule, and unfortunate for the authors of the -exceptional poems, who must endure through life the consciousness that -their popularity is a cruel injustice. - -Far be it from me to underrate the value of the delicate and difficult -art of managing words. It is to poetry what color is to painting. The -thought is the outline drawing, which, if it be great, no dauber who -stops short of actually painting it out can make wholly mean, but to -which the true artist with his pigments can add a higher glory and -a new significance. No one who has studied style as a science and -endeavored to practice it as an art; no one who knows how to select -with subtle skill the word for the place; who balances one part of -his sentence against another; who has an alert ear for the harmony -of stops, cadences and inflections, orderly succession of accented -syllables and recurrence of related sounds—no one, in short, who knows -how to write prose can hold in light esteem an art so nearly allied -to his own as that of poetic expression, including as it does the -intricate one of versification, which itself embraces such a multitude -of dainty wisdoms. But expression is not all; while, on the one hand, -it can no more make a poetic idea prosaic than it can make falsehood -of truth, so, on the other, it is unable to elevate and beautify a -sentiment essentially vulgar or base. The experienced miner will no -more surely detect the presence of gold in the rough ore than a trained -judgment the noble sentiment in the crude or ludicrous verbiage in -which ignorance or humor may have cast it; and the terrier will with no -keener nose penetrate the disguise of the rat that has rolled in a bed -of camomile than the practiced intelligence detect the pauper thought -masquerading in fine words. The mind that does not derive a quiet -gratification from the bald statement that the course of the divine -river Alph was through caves of unknown extent, whence it fell into a -dark ocean, will hardly experience a thrill of delight when told by -Coleridge that - - Alph, the sacred river, ran - Through caverns measureless to man, - Down to a sunless sea. - -Nor would one who is capable of physically feeling the lines, - - Full many a glorious morning have I seen - Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, - -have disdained to be told by some lesser Shakspeare that he had -observed mornings so fine that the mountains blushed with pleasure to -be noticed by them. Poetry is too multiform and many sided for anyone -to dogmatize upon single aspects and phases of it as if they were -the whole; it has as many shapes as Proteus, and as many voices as a -violin. It sometimes thunders and sometimes it prattles; it shouts -and exults, but on occasion it can whisper. Crude and harsh at one -time, the voice of the muse is at another smooth, soft, exquisite, -luxurious; and again scholarly and polite. There is ornate poetry, like -the façade of a Gothic cathedral, and there is poetry like a Doric -temple. Poems there are which blaze like a parterre of all brilliant -flowers, and others as chaste and pallid as the white lily. It is all -good (though I hasten to explain with some alarm that I do not think -all verse is good) but the best minds are best agreed in awarding the -palm to poetry that is most severely simple in diction—in which are -fewest “inversions”—from which words of new coinage and compounding -are rigorously excluded, and the old are used in their familiar sense; -poetry, that is to say, that differs least in expression from the best -prose. A truly poetic line—a line that I never tire of repeating to -myself—is this from Byron: - - And the big rain comes dancing to the earth. - -It is from the description of a storm in the Alps, in “Childe Harold.” -I will quote the whole stanza in order that the reader may be reminded -how much of the excellence of this line depends upon its context: - - And this is in the night—most glorious night! - Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be - A sharer in thy fierce and far delight— - A portion of the tempest and of thee! - How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, - And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! - And now again ’tis black—and now the glee - Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, - As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth. - -It would not be difficult, were it worth while, to point out in this -stanza almost as many faults as it has lines; after the “lit lake” the -“phosphoric sea”—a simile that repeats the image and debauches it—is -singularly execrable, and the “young earthquake’s birth” is almost as -bad; but all the imperfections of the stanza count for nothing, for -they are redeemed by its merits, and particularly by that one splendid -line. Yet how could the thought it holds be more baldly stated? I only -stipulate that the rain shall be “big,” and “dancing” seem to be the -manner of its approach. With these not very hard, and perfectly fair, -conditions let ingenuity do its malevolent worst to vulgarize that -thought. These few instances prove, I hope, that poetry, whatever it -is, is something more than “words, words, words”—that there is such a -thing as poetry of the thought. - -But let us take a different kind of example. If poetry is all in the -manner, as General Foote avers, expression must be able to create -poetry out of anything; at least, no line has been drawn between the -prosaic ideas upon which expression can work its miracle and those -upon which it can not. I am, therefore, justified by a familiar law of -logic in assuming that it is meant that expression, by the mere magic -of method, can make any idea poetical. Now, I beg most respectfully to -submit the following problems to be “worked out” by believers in that -dictum: Make poetry of the thought that— - -(1) Glue is made from the hoofs of cattle, and (2) silk purses by -macerating the ears of sows in currant jelly. - -If anyone will build a superstructure of poetry upon either of those -“ideas” as a foundation I will be first and loudest in calling -attention to the glory of the edifice. - -I have said that men in general do not love poetry as poetry, but as -verse. They are pleased with verse, but if the verse contain poetry -they like it none the better for that. To the vast majority of the -readers of even the higher class newspapers, verse and poetry are -terms strictly synonymous. The pleasure they get from metre and rhyme -is merely physical or sensual. It is much the same kind of pleasure -as that derived from the clatter of a drum and the rhythmic clash -of cymbals, and altogether inferior to the delight that the other -instruments of a band produce. Emerson, I believe, accounts for our -delight in metrical composition by supposing metre to have some -close relation to the rhythmical recurrences within our physical -organization—respiration, the pulse-beat, etc. No doubt he is right, -and if so we need not take the trouble to deride the easy-going -intellect that is satisfied with sound for sentiment whenever the sound -is in harmony with the physical nature that perceives it, for in such -sounds is a natural charm. The old lady who found so much Christian -comfort in pronouncing the word “Mesopotamia” was nobody’s fool; the -word consists of two pure dactyls. - -For an example of the satisfaction the ordinary mind takes in mere -metre there is nothing better than the senseless refrains of popular -songs—things which make not even the pretense of containing ideas. -From the “hey ding a ding” of Shakspeare and the “luddy, fuddy,” etc., -of Mr. Lester Wallack’s famous thieves’ song in “Rosedale,” to the -“whack fol-de-rol” of inferior and less original composers, they are -all alike in appealing to nothing in the world but the sense of time. -And in this they differ in no essential particular from the verses in -the newspapers; for such ideas as these contain—and God knows they are -harmless—are probably never perfectly grasped by the reader, who, when -he has finished his “poem,” is very sure to be unable to tell you what -it is all about. I have proved this by repeated experiments, and I -believe I am not far wrong on the side of immoderation in saying that -of every one hundred adults who can read and write with ease, there -are ninety and nine to whom poetry is a sealed book—who not only do -not recognize it when read, but do not understand it when pointed out. -There is hardly any subject on which the ignorance of educated persons -is more deep, dark and universal. And in one sense it is hopeless. By -no set instruction can a knowledge of poetry be gained. It is (to those -having the capacity) a result of general refinement—the fruit of a -taste and judgment that come of culture. The difficulty of imparting it -is immensely enhanced by the want of a definition. If one have gift and -knowledge it is easy enough to say what is poetry, but not so easy to -say what poetry is. - -Hunters have a saying that a deer is safe from the man that never -misses. Likewise it may be said that the faultless poet gets no -readers; for, as the hunter can never miss only by never firing, so -the poet can avoid faults only by not writing. There is no such thing -in art or letters as attainable perfection; the utmost that any man -can hope to do is to make the sum and importance of his excellences so -exceed the sum and importance of his faults that the general impression -shall seem faultless—that the good shall divert attention from the bad -in the contemplation and efface it in the recollection. In considering -the character of a particular work and assigning it to its true place -amongst works of similar scope and design, we must, indeed, balance -merits against demerits, endeavoring in such a general way as the -nature of the problem permits, to say which preponderate, and to what -extent, making allowance in censure and modification in praise. But the -author of the work is to be rightly judged by a different method, and -he who has done great work is great, despite the number and magnitude -of his failures and imperfections. These may serve to point a moral -or illustrate a principle by its violation, but they do not and can -not dim the glory of the better performance. Is he not a strong man -who can lift a thousand pounds, notwithstanding that in acquiring the -ability he failed a hundred times to lift the half of it? Who was the -strongest man in the world—he who once lifted the greatest weight, -or he who twice lifted the second greatest? The author of “Paradise -Lost” wrote afterward “Paradise Regained.” He who wrote a poem called -“In Memoriam” wrote a thing called “The Northern Farmer.” Of what -significance is that? Shall we count also a man’s washing-list against -him? Suppose that Byron had not written the “Hours of Idleness”—would -that have enhanced the value of “Childe Harold”? Is our hoard of -Shakspearean pure gold the smaller because from the mine whence it came -came also some of the base metal of “Titus Andronicus”? Surely it does -not matter whether the hand that at one time wrote the lines “To Helen” -was at another time writing “The Bells” or whittling a pine shingle. -Literature is not like a game of billiards, in which the player is -rated according to his average. In estimating the relative altitudes of -mountain peaks we look no lower than their summits. - -In judging men by this broader method than that which we apply to -their work we do but practice that method whereby posterity arrives -at judgments so just and true that in their prediction consists the -whole science of criticism. To anticipate the verdict of posterity—that -is all the most daring critic aspires to do, and to do that he -should strive to exclude the evidence that posterity will not hear. -Posterity is a tribunal in which there will be no testimony for the -prosecution except what is inseparable from the strongest testimony -for the defence. It will consider no man’s bad work, for none will be -extant. Nay, it will not even attend to the palliating or aggravating -circumstances of his life and surroundings, for these too will have -been forgotten; if not lost from the records they will be whelmed under -mountains of similar or more important matter—Pelion upon Ossa of -accumulated “literary materials.” - -These are points to which the critics do not sufficiently attend—do -not, indeed, attend at all. They endeavor to anticipate the judgment -of posterity by a method as unlike posterity’s as their judgment and -ingenuity can make it. They attentively study their poet’s private -life and his relation to the time and its events in which he lived. -They go to his work for the key to his character, and return to his -character for the key to his work, then ransack his correspondence for -side-lights on both. They paw dusty records and forgotten archives; -they thumb and dog’s-ear the libraries; and he who can turn up an -original document or hitherto unnoted fact exults in the possession -of an advantage over his fellows that will justify the publication of -another volume to befog the question. Then comes posterity, calmly -overlooks the entire mass of ingenious irrelevance, fixes a tranquil -eye upon those lines which the poet has inscribed the highest, and -determines his mental stature as simply, as surely and with as little -assistance as Daniel discerning the hand of God in the letters blazing -upon the palace wall. - - - II - -The world is nearly all discovered, mapped and described. In the hot -hearts of two continents, and the “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed -ice” about the poles, uncertainty still holds sway over a lessening -domain, and there Fancy waves her joyous wing unclipped by knowledge. -As in the material world, so in the world of mind. The daring -incursions of conjecture have been followed and discredited by the -encroachments of science, whereby the limits of the unknown have been -narrowed to such mean dimensions that imagination has lost her free, -exultant stride, and moves with mincing step and hesitating heart. - -I do not mean to say that to-day knows much more that is worth -knowing than did yesterday, but that with regard to poetry’s -materials—the visible and audible without us, and the emotional -within—we have compelled a revelation of Nature’s secrets, and found -them uninteresting to the last degree. To the modern “instructed -understanding” she has something of the air of a detected impostor, -and her worshipers have neither the sincerity that comes from faith, -nor the enthusiasm that is the speech of sincerity. The ancients not -only had, as Dr. Johnson said, “the first rifling of the beauties of -Nature”; they had the immensely greater art advantage of ignorance of -her dull, vulgar and hideous processes, her elaborate movements tending -nowhither, and the aimless monotony of her mutations. The telescope -had not pursued her to the heights, nor the microscope dragged her -from her ambush. The meteorologists had not analyzed her temper, nor -constructed mathematical formulæ to forecast her smiles and frowns. -Mr. Edison had not arrived to show that the divine gift of speech -(about the only thing that distinguishes men, parrots, and magpies -from the brutes) is also an attribute of metal. In the youth of the -world they had, in short, none of the disillusionizing sciences with -which a critical age, delving curiously about the roots of things, has -sapped the substructure of religion and art alike. I do not regret the -substitution of knowledge for conjecture, and doubt for faith; I only -say that it has its disadvantages, and among them we reckon the decay -of poesy. In an enlightened age, Macaulay says, - - Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will - talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain - extent enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the - effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, - the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek rhapsodists, - according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into - convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping-knife while he - shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales - and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers - almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a civilized - community, and most rare among those who participate most in its - improvements. They linger among the peasantry. - -While it is true in a large sense that the world’s greatest poets have -lived in rude ages, when their races were not long emerged from the -night of barbarism—like birds the poets sing best at sunrise—it must -not be supposed that similarly favorable conditions are supplied to -a rude individual intelligence in an age of polish. With a barbarous -age that had recently set its face to the dawn a Joaquin Miller would -have been in full sympathy, and might have interpreted its spirit in -songs of exceeding splendor. But the very qualities that would have -made him _en rapport_ with such an era make him an isolated voice in -ours; while Tennyson, the man of culture, full of the disposition of -his time—albeit the same is of less adequate vitality—touches with a -valid hand the harp which the other beats in vain. The altar is growing -cold, the temple itself becoming a ruin; the divine mandate comes with -so feeble and faltering a voice that the priest has need of a trained -and practiced ear to catch it and the gift of tongues to impart its -meaning to a generation concerned with the unholy things whose voice -is prose. As a poetical mental attitude, that of doubt is meaner -than that of faith, that of speculation less commanding than that of -emotion; yet the poet of to-day must assume them, and “In Memoriam” -attests the wisdom of him who “stoops to conquer”—loyally accepting -the hard conditions of his epoch, and bending his corrigible genius in -unquestioning assent to the three thousand and thirty-nine articles of -doubt. - -As inspiration grows weak and acceptance disobedient, form of delivery -becomes of greater moment; in so far as it can, the munificence of -manner must mitigate the poverty of matter; so it occurs that the -poets of later life excel their predecessors in the delicate and -difficult arts and artifices of versification as much as they fall -below them in imagination and power. - - 1878. - - - - - THOUGHT AND FEELING - - -“What is his idea?—what thought does he express?” asks—rather loftily—a -distinguished critic and professor of English literature to whom I -submitted a brief poem of Mr. Loveman. I had not known that Mr. Loveman -(of whom, by the way, I have not heard so much as I expect to) had -tried to express a thought; I had supposed that his aim was to produce -an emotion, a feeling. That is all that a poet—as a poet—can do. He -may be philosopher as well as poet—may have a thought, as profound a -thought as you please, but if he do not express it so as to produce an -emotion in an emotional mind he has not spoken as a poet speaks. It is -the philosopher’s trade to make us think, the poet’s to make us feel. -If he is so fortunate as to have his thought, well and good; he can -make us feel, with it as well as without—and without it as well as with. - -One would not care to give up the philosophy that underruns so much of -Shakspeare’s work, but how little its occasional absence affects our -delight is shown by the reading of such “nonsense verses” as the song -in a “As You Like It,” beginning: - - It was a lover and his lass, - With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino. - -One does not need the music; the lines sing themselves, and are full of -the very spirit of poetry. What the dickens they may chance to mean is -quite another matter. What is poetry, anyhow, but “glorious nonsense”? -But how very glorious the nonsense happens to be! What “thought” did -Ariel try to express in his songs in “The Tempest”? There is hardly -the tenth part of a thought in them; yet who that has a rudimentary, -or even a vestigial, susceptibility to sentiment and feeling, can -read them without the thrill that is stubborn to the summoning of the -profoundest reflections of Hamlet in his inkiest cloak? - -Poetry may be conjoined with thought. In the great poets it commonly -is—that is to say, we award the palm to him who is great in more than -one direction. But the poetry is a thing apart from the thought and -demanding a separate consideration. The two have no more essential -connection than the temple and its granite, the statue and its bronze. -Is the sculptor’s work less great in the clay than it becomes in the -hands of the foundry man? - -No one, not the greatest poet nor the dullest critic, knows what -poetry is. No man, from Milton down to the acutest and most -pernicious lexicographer, has been able to define its name. To catch -that butterfly the critic’s net is not fine enough by much. Like -electricity, it is felt, not known. If it could be known, if the secret -were accessible to analysis, why, one could be taught to write poetry -without having been “born unto singing.” - -So it happens that the most penetrating criticism must leave eternally -unsaid the thing that is most worth saying. We can say of a poem as -of a picture, an Ionic column, or any work of art: “It is charming!” -But why and how it charms—there we are dumb, its creator no less than -another. - -What is it in art before which all but the unconscious peasant and the -impenitent critic confess the futility of speech? Why does a certain -disposition of words affect us deeply when if differently arranged to -mean the same thing they stir no emotion whatever? He who can answer -that has surprised the secret of the Sphinx, and after him shall be no -more poetry forever! - -Expound who is able the charm of these lines from “Kubla Khan:” - - A damsel with a dulcimer - In a vision once I saw. - It was an Abyssinian maid, - And on her dulcimer she played, - Singing of Mount Abora. - -There is no “thought” here—nothing but the baldest narrative in common -words arranged in their natural order; but upon whose heart-strings -does not that maiden play?—and who does not adore her? - -Like the entire poem of which they are a part, and like the entire -product of which the poem is a part, the lines are all imagination -and emotion. They address, not the intellect, but the heart. Let the -analyst of poetry wrestle with them if he is eager to be thrown. - - 1903. - - - - - THE TIMOROUS REPORTER - - - - - THE PASSING OF SATIRE - - -“Young man,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not commonly permit -myself to be ‘interviewed’; what paper do you represent?” - -The Timorous Reporter spoke the name of the great journal that was -connected with him. - -“I never have heard of it,” said the Melancholy Author. “I trust that -it is devoted to the interests of Literature.” - -Assurance was given that it had a Poets’ Corner and that among its -regular contributors it numbered both Aurora Angelina Aylmer and -Plantagenet Binks, the satirist. - -“Indeed,” said the great man, “you surprise me! I had supposed that -satire, once so large and wholesome an element in English letters, was -long dead and d—— pardon me—buried. You must bear with me if I do not -concede the existence of Mr. Binks. Satire cannot co-exist with so -foolish sentiments as ‘the brotherhood of man,’ ‘the trusteeship of -wealth,’ moral irresponsibility, tolerance, Socialism and the rest of -it. Who can ‘lash the rascals naked through the world’ in an age that -holds crime to be a disease, and converts the prison into a sanitarium?” - -The Timorous Reporter ventured to ask if he considered crime a symptom -of mental health. By way of fortifying himself for a reply, the -melancholy one visited the sideboard and toped a merciless quantity of -something imperfectly known to his visitor from the arid South. - -“Crime, sir,” said he, partly recovering, “is merely a high degree of -selfishness directed by a low degree of intelligence. If selfishness -is a disease none of us is altogether well. We are all selfish, or -we should not be living, but most of us have the discernment to see -that our permanent advantage does not lie in gratification of our -malevolence by murder, nor in augmenting our possessions by theft. -Those of us who think otherwise should be assisted to a saner view by -punishment. It is sad, so sad, to reflect that many of us escape it.” - -“But it is agreed,” said the journalist, “by all our illustrious -sociologists—Brand Whitlock, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs and Emma -Goldman—that punishment is useless, that it does not deter; and they -prove it by the number of convictions recorded against individual -criminals. Will you kindly say if they are right?” - -“They know that punishment deters—not perfectly, for nothing is -perfect, but it deters. If every human institution that lamentably -fails to accomplish its full purpose is to be abolished none will -remain.” - -The Timorous Reporter begged to be considered worthy to know what, -apart from its great wisdom and interest, all this had to do with -satire. - -“Satire,” said the Melancholy Author, “is punishment. As such it has -fallen into public disfavor through disbelief in its justice and -efficacy. So the rascals go unlashed. Instead of ridicule we have -solemn reprobation; for wit we have ‘humor’—with a slang word in the -first line, two in the second and three in the third. Why, sir, the -American reading public hardly knows that there ever was a distinctive -kind of writing known, technically, as satire—that it was once not -only a glory to literature but, incidentally, a terror to all manner -of civic and personal unworth. If we had to-day an Aristophanes, a -Jonathan Swift or an Alexander Pope, he would indubitably be put into a -comfortable prison with all sanitary advantages, fed upon yellow-legged -pullets and ensainted by the Little Brothers of the Bad. For they would -think him a thief. In the same error, the churches would pray for him -and the women compete for his hand in marriage.” - -The thought of so great a perversion of justice overcame the creator -of the vision and he sank into a chair already occupied by the cat—a -contested seat. - - - - - SOME DISADVANTAGES OF GENIUS - - -“My child,” said the Melancholy Author, “the sharpest affliction -besetting a man of genius is genius.” - -The Timorous Reporter ventured to explain that he had been taught -otherwise. - -“In the first place,” continued the Melancholy Author, inattentive -to dissent, “the man of genius cannot hope to be understood by his -contemporaries. The more they concede his genius, the less will they -comprehend any particular manifestation of it. Carlyle has said that -the first impression of a work of genius is disagreeable. There are -magazines and publishing houses that say they receive as many as -twenty-five thousand manuscripts a year. Of course, as Dr. Holmes -pointed out, one does not have to eat an entire cheese to know if he -likes it—it is needless to read all manuscripts through to the bitter -end. But how if in those that are really great the apparently bitter -end is the beginning? If the first impression is disagreeable—to one -who is _not_ a genius, just an editor—what chance of acceptance has the -work?” - -Not daring to affirm his steadfast conviction that all editors are men -of genius, the interviewer suffered in (and from) silence, and the -great man went on: - -“Furthermore, the work of a man of genius is necessarily different from -that of all others; by that difference, indeed, it is credentialed—to -posterity—as a work of genius. But the editor, or the publisher’s -reader—will he feel sure of his ground when dealing with that to which -he is unaccustomed?—of whose acceptability to the public he is without -the _criteria_ to judge? With an abiding though secret sense of his -own fallibility, will he not think it expedient to take the safe side -and reject the work? That will at least entail no possible ‘difference -of opinion’ with his employer. Dead manuscripts tell no tales. Sir, in -the noble profession of letters it is the rule, attested by a thousand -familiar instances, that the man of genius is starved by those whose -successors in the seats of authority pay enormous prices for any -scrap of his work that may survive him. Consider the case of Poe, of -Lafcadio Hearn—who confessed that in the last dozen years of his life -his average annual earnings by his pen did not exceed five hundred -dollars. And I am no millionaire myself.” - -As the Melancholy Author paused to celebrate his poverty at the -sideboard his auditor cautiously advanced the view that several living -writers of indubitable genius were pretty prosperous. - -“Despite their genius,” said the great man, drying his lips with -his coat-sleeve, “and because of something else. One of them may -have the good fortune to take the attention of some distinguished -person having the world’s ear at his tongue’s end, and the habit of -loquacity—a person like Colonel Roosevelt, or the late Mr. Gladstone. -Did not the latter, by a few words of commendation, provide for life -for Mrs. Humphry Ward and for eternity for Marie Bashkirtseff? True, -the one is impenitently dull and the other was a shrilling lunatic; -but by accident he _might_ have praised an author of consummate -ability. Another really great writer may be prosperous—that is to -say, popular—because of some engaging mannerism or artifice; as Mr. -Kipling bends from his Olympian omniscience to flatter his readers -with colloquial familiarity. Another, like Dickens, may have the good -luck to be an amusing vulgarian, or, like Mr. Riley, be willing to -write lyrics of the pumpkin-field in the ‘dialect’ of those who eat -pumpkins. It may happen, too, although in point of fact it never does -happen, that a man of genius is at the little end of a long, brass -trumpet—I mean, is editor of Our Leading Magazine. Even conceding your -entire claim for these fortunate persons (which I do not) it is clear -that their genius has had nothing to do with their success. You are a -hebetudinous futilitarian!” - -The Timorous Reporter “shrank to his second cause and was no more.” -On reviving, he humbly submitted that he had affirmed nothing of the -authors named, nor even mentioned them. - -“Genius has been a thousand times defined,” resumed the oracle, -regardless; “nevertheless we know fairly well what, partly, it is. -_Inter alia_, it is the faculty of knowing things without having to -learn them. When Hugo wrote his immortal narrative of Waterloo he had -never seen a battle; nor was Dickens ever in solitary confinement -in the Pennsylvania penitentiary. But will the possessor of this -miraculous faculty profit by it, or even be able rightly to use it in -the service of another’s gain? No; in his dealings with his fellow -men, editors and publishers included, he will find them unaware, and -unable to perceive, that he knows any more than they do. He will -encounter, indeed, the most insuperable distrust, even from those who -concede his genius; for genius is almost universally held to be a -particular kind of brilliant disability. The story of Homer instructing -the sandal-maker how to make foot-gear is, of course, apocryphal, but -no more credence is given to the authentic instance of Lord Brougham -showing the brewer how to make beer. Even those who assent to the -best definition of genius ever made—‘great general ability directed -into a particular channel’—will unconsciously assume that it is -confined to that channel, and will assist in keeping it there. Its -most distinguishing feature—versatility—the power to do many kinds -of work equally well—will get no contemporary recognition. Having a -reputation for writing great stories (for example) you will write -equally great essays, satires and what not, all in vain. It is only to -mediocrity that ‘great general ability’ is conceded. That is why the -late William Sharp, turning to another kind of work than that in which -he had distinguished himself, took a feminine name, and, secure from -disparaging comparison with himself, was accessible to commendation. -As the work of William Sharp, that of ‘Fiona McLeod’ would have evoked -a chorus of deprecation as evidence of failing power. In literature, a -single specialty is all that contemporary criticism is willing to allow -to genius. Posterity tells a juster tale, albeit disposed to go to the -other extreme, seeing something of the fire divine in even the paste -jewels wherewith the great lapidary pelted the wolf from his door.” - -“Then you would advise the writer of distinction to stick to -his—latest?” - -“That will not save him. The criticism that will not concede -versatility will deny stability. After a few years, the man of genius, -however he may confine himself to the kind of work in which, despite -its excellence, he has been successful, must face the inevitable and -solemn judgment that he has ‘exhausted the vein,’ ‘fallen down,’ -‘gone stale.’ It matters not if practice and years have ripened his -imagination, broadened his knowledge and refined his taste—for great -minds do not decay with age; his contemporaries will have it that he -is ‘written out,’ for he is no longer a new thing under the sun.” - -The Melancholy Author himself looks hardly more than seventy-five. - -“‘Written out, written out’—England said so of Dickens and Tennyson; -America said so of Bret Harte; both have for five years been saying so -of Kipling. The great writer is likely, by the way, to share that view -himself, as Thackeray, reading over some of his early work, exclaimed: -‘What a giant I was in those days!’ - -“Another lion in the path of genius is its own success—the low kind of -success that is called popularity, for which some sons of the gods, -with their bellies sticking to their backs, really do strive. Let one -of them achieve a result of this kind and he will find it all the -harder to achieve another. Read Stockton’s story of ‘My Wife’s Deceased -Sister.’ The narrator tells how, having published a popular tale with -that title, he was ever thereafter what is called in the slang to which -your detestable profession is addicted, ‘a dead one.’ Editors would -take nothing that he offered, but always begged for something like ‘My -Wife’s Deceased Sister.’ Sir, I know how it feels to go up against -that invincible competitor, oneself. After publication of my famous -story, ‘The Maiden Pirate,’ my greater (and even longer) work, ‘A -Treatise on the Chaldean Dative Case,’ was rejected by twenty editors! -Let the man of genius beware of popularity; one slip of that kind and -a brilliant future is behind him. But it does not greatly matter, for -even without incurring the mischance of a ‘hit,’ the great writer is, -as I said, foredoomed to the charge of degeneracy.” - -The Timorous Reporter humbly murmured the names of Hall Caine, Henry -James, the late F. Marion Crawford, Mrs. Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss -Mary Murfree, Miss Mary Edward Bok, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Ella Wheeler -Sylvester Vierick, and the venerable Hildegarde Hawthorne—then edged -himself softly toward an open door. With unforeseen resourcefulness, -the sad-eyed deprecator of dissent seized a convenient missile, but it -happened to be a decanter of Medford rum, and the situation was saved. -With fortified solemnity the father of the maiden pirate again took up -his parable: - -“Certain literary domains are posted with warnings to the trespasser, -and against men of genius the inhibition is fiercely enforced. -Irruptions of mediocrity entail no penalty because unobserved by -the constabulary. The supposed proprietors of these guarded estates -are long dead, leaving no heirs; the ‘notices’ are put up without -authority, for the land is really a common. One of these closed areas -is that of Jonathan Swift, who dispossessed some of the successors of -Lucian. Whom Lucian dispossessed we do not know, all evidences of an -earlier occupancy than his having been effaced by the burning of the -great library at Alexandria. All, doubtless, incurred ‘the penalty of -the law,’ each in his turn, from the dunces of his day. The ‘penalty’ -is execration as an imitator. Long before Swift, and probably long -before Lucian, an accepted method of satire was comparison of actual -with imaginary civilizations, through tales of fictitious travelers -in unreal regions. But since Swift, woe to the writer having the -hardihood to adopt the method, however candidly avowed, and however -different the manner! It is as if guardians of Homer’s fame had chased -Dante and Camoëns out of the field of the epic, and had put up the -bars against Milton. Nay, it is as if an engineer platting a survey -were accused of imitating Euclid. True, Virgil, who did imitate Homer -most shamelessly, escapes censure. I fancy the Proponents-Militant of -Originality have not heard of him. - -“In our own day Bret Harte wrote charming sketches of life and -character in Californian mining camps. Many others had done so before -him, but for many years after his first work in that field none could -enter it without incurring austere denunciation as imitator and -plagiarist; and even to-day one having the experience to observe or -the genius to imagine the life of a Californian mining camp, or any -interesting feature of it, delivers his tidings, like the heralds of -old, at his peril. - -“Another of these posted preserves is that of satire in iambic -pentameter verse. This mode of expression is supposed to belong -by right divine to Alexander Pope, who made the most constant and -cleverest use of it. With its concomitants of epigram and antithesis, -it was old before Pope was young. He was himself a ‘trespasser’; he -was roundly reviled for imitating Dryden. The form was used by other -Queen Anne’s men, acceptably by Johnson and by many a later; but of -this the patrolmen and gatekeepers of the Pope reservation in our day -have not been apprised by ‘report divine’—the only way that they can -be made to know anything, for read, the devil a bit do they. In the -literary landscape they see only the highest peaks of the Delectable -Mountains. They know only the large, familiar figures, and these only -by their most characteristic work. To their indurated understandings -each individual of this bright band stands for a particular field of -composition. His title to exclusive possession is _res adjudicata_. If -anybody set foot across the sacred boundary—little fellows excepted—he -will find himself the fundamental element in a cone of pummeling -custodians. Young man, in your report of this interview you will be -good enough to quote me as deprecating that situation.” - -The interviewer pledged his life, his sacred fortune and his honor to -the performance of that duty, and the great man resumed: - -“Of all these inhibiting _censores literarum_, the most austere and -implacable are those guarding the sovereignty of Poe. They have made -his area of activity a veritable _mare clausum_—as if he were - - the first that ever burst - Into that silent sea.” - -The Timorous Reporter signified his sense of the speaker’s fertility of -metaphor: there had been an inundation (of words) and the “estate” had -become a “sea.” He whistled softly “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” - -“It was not an unknown sea; it was cris-crossed by the wakes of a -thousand ships and charted to the last reef. Tales of the tragic and -the supernatural are the earliest utterances in every literature. When -the savage begins to talk he begins to tell wonder tales of death and -mystery—of terror and the occult. Tapping, as they do, two of the -three great mother-lodes of human interest, these tales are a constant -phenomenon—the most permanent, because the most fascinating, element -in letters. Great Scott! has the patrol never heard of _The Thousand -and One Nights_, of _The Three Spaniards_, of Horace Walpole, of ‘Monk’ -Lewis, of De Quincey, of Maturin, Ingemann, Blicher, Balzac, Hoffmann, -Fitz James O’Brien?” - -The reporter summoned the boldness to say that the charge of imitation -had not been made against De Maupassant, who certainly was not an -unobserved “little fellow,” and was contemporary with the offending -critics. - -“Why, sir,” said the Melancholy Author, “you forget—he wrote in -French. Translations? Dear me, have there been translations? How sad! - -“As to ‘originality’ that is merely a matter of manner. The ancients -exhausted the possibilities of method. In respect of that, one cannot -hope to do much that is both new and worth doing, but there are as -many styles—that is, ways of doing—as writers. One can no more help -having some individuality in manner than one can help looking somewhat -different from anybody else, although hopeless of being much of a -giant, or unique as to number and distribution of arms, legs and head. -But, sir, this demand for ‘originality’ is a call for third-rate men, -who alone supply such a semblance of it as is still possible. The -writer of sane understanding and wholesome ambition is content to -meet his great predecessors on their own ground. He enters the public -stadium, and although perversely handicapped because of his no record -and mocked by the _claque_; and although the spectators are sure to -declare him beaten, that ultimate umpire, Posterity, will figure the -matter out, and may announce a different result.” - -The reporter has reason to think that much more was said, but he had -the misfortune to fall asleep; and when wakened by the sound of a -closing door he was alone. “My!” he said; “I have had a narrow escape; -if the man that once proclaimed me a genius had not happened to be a -fool I know not what evils might have befallen me.” - - 1909. - - - - - OUR SACROSANCT ORTHOGRAPHY - - -“No,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not understand British -criticism of American attempts at spelling reform. The claim of our -insular cousins to a special ownership and particular custody of -our language is impudent. English is not a benefaction that we owe -to living Englishmen, nor a loan to be enjoyed, under conditions -prescribed by the creditors. When our ancestors ‘came over’ they did -not sign away any rights of revision of their own speech; and if a man -come not honestly by his mother-tongue I know not what he may be said -legitimately to own. I am not addicted to intemperate words, and harsh -retaliation does not engage my assent, but when I see an Englishman -reaching ‘hands across the sea’ to punish what he chooses to call an -infraction of the laws of _his_ language, I am tempted to slap his -wrist.” - -In the presence of this portentous incarnation of justice the Timorous -Reporter trembled appropriately and was silent in all the dialects of -his native land and Kansas. - -“What would they have,” continued the great, sad man—“these -‘conservatives’? A language immune to change? That would be a dead -language and we should have to evolve a successor. Ours has never been -a changeless tongue; nothing is more mutable, even in its orthography. -As it existed a few centuries ago it is now unintelligible except to a -few specialists, yet every change has encountered as fierce hostility -as any that is now proposed. Compare a page of ‘Beowulf’ with a page -of the London _Times_ or _The Spectator_ and see what incalculable -quantities of ‘crow’ the luckless ‘guardians of our noble tongue’ have -had to swallow. Do you wonder, young man, that they are a dyspeptic -folk? And did not Dr. Samuel Johnson formulate a great truth in the -dictum that ‘every sick man is a scoundrel’?” - -“Surely,” ventured the Timorous Reporter, “you would not apply so harsh -a word to the great English reviewers, nor to our own beloved Professor -Harry Thurston Peck!” - -“To be consistent these gentlemen should not demand that the -spelling remain as it is, for its present condition is the result -of innumerable defeats of themselves and their predecessors by hardy -‘corruptors.’ It is pusillanimous of them not only to accept a -situation that has been forced upon them but to proclaim it sacred and -fight for its eternal maintenance. They should be making heroic efforts -to restore at least the spelling of Hakluyt and Sir John Mandeville. It -is not so very long since a few timid innovators began (as secretly as -the nature of the rebellious act would permit) to leave off the ‘k’ in -such words as ‘musick’ ‘publick’ and so forth. Instantly - - The wonted roar was up amid the woods, - And filled the air with barbarous dissonance— - -the self-appointed ‘guardians of our noble tongue’ rose as one old lady -and swore that rather than submit they would run away! That sacred ‘k’ -is no more, but they are with us yet, untaught by failure and unstilled -by shame. It is the nature of a fool to hate a thing when it is new, -adore it when it is current, and despise it when it is obsolete.” - -Pleased with his epigram, the Melancholy Author so accentuated the -sadness of his countenance as to invite a sincere compassion. - -“We hear much from the scholar-folk about the importance of preserving -the derivation of words, not only as a guide to their meaning, but -because from the genealogy and biography of words we get instructive -side-lights on the history and customs of nations. That is all true: -philology is a useful and fascinating study. Read _The Queen’s English_ -of the late Dean Alford if you think it is not. (Incidentally, I -may mention my own humble volumes on _The Genesis and Evolution of -‘Puss’ as the Vocative Form of ‘Cat.’_) But derivation is really not -a very sure guide to signification. For example, what do I learn -of the meaning of ‘desultory’ by knowing that it is from the Latin -‘desultor,’ a circus performer that leaps from horse to horse? In many -instances the origin of a word is misleading, as in ‘miscreant,’ which, -etymologically, means nothing worse than ‘unbeliever.’ Of course it is -interesting to hear in it a lingering echo of an ecclesiastic damning -in a time when nothing worse than an unbeliever was thought to exist. - -“But, as the late Prof. Schele de Vere pointed out, the roots of words -are better disclosed in their sound than in their spelling. By phonetic -spelling only can their pronunciation be made nearly uniform—if that -is an advantage. If this is not obvious, human intelligence is a shut -clam.” - -The creator of this beautiful figure celebrated it at the sideboard and -resumed his illuminating discourse. - -“To those who deem it worth while to be happy, the study of derivations -is, indeed, a perpetual banquet of delights, but it is important to -remember that language is not merely, nor chiefly, a plaything for -scholars, but a thing of utility in the conduct of life and affairs. To -its service in that character all obstruent considerations should, and -eventually do, give way. It may please, and to some extent profit, to -know that ‘phthisis’ comes from the Greek ‘phthio’—to waste away—but -if in order that one may see this, as well as hear it, I must so spell -it as to deny to certain letters of the alphabet their customary and -established powers I protest against the desecration. Our orthography -has no greater sanctity than have the vested rights of the vowels and -consonants by which we achieve it. Why do not ‘the whiskered pandours -and the fierce hussars’ of conservatism stand forth as champions of -that noble Roman, the English alphabet? - -“Yes, I concede the importance of being able to trace the origin -of words, for words are thoughts, and their history is a record of -intellectual progress, but in very few of them would a simplified, even -a consistently phonetic, spelling tend to obscure the trail by which -they came into the language. And as to these few, why not learn their -origin from the dictionaries once for all and have done with it? The -labor would be incomparably less than that of learning to spell as we -do.” - -Impressed but not silenced, the thirsty soul at the fountain of wisdom -cautiously advanced the view that the reformed spelling is uncouth to -the eye. - -“It is most dispiriting,” said the oracle, in the low, sad tones that -served to distinguish him from the bagpipes of Skibo castle, “to -hear from the beardless lips of youth a folly so appropriate to age -and experience. To the unobservant, any change in the familiar looks -disagreeable. The newest fashion in silk hats looks ridiculous; a -little later the old style looks worse. To me nothing is uncouth: the -most refined and elevated sentiment loses nothing by its expression in -as nearly phonetic spelling as our inadequate alphabet will permit. -For my reading you may spell like Josh Billings if you will not write -like him.” - -“From all that you have been kind enough to say,” said the Timorous -Reporter, with a sudden access of courage that alarmed him, “I infer -that in your forthcoming great work, _The Tyrant Preposition_, you will -employ the Skibonese philanthropography.” - -“Not I. Courage is an excellent thing in man: the soldier is useful; -but each to his trade. Mine, sir,” he concluded, with a note of pride -underrunning the grave, sweet monotony of his discourse, “is writing.” - - - - - THE AUTHOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY - - -“To the literary man,” said the Melancholy Author, “life is not all -‘beer and skittles’ by much. He is in a peculiar sense the custodian of -‘troubles of his own.’ Of these, one of the most insupportable grows -out of the fact that almost every man, woman or child thinks himself, -herself or itself an expert in literature, and the literary man a -Heaven-sent Opportunity. No hawk ever watched a plump pullet detaching -itself from the flock, with a more possessing delight than burns in -the bosom of the average human being when a defenceless author ‘swims -into his ken.’ Lord, Lord, with what alacrity he swoops down upon the -incautious wight and holds him with his glittering eye to ‘talk books’ -at him! - -“He knows it all, the good assailant—knows all about books, -particularly ‘the English classics’ and the newest novel. This -knowledge—consisting, at the best, in whatever is current in popular -criticism of the newspaper and magazine sort—he has quite persuaded -himself is knowledge of Literature. It never occurs to the good -creature that books are not literature; that he might have read every -book in the world yet know no more of literature than a horned toad. -Naturally, you do not care to explain to him that literature is an -art—the art of which books are merely a result. He sees the result, but -of the art behind them he knows not even so much as its existence. - -“He thinks that good writing is done as naturally, instinctively and -with as little training as a bird sings in a tree, or a pig in a gate. -He would be willing to admit that good painting cannot be done, good -music executed, a good plea made in court, or good medical attendance -given to the sick, without a deal of hard study of principles and -methods. But writing—why, writing is merely setting down what you -think; everybody writes. - -“Even the literary critic—may hornets afflict him!—cannot be -intelligently objectionable without a technical knowledge of his -business. A great poet has said: - - A man must serve his time at every trade, - Save censure; critics all are ready made. - -“And ‘censure’ here, you will have the goodness to observe, means not -condemnation, as in our common speech, but the passing of judgment of -any kind on the work of another. - -“Suppose you were a famous electrician, and all other persons, eager to -show you that they, too, know a thing or two and solemnly persuaded of -the necessity of regaling you with scraps from your own table, should -gravely define electricity as a ‘mysterious force,’ express to you the -belief that it is destined to ‘revolutionize the world’ and declare -their admiration of Benjamin Franklin’s gigantic achievement in drawing -it from a cloud. Suppose you could turn away from one tormentor only -to fall into the hands of another and another, all uttering the same -infantile babble—the same shallow platitudes, the same false judgment. -That would be no more than we authors have to endure, and smile in the -endurance. Nay, not so much, for not only do we have to suffer all this -talk of the ‘shop’—our shop—with all its irritating idiocy, but if we -open our mouths to say something worth while, God help us!—we’ve a -‘fight’ on hand forthwith. For it is of the nature of ignorance to be -disputatious, contentious, cantankerous. The more a man does not know, -the more aggressive his manner of not knowing it. Venture to rack one -of his ugly literary idols by so much as the breadth of a finger and—!” - -Unable to suppress his emotion, the Melancholy Author rose and strode -three paces toward an open door, then turned and, striding back again, -dropped into his seat and tried to look unconcerned. - -“The very persons who seek your society because they honestly admire -your intellect will resent every manifestation of it. Whatever they -do not understand, whatever is unfamiliar to them, is bad—false and -immoral and insincere. Why, I remember a woman who came four hundred -miles to see me—to sit at my feet, she was kind enough to say, and -partake of my wisdom. In less than ten minutes she was angrily -affirming the unworth of my opinions and attempting to inoculate me -with her own. What did I do? My friend, what could I do, but wait until -the storm had subsided and then express my admiration of the pink bow -that she wore at her throat. Alas, I had sailed into a zone of storms, -for it was cherry, and away went she! - -“Now, I am willing to talk of literature—it is one of the delights of -my life to do so. I am even willing to ‘talk books.’ But it must be -with my equals, or with those who show some sense of the fact that a -lifetime passed in the study of my art, and in its practice counts for -something. Few things are more agreeable than imparting knowledge to -those who in good faith and decent humility seek it; and such there -are. I know some of them, and in their service find enough to do to -keep me awake nearly all day. But the other sort: readers of brand-new -books and reviews thereof; persons who think the ancients were -barbarians; philosophers by birth and critics by inspiration who know -it all without having learned any part of it—may Heaven,” concluded the -Melancholy Author, with a fine flourish of his right hand, “bestow them -as friends upon my enemies.” - - - - - ON POSTHUMOUS RENOWN - - -“No,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not expect my name to be -shouted in brass on the frieze of Miss Helen Gould’s ‘Temple of Fame.’” - -The Timorous Reporter ventured to inquire if that was because he had -the misfortune to be alive. - -“That is a disqualification that time will remove,” answered the -Melancholy Author. “The ground of my hope is different: I shall cause -to be inscribed upon my tombstone the lines following: - - Good friends, for Jesus’ sake forbear - To grieve the soul that’s gone to—where? - Blest be the man that spares my fame, - And curst be he that flaunts my name! - -“The lines are admirable and extremely original,” said the Timorous -Reporter. “May I ask if your reluctance to have your name emblazoned -in the Temple is due to disesteem of the methods and results of -selection, or to that innate modesty which serves to distinguish you -from the violet?” - -“To neither. It is due to my consciousness of the futility of all -attempts to perpetuate an individual fame. When I die my fame will die -with me. It is mine no longer than I live to bear it. When there is no -nominative there can be no possessive. - -“For illustration, you speak of Shakspeare’s fame. But there is no -Shakspeare. The fame that you speak of is not ‘his’; it is ours—yours, -mine and John Smith’s. To call it ‘his’—why, sir, that is as if one -should concede the ownership of property to a vacuum. The dead are -poor—they have nothing. Our mental confusion in this matter is no doubt -largely due to our imperfect grammar: we have not enough cases in our -declension; or, rather, there are not enough names for the cases that -we have. In the phrase ‘a horse’s tail’ we say rightly that ‘horse’s’ -is in the possessive case: the animal really possesses—owns—the tail. -But in the phrase ‘a horse’s price’ there is no possessive, for the -horse does not own the price: there should be another name for the -case. When dead, the horse does not own even the tail. It is the -same with ‘Shakspeare’s fame’: while he lived the phrase contained a -possessive case; now it is something different—merely what the Latin -calls a genitive. Our name for it misleads the unenlightened and makes -them think of a dead man as owning things. One of my ambitions, I may -add, is to bring English grammar into conformity with fact, promoting -thereby every moral, intellectual and material interest of the race!” - -The Timorous Reporter summoned the courage to rouse him from ecstatic -contemplation of the glory of his great reform by directing his -disobedient attention to the fact that the Latin grammar, also, -is defective, in that its genitive case is not supplemented by a -possessive; yet the Romans appear to have had a pretty definite -conception of “mine” and “thine,” albeit the latter was less lucidly -apprehended than the former, and held a humbler place in the national -conscience. Deigning to ignore the argument, the Melancholy Author -resumed his discourse: - -“Posthumous fame being what it is—if nothing can be said to be -something—the desire to attain it is comic. It seems the invention of -a humorist, this ambition to attach to your name (and equally to that -of every person bearing it, or to bear it hereafter) something that -you will not know that you have attached to it. You labor for a result -which you are to be forever unaware that you have brought about—for a -personal gratification which you know that you are eternally forbidden -to enjoy: if the gods ever laugh, do they not laugh at that?” - -To signify his sense of the humor of the situation, the Melancholy -Author fashioned the visage of him to so poignant a degree of visible -dejection as might have affected an open tomb with envy and despair. - -“Some time,” he continued, “the earth, her spinning retarded by the -sun’s tidal action, will turn on her axis only once a year, presenting -always the same side to the sun, as Venus does now, and as the moon -does to the earth. That side will be unthinkably hot; the other, dark -and unthinkably cold. Of man and his works nothing will remain. Later, -the sun’s light and fire exhausted, he and all his attendant planets -and their satellites will whirl, as dead invisible bulks, through the -black reaches of space to some inconceivable doom. Suppose that then -a man who died to-day—or yesterday in Assyria—should be miraculously -revived. He would think that he had waked from a sleep of an instant’s -duration. What to him would seem to have been the advantage of what -he once knew as ‘fame’—sometimes as ‘immortality’? Would he not smile -to learn that his name had once evoked sentiments of admiration and -respect—that it had been carved in stone or cast in metal to adorn a -Temple of Fame? And when again, and finally, put to death for nothing, -would not his last squeak and gurgle carry an aborted jest? - -“My boy,” continued the Melancholy Author, suffering a look of -compassion to defile the dread solemnity of his aspect, “I perceive -that I have put the matter too strongly for you. You are not at home in -the fields of space; you are disconcerted by the dirge of the spheres. -Let us get back to earth as we have the happiness to know it. I will -read you the concluding lines of a poem by an obscure pessimist, on the -brevity of time and the futility of memorial structures: - - Then build your mausoleum if you must, - And creep into it with a perfect trust; - But in the twinkling of an eye the plow - Shall pass without obstruction through your dust. - - Another movement of the pendulum - And, lo! the desert-haunting wolf shall come - And, seated on the spot, howl all the night - O’er rotting cities, desolate and dumb.” - -Delighted with his ruse of binding an unresisting auditor by passing -off his own poetry as that of another, the Melancholy Author fell into -a sea-green stupor, and the Timorous Reporter, edging himself quietly -through the door of opportunity, departed that life. - - - - - THE CRIME OF INATTENTION - - -“When the germ of egotism is discovered,” said the Curmudgeon -Philosopher, “it will be readily recognized. The cholera germ is -sometimes called the ‘comma bacillus,’ from its resemblance to the -printer’s comma; the bacillus of egotism does not look like a capital -I, as you would naturally suppose, but like the note of admiration. -In order to discover it you have only to shed the gore of the first -man you meet (who is sure to be a bore and deserve it) and put a drop -under the microscope. True, you may have defective eyesight from long -contemplation of your dazzling self, and so miss it, but it is there as -plain as the nose on an elephant’s face.” - -The Timorous Reporter ventured to suggest that when the note of -admiration was named, to admire meant, not to esteem, but to -wonder—that Milton so uses it in relating the meeting of Satan and -Death at the gates of Hell. There was no reason, he said, why the germ -of egotism or self-esteem should have the shape of that point. - -“Having discovered and isolated the germ of egotism,” continued the -Curmudgeon Philosopher, apparently addressing some exalted intelligence -behind the Timorous Reporter, “the physicians will naturally cast about -for a serum that will be powerful enough to beat it.” - -The Curmudgeon Philosopher had the condescension to darken his -environment with a smile. - -“I should suppose that this might be made from the blood of a whale, a -rhinoceros, a tiger and an anaconda, all, of course, duly inoculated -with the germ till silly. If a few gallons of this mighty medicament -were injected into the veins of a patient not more than two years of -age it might so check his self-esteem that on growing up he would -emblazon the violet on his coat of arms.” - -The Curmudgeon Philosopher manifested his sense of his own distinction -as a wit by a gesture singularly and appropriately elephantine. He had -the goodness to continue: “A few years ago, before a just appreciation -of the dignity of my position as a philosopher had compelled my -withdrawal from the clubs and taverns, I used to observe that of a -half-dozen men sitting about a table and engaged in the characteristic -industry of smoking and drinking, four were commonly talking of -themselves, one, with an impediment in his enterprise, was endeavoring -to ‘get the floor’ in order to talk about _him_self, and the other -(I trust it is needless to name him) was vainly asking attention to -matters of interest and importance. - -“It was customary among these gentlemen to interrupt one another in the -middle of a sentence by ordering drinks or entering into a colloquy -with the waiter, or addressing a trivial question to another of the -party. Habitually the person speaking had the mortification to see his -interlocutor turn squarely away from him and himself begin a monologue, -only to be disregarded in his turn. There is something singularly -pathetic in the spectacle of a man with an unfinished discourse turning -to the only one of the party that has the civility to hear him out. It -is one of the minor tragedies of social life, demanding an infinite -compassion. Sometimes the sufferer would signify a just resentment by -abruptly rising and leaving the table, but the rebuke was never even -observed. - -“Not the monologist alone was ignored in this unmannerly way; the -nimble epigrammatist fared no better. The brightest sallies of wit, -the oddest ventures in paradox, the most delicious bits of humor and -the finest turns of wisdom—all met the same fate, all alike fell upon -the stony soil of inattention. Remember that I speak, not of ordinary -dullards, but of the so-called choice spirits of clubland, ‘gentlemen -of wit and pleasure about town.’” - -With a sidewise movement toward the door the Timorous Reporter -cautiously advanced the notion that possibly something in the quality -of the Curmudgeon Philosopher’s wit may not have had the good fortune -to commend itself to his auditors. - -“Selected from Apuleius, from Rabelais, Pascal, Rochefoucauld, Pope, -and boldly worked into the conversation, they always passed without -recognition of either their source or their wit. The company was simply -unaware that anything out of the common had been said. Egotism has a -bale of cotton in each ear.” - -The Curmudgeon Philosopher paused to note the effect of his epigram. -Seeing that safety meant either applause or absence the Timorous -Reporter deemed it expedient to withdraw by way of an open window. - - - - - FETISHISM - - -“We are wiser in many ways than our savage ancestors; we are wiser -than the savages of to-day,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, with the -air of one making a great concession; “yet for every folly or vice of -uncivilized man I can show you a corresponding one among ourselves. -In the matter of religions, for example, and of religious rites and -observances, we have, mixed in with our better faiths, vestiges of all -the primitive superstitions that have marked the childhood of the race. -Vestiges, did I say? Why, sir, in many instances we have the veritable -thing itself in all the vigor of its perennial prime.” - -The Reporter ventured to express a conviction that a crude and -primitive religion could have no devotees among so enlightened and -cultivated a people as ours. - -“Sir,” thundered the Adversary of Presumption, turning a delicate -purple, “races are like individuals; along with the vices and -virtues of maturity they have those of infancy. No people ever is -sufficiently civilized and enlightened to have laid aside any of its -early superstitions and absurdities. To these it adds better things. It -overwrites its primitive ideas with ideas less crude and reasonless; -but nothing has been effaced. The latest text of the palimpsest is -most in evidence, but all is there and, to a keen enough observation, -legible. Did you never see a whole concourse of moderns uncover to a -flag?” - -The Reporter confessed that those whom he had seen performing this -religious rite were mostly moderns. - -“They will say when detected,” continued the oracle, “that what they -uncover to is not the flag, but the sentiment that it represents. If -ingenious enough, the idolater would make the same defence. So would -the shagpated chap that prostrates himself before the sacred moogoo -tree. - -“What’s that—a flag is a symbol? Why, yes, ‘symbol’ is the name we -choose to give to objects which we know to have no real sanctity, yet, -either from hereditary instinct or other unreasoning impulse, cannot -forbear to revere. The word is also used to denote a mere ‘survival,’ -an object that once had a useful purpose, but now exists only because -of our habit of having it. Be pleased to look down into that burial -place.” - -The Curmudgeon Philosopher’s dwelling had characteristically been -chosen because of its contiguity to a cemetery. - -“Note the number of ‘dummy’ urns surmounting the monuments. Centuries -ago, when cremation was the rule, as it seems likely to be again, -those would have been true urns, holding ashes of the dead. We have -inherited the tendency to have them, but as they have now no utility we -spare ourselves the trouble of accounting for them by saying they are -symbolic—whereby the fashion is exalted to a high dignity. - -“I assume your familiarity with the word ‘fetish.’ It is spelled two -ways and pronounced four; I pronounce it as I was taught at my mother’s -knee.” - -By way of accentuating the fact that he had had a mother he affected -a rudimentary tenderness of tone and expression which in a case of -doubtful identity would have assisted in distinguishing him as a pirate -of the Spanish Main. - -The Reporter asked what fetish worship might have the hardihood to be. - -“Fetish worship,” replied the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “is the most -primitive of religions. It is the form that belief in the supernatural -takes in our lowest stage of intellectual development—the adoration of -material objects. A stone or a tree supposed to possess supernatural -powers of good or evil, or to have some peculiar sanctity, is a fetish. -Idolatry and the worship of living things are not uncommonly confounded -with fetish worship, but in reality are another and higher form of -religion, belonging to a more advanced culture.” - -“You have seen the proposal to transport Plymouth Rock about the -country for a show? It is in the morning papers, one of which I had the -bad luck to pick up while at breakfast. Hate the morning papers!” - -The Timorous Reporter signified his regret. - -“I hope it will not be done,” continued the Curmudgeon Philosopher, -ignoring the apology. “In the first place, the Rock is devoid of -authenticity. It is indubitably a rock, and it is at Plymouth, -but its connection with the landing of the Pilgrims was supplied -by imagination. That is all right; by imagination we demonstrate -our superiority to the novelists. Historians and scientists are -credentialed by imagination; through imagination the philosopher -attains to a knowledge of the meaning and message of things. Without -imagination we should be as the magazine poets that perish.” - -With obvious satisfaction in his character of cynic the Curmudgeon -Philosopher again mitigated the austerity of his countenance—this time -by something that may have been honestly intended as a smile. - -“We have seen bands of children taught to march about a cracked bell, -throw flowers upon it, sing hymns to it. When it stopped in the several -cities that it was carried through on a triumphal car the populace -turned out to worship it. It was supplied with a ‘guard of honor.’ -Bands played appropriate music before it, and mayors ‘delivered -eulogies.’ No popular hero or august sovereign could be accorded a more -obsequious homage than this lifeless piece of cracked metal—nay, its -progress is more like that of a Grecian god. This was fetishism, pure -and undefiled. - -“If this new project is carried out the people that worshiped a bell -will worship a stone. True, the stone weighs several tons.” - -Proud of his generosity in making so great a concession, the Curmudgeon -Philosopher looked over the top of his spectacles for the applause that -came not to his hope. - -“Sir,” he concluded, his great fist falling like a thunderbolt upon the -table at which he stood, “we are Pottawattomies!” - - - - - OUR AUDIBLE SISTERS - - -“No,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “I am no believer in ‘the -elevating influence of woman.’ We have had women a long time, now; -the influence is obvious, but the elevation—we are still waiting -for that. Perhaps it was different in the old days when they had no -connection with public affairs and could devote their entire attention -to the business of giving men ‘a leg up,’ but to-day they are so busy -assisting us to conduct the world’s large activities that they overlook -our dissatisfaction with the low moral plane that we occupy. - -“I think, sir, that old Sir William Devereux was wrong when he said -that the best way to keep the dear creatures from playing the devil -was to encourage them in playing the fool. We have been for more than -a generation encouraging them to play the fool in a thousand and fifty -ways, and they play the devil as never before. - -“These dreadful creatures—I mean these dear, delightful darlings—care -for nothing but abstract ideas having no practical application to -actual conditions in a faulty world. In the councils of Them Loud -nobody cares for anything but principles and Principle. Every Mere Male -who anywhere ventures to lift up his voice in behalf of an imperfect -but practicable reform is outfitted by them with a set of motives that -would disgrace a pirate. To the she colonels of uplift, nothing is so -fascinating as Abstract Reform; they roll it as a sweet morsel under -and over their tireless tongues. At every session of Congress you -shall hear again the clank of the female saber in the corridors and -committee rooms of the Capitol, intimidating the poltroon law maker. -You shall hear the war whoop of the Sexless Impracticables, acclaiming -the Sufficient Abstraction and denouncing the coarse expedients of the -Erring Male. May the devil shepherd them in a barren place!” - -Overcome by his emotions, the Curmudgeon Philosopher cruelly kicked the -house dog (which “answered not with a caress”), and snorted at vacancy. - -“What good does it all do, anyhow—this irruption of women into the -domain of public affairs? The advantages that Lively Woman promised -even herself in becoming New and Audible are illusory; those that she -renounced were real. For one thing, we no longer love her. Why, sir, -I remember the time when I myself would have taken trouble to serve -and honor women. I may say that I felt for them a special esteem. How -is it to-day? They pass me by as the idle wind, unobserved, and—most -significant of all—unobserving. - -“Love, sir, ‘romantic love,’ as Tolstoi calls it, is a purely -artificial thing. Many nations know it not. The ancient Greeks knew it -not; the Japanese of yesterday did not at all comprehend it. There have -been no other really civilized nations. We love those who are helpless -and dependent on us. That is why we love our children and our pets. - -“In demanding equal rights before the law woman renounces her claim -to exceptional tenderness; in granting the demand, man accepts the -renunciation in good faith. If the rest of you are going to look out -for my wife, sir, I am left free to look out for myself. Have I really -a wife? God forbid—I’m supposing one. - -“When in the history of our civilization was romantic love at high -noon? Why, sir, ‘when knighthood was in flower’; when woman was a -chattel; when a gentleman could divorce himself with a word. It was -then that woman was set upon a pedestal and adored. Men consecrated -their lives to the service of the sex—fought for woman, sang of her -with a sincerity that is sadly lacking in the imitation troubadours of -our time. Why, sir, even I, in my youth, composed some verses.” - -The Curmudgeon Philosopher educed a manuscript from his breast-pocket -and the Timorous Reporter began to withdraw from the Presence. - -“O, very well—I’ll not force them on you; but permit me to remark, -sir, that the decay of courtesy toward women is not unattended with a -certain growing coarseness of manners in general. Those who have caught -the base infection are not gentlemen, and you may go to the devil!” - - - - - THE NEW PENOLOGY - - -“True science,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “began with -publication, in 1620, of Lord St. Albans’ _Novum Organum_. Why not Lord -Bacon’s? Because, my benighted friend, there was no ‘Lord Bacon.’ He -was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, and, later, Viscount St. Albans. When -you hear a man speak of ‘Lord Bacon’ fly from that man. - -“The _Novum Organum_, or new method, has overthrown the _Organum_ -of Aristotle and released men’s minds from thraldom to the belief -that truth could be got by mere reasoning, unaided by observation -and experiment. This faith in the all-sufficiency of Logic had -persisted for more than two thousand years, an intellectual paralysis -invulnerable to treatment; and all the while the world thought itself -enjoying robust mental health. - -“Belief in the sufficiency of Deduction was not the only delusion that -dominated and shackled the human mind, and some of the others are with -us to-day, to comfort and inspire! We think that if we did not have -them we should be sick.” - -Pleased with his wit, the Curmudgeon Philosopher executed the great -convulsion of nature which he knew as a smile. - -“One of the most mischievous of these false and futile faiths is known -as the Reformation of Criminals. With no result, we have been embracing -it with a devout fervor since the dawning of time. Our mistake is not -so much that we have neglected to get the consent of the criminals as -that we think ourselves able to reform them without it. - -“Each habitual criminal is the hither end of an interminable line -of criminal ancestors. He can reform no more than he can fly: his -character is as immutable as the shape of his head or the texture of -the muscle that he calls his heart. Our efforts in his behalf recall -the story of the physician who, after examining a patient afflicted -with a disorder of the skin, said: ‘This is hereditary; we must begin -at the beginning. Go home and tell your father to take a sulphur bath.’ -Our criminals are in worse case than that patient; he had an accessible -father for the treatment. - -“What have I to propose? What is the ‘New Method’ that I favor? -What would I substitute for ‘reformation’ of the unworthy? Their -destruction—I would kill them.” - -With obvious pride in this humane suggestion, he stroked his ragged -beard with both hands and adored his reflection in the mirror opposite -his pedestal. - -“It sounds harsh, I dare say, to one unfamiliar with the thought, and I -might have said ‘remove’ if that would seem less alarming; but ‘kill’ -is an honest word, and I’ll stand to it. - -“Think of it! The New Method would give us in two generations a nation -without habitual criminals! What other will do that? Think of the -lessened misery, the security of life and property, the lighter burden -of taxation to maintain the machinery of justice, the no police—all -that the besotted proponents of ‘Reformation’ hope and hope again and -hope in vain to accomplish brought about in the lifetime of one man! - -“And by means that are merciful to the criminals themselves. Can there -be a doubt that if in him the love of life were not the mere brute -instinct of a perverted soul the habitual criminal would prefer death? -What does life hold that is worth anything to such as he, devoid of -self-respect and the respect of others, victim alike of justice and -injustice, denied the delights that come of refined sensibilities, -hunted from pillar to post and ever cowering in fear of the law? -Nothing is more cruel than to let him live. And at last he dies anyhow. - -“But suppose that the painless putting to death of all criminals -were as deep a misfortune as it would be to—to philosophers, for -example? Yet in the long run it would vastly lessen the total of -human unhappiness, even of public executions. The earth was not made -yesterday: for thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years, men -have been putting other men to death for crime. - -“Even under the mild laws of to-day in civilized countries the number -executed will in the course of the ages enormously exceed to-day’s -total criminal population. Moreover, it would not be necessary to kill -them all: most of them, if confronted by a law for their killing, would -take themselves out of the country, quarter themselves upon foolish -nations still willing to stand their nonsense—nations still enamored of -that ancient delusion, Reformation of Criminals. - -“That would serve _your_ purpose as well as anything, but as a citizen -of the world, owing my first allegiance to Mankind,” concluded the -Curmudgeon Philosopher, with a gesture appropriate to some noble -ancestral sentiment, “I should deem it my duty to endeavor to prevent -their escape by writs of _ne exeat regno_.” - - - - - THE NATURE OF WAR - - -The Bald Campaigner was looking over the tops of his spectacle lenses, -silent, obviously wise, a thing of beauty. - -“Do you approve the punishment of General Jacob Smith, who was -dismissed from the army for barbarism?” asked the Timorous Reporter. -“Doubtless you remember the incident.” - -“My approval,” said the great soldier, “is needless and of no -significance. I have long been on the retired list myself, and am not -the reviewing officer in this case. I think General Smith’s punishment -just, if that’s what you want to know. He committed a serious -indiscretion. As a commander of troops in the island of Samar he gave -to a subordinate the following oral instructions: - -“‘I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill -and burn the better you will please me.’ He said, further, that he -wanted all persons killed who were capable of bearing arms and were in -actual hostilities against the United States—I am quoting the Secretary -of War—and, in reply to a question by his subordinate, asking for an -age limit, designated it as ten years. - -“All this was highly improper and unmilitary. It is customary -in matters of so great importance for the commander to give his -instructions in the form of written orders—a good commander is without -a tongue. - -“I am no great literary genius, but in the matter of military orders -I know a hawk from a handsaw by the handsaw’s teeth. Suppose General -Smith’s orders (written orders) had read like this: - -“‘It is thought that it will be to the advantage of the expedition -in point of celerity of movement, and will simplify the problem of -supply, if the column be not encumbered with prisoners. The commander -of the expedition will not be unmindful of the military advantages -that flow from the infliction of as many casualties upon the enemy as -is practicable with the small force that he commands and the evasive -character of the enemy; nor will he overlook the need of removing -by fire such structures and supplies as are incompatible with the -interests of the United States, or inconsistent with professions of -amity on the part of the island’s inhabitants, or conducive to the -prosperity of those in rebellion. No person engaged in hostilities -against the United States will, of course, be suffered to plead sex or -age in mitigation of such mischances as the fortunes of war may entail, -provided, however, that no non-combatants of either sex under the age -of ten years shall under any circumstances be put to death without -authority from these headquarters; the traditional benevolence of the -American army must not be impaired.’ - -“Sir, if General Smith had issued an order like that he would to-day be -a popular hero and an ornament to the active list of the army.” - -Waving his remaining arm with a gesture singularly cogent and -convincing, the Bald Campaigner ceased and marched against a hostile -bottle near by. After study of the suppositious “order” in his -stenographic notes, the reporter ventured the opinion that the -difference between it and the oral instructions actually given was -mainly one of expression. The Bald Campaigner said in reply: - -“Expression is everything. An army officer should be a master of -expression, as a baseball pitcher should be a master of delivery. The -straight throw and the curved throw carry the ball to the same spot, -but consider the different effect upon the fortunes of the pitcher. -What General Smith lacked was not heart, but style. He was not cruel, -but clumsy. His words were destitute of charm. His blundering tongue -had succeeded only in signifying his fitness to be thrown to the -civilian lions.” - -The reporter hazarded a belief that the General’s instruction to make -Samar “a howling wilderness” was brutal exceedingly. - -“Certainly it was,” assented the Bald Campaigner, “an officer of -refinement and taste would have said: ‘It will be found expedient to -operate against the enemy’s material resources.’ There is never a -military necessity for coarse speech. - -“As to devastation—did you mention devastation?—that is the purpose of -war. War is made, not against the bodies of adult males, but against -the means of subsistence of a people. The fighting is incident to the -devastation: we kill the soldiers because they protect their material -resources—get between us and the fields that feed them, the factories -that clothe them, the arsenals that arm them. We cannot hope to kill -a great proportion of them at best; the humane thing is to overcome -them by means of hunger and nakedness. The earlier we can do so, the -less effusion of blood. Leave the enemy his resources and he will fight -forever. He will beget soldiers faster than you can destroy them. - -“Do you cherish the delusion that in our great civil war, for example, -the South was subdued by killing her able-bodied males who could bear -arms? Look at the statistics and learn, to your astonishment, how small -a proportion of them we really did kill, even before I lost my arm. - -“The killing was an incident. I speak of the latter part of the -conflict, when we had learned how to conduct military operations. -As long as our main purpose was bloodshed we made little progress. -Our armies actually guarded the homes and property of the men they -were sent to conquer—the very men that were fighting them, and who, -therefore, assured of the comfort and safety of their families, -continued fighting with cheerful alacrity. If we had continued that -rose-water policy they might have fought us to this day.” - -The reporter involuntarily glanced at a calendar on the wall, and the -war oracle continued: - -“Wisdom came of experience: we adopted the more effective and more -humane policy of devastation. With Sherman desolating the country from -Atlanta to Goldsborough and Sheridan so wasting the Shenandoah Valley -that he boasted the impossibility of a crow passing over it without -carrying rations, the hopes of Confederate success went up in smoke. - -“And,” concluded the hairless veteran, rising and opening the door -as a delicate intimation that there was nothing more to say, “I beg -leave to think that the essential character of the _Ultima Ratio_ is -not permanently obscurable by the sentimental vagaries of blithering -civilians such as you have the lack of distinction to be.” - -The Timorous Reporter retired to his base of operations and the -war-drum throbbed no longer in his ear. - - - - - HOW TO GROW GREAT - - -“I do not overlook the disadvantages of defeat in a war with some -foreign power,” said the Bald Campaigner; “I only say that in the -resulting humiliation would be a balance of advantage. It does a nation -good to ‘eat the leek.’ The great Napoleon thrust that tonic vegetable -into the mouths of Prussia and the other German states. They took a -bellyful each, and the result of that penitential feast is the splendid -German empire of to-day. Before their racial health was entirely -restored the Germans passed the unwelcome comestible to the ailing -dominion of Napoleon the Stuffed, and France has so thriven on the diet -that she no longer fears the hand that wrote the _menu_. Alone among -modern states, Great Britain has grown powerful without having had to -cry for mercy. In the voice of supplication is heard the prophecy of -power.” - -The Timorous Reporter cautiously named our own country as one that has -risen to greatness without suffering defeat and humiliation. - -“Sir, you are in error,” said the Bald Campaigner loftily. “We were -defeated in the War of 1812. Wherever our raw volunteers met the -trained veterans of Great Britain (except at New Orleans, when the war -was over) we were beaten off the field. Our attempts to invade Canada -were all repelled, our capital was taken and sacked, and when we sued -for peace it was granted in a treaty in which the grievance for which -we had taken up arms was contemptuously ignored. - -“Remember that for this conflict we enlisted and equipped more than a -half-million men, while Great Britain had at no time more than sixteen -thousand opposing us. - -“As historians of the conflict we have done heroic work, as have -Southern historians of our civil war and French historians of the -struggle with the Germans—as all beaten peoples naturally do. Sir, -do you know that the great body of the Spanish people believe, and -will always believe, that Spain brought us to our knees in 1898? The -Russian who does not think that the armies of the Czar wrung the most -humiliating terms from the Japanese is an exceptionally intelligent -Russian—he knows enough to disbelieve the ‘popular histories’ in the -Russian tongue and the official falsehoods of his government.” - -The Timorous Reporter inquired how a second beating would profit us, -seeing that we got no good out of the other. - -“The other was not bad enough,” the great man explained. “Having -Napoleon on her hands, Great Britain did not, until he had been got rid -of, make an aggressive war. When she began to we cried for mercy. What -we need is a beating that neither our vanity can deny nor our ingenuity -excuse—one which, in the slang of your pestilent trade, ‘will not come -off.’” - -“And then?” - -“Then, sir, we shall give ourselves an army strong enough to repel -invasion from the north, or, if something should happen to our -navy, from the east or west. Then, sir, we shall get our soldiers -by conscription, and the man who is drawn will serve. The words -‘volunteer,’ ‘recruiting,’ ‘bounty,’ ‘substitute’ will disappear from -our military vocabulary, with all the inefficiency, waste, and shame -that they connote. In brief, we shall recognize the truth, obvious -to reason, that a citizen owes his country military service in the -same way that he owes it pecuniary support. (If taxpaying had always -been optional what an expostulation would meet the proposal to make -it compulsory!) We shall then not need to concern ourselves with ‘the -problem of desertion,’ ‘the effect on the army of high wage-rates -in civil employment,’ and the rest of it. There will be no problem -of desertion: the discernment that recognizes a citizen’s military -obligation will find an effective method preventing him from running -away from it. All this will come after we have been sorely defeated by -some power, or combination of powers, that has not only a navy but an -army.” - -The Timorous Reporter hesitatingly advanced the view that a large -standing army might seriously imperil the subordination of the military -to the civil power. - -“Young man,” said the hairless veteran, austerely, “you talk like a -Founder of this Republic!” - - - - - A WAR IN THE ORIENT - - -“Considering your pro-Russian sympathies,” said the Timorous Reporter, -“the results of some of the fighting in the Japanese and Russian war -must have been deeply disagreeable to you—that of the great naval -engagement in the Sea of Japan, for example.” - -“Yes,” replied the Bald Campaigner, “the escape of two or three Russian -ships affected me most unpleasantly.” - -The reporter professed himself unable to understand. - -“I had confidently expected Togo to destroy them all. He is -disappointing—Togo.” - -“Please pardon me,” said the man of letters; “I thought that you had -favored the Russian cause.” - -“So I did, sir, so I did, and do. But something is due to the art and -science of war. As a soldier I stand for them, deprecating any laxity -in the application of the eternal principles of strategy and tactics -by land or sea. Admiral Togo should have been dismissed for permitting -those ships to escape.” - -The reporter suggested the possibility that in the uproar and obscurity -of battle the ships that got away were overlooked. - -“Nothing should be overlooked,” said the Bald Campaigner. “The -commander in battle should know everything that is going on—or going -away. With the light that we have, I am unable to explain the Japanese -admiral’s lamentable failure; I can only deplore it.” - -“Had he, then, so overwhelming an advantage?” the reporter asked. “It -is thought the fleets were pretty evenly matched.” - -“Sir,” said the Bald Campaigner, loftily, “it was a fight between -an inland people and an insular. If Rojestvensky had had a hundred -battleships he would have been over-matched and defeated. Ships and -guns do not make a navy, and landsmen are not transmuted into sailors -by sending them to sea. The Russians are not a sea-going people. Their -country has no open ports—that is what they are always fighting to get. -They have no foreign commerce; they have no fisheries. Why, sir, it -reminds me of the reply made by a Scotch carter to an angry soldier -who had challenged him to fight. ‘Fecht wi’ ye? Na, na, fechtin’s yer -trade. But I’ll drive a cart wi’ ye.’ If command of the ocean were a -matter of planting potatoes, Russia would be a great sea power. - -“The born sailor is a being of an order different from ourselves—as -different as a gull from a grouse, a seal from a cat. What, to a -landsman, is a matter of study, memory and calculation, is to him -a matter of intuition. An unstable plane is his natural, normal -and helpful footing. As a gun-pointer he sights his piece not only -consciously with his instruments and his eye, but unconsciously with -that better instrument, the sense of direction—as one plays billiards. -The rolling and pitching of the ships do not spoil his aim; he allows -for them automatically—_feels_ the auspicious instant with the sure -instinct of an expert rifleman breaking bottles in the air. It is -impossible to impart this subtle sense to a farmer’s boy, or to a -salesman in a shop, no matter how young you catch him; he cannot be -made to understand it—cannot even be made to understand that it can -be. For that matter, nobody does understand it. - -“I am not unaware, sir, of the ‘modern’ methods of sea-fighting—keeping -at a safe distance from the enemy and pointing the guns by means of -range-finders and other instruments and machines, but nothing that can -be invented can eliminate the ‘personal equation’ in sea-fighting, -any more than in land-fighting parapets, casemates, turrets and other -defensive works can profitably replace the breasts of the soldiers, -or arms of precision take the place of their natural aptitude for -battle with both feet on the ground. I am not unmindful of the time -when the Romans improvised a fleet (constructed on the model of a -wrecked Carthaginian galley) and manning it with landsmen destroyed the -sea-power of Carthage in a single engagement. That exception tests the -rule (_probat regulam_) but the rule stands. Landsmen for soldiers, -sailors for the sea and to the devil with military machinery! - -“Before our civil war we had a merchant marine second only to that of -Great Britain. American sails whitened every sea, the stars and stripes -glowed in every port. We were a nation of sailors. Even so long ago -as the war of 1812 we held our own with Great Britain on the ocean, -though beaten everywhere on land by inferior numbers with superior -training. To-day we could not hold our own against any maritime people, -even if we fought with full coal-bunkers near our own shores. The -American behind the gun is no longer a born sailor with the salt of -the sea in every globule of the blood of him. Our fate in encountering -a seagoing people, sailors and fishermen and the sons of sailors and -fishermen, with sea legs, sea eyes and sea souls, would be that which -has befallen inlanders against islanders, from Salamis to Tsu Shima. -The sea would be strewn with a wreckage of American ‘magnificent -fighting-machines.’” - -The Timorous Reporter murmured the words “Manila Bay” and “Santiago de -Cuba,” then diffidently lifted his eyes, with a question mark in each, -to the face of his distinguished interlocutor—which darkened with a -smile. - -“With regard to Manila,” he said, “I am told that Dewey’s famous -command, ‘You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,’ was not -accurately reported. According to my informant, the Spanish ships -were ingeniously wound with ropes to keep them from falling apart. -What Dewey actually said was this: ‘When you are ready, Gridley, you -may fire at those ropes.’ Anybody can cut a rope with a cannon if not -molested. At Santiago, the Spanish Admiral was ordered not to give -battle, but to escape, and ships cannot run away and fight at the same -time. - -“Sir, two naval victories in which the victors lost one man killed -do not supply a reasonable presumption of invincibility. Manila and -Santiago were slaughters, not battles. They are without value.” - -The reporter said he thought that they were not altogether worthless -as “horrors of war,” and visibly shuddered. The superior intelligence -flamed and thundered! - -“That is all nonsense about ‘the horrors of war,’ in so far as the -detestable phrase implies that they are worse than those of peace; they -are more striking and impressive, that is all. As to the loss of life, -I submit that civilians mostly die some time, and are mourned, too, -quite as feelingly as soldiers; and the kind of death that is inflicted -by war-weapons is distinctly less objectionable than that resulting -from disease. Wars are expensive, doubtless, but somebody gets the -money; it is not thrown into the sea. In point of fact, modern nations -are never so prosperous as in the years immediately succeeding a -great war. I favor anything that will quicken our minds, elevate our -sentiments and stop our secreting selfishness, as, according to that -eminent naturalist, the late William Shakspeare, toads get venom by -sleeping under cold stones. A quarter-century of peace will make a -nation of block-heads and scoundrels. Patriotism is a vice, but it -is a larger vice, and a nobler, than the million petty ones which it -promotes in peace to swallow up in war. In the thunder of guns it -becomes respectable. I favor war, famine, pestilence—anything that will -stop the people from cheating and confine that practice to contractors -and statesmen. - -“To return to Russia—” - -“Which,” said the reporter, _sotto voce_, “many Russians abroad do not -care to do.” - -“You said, I think, that she does not seem to be much of a power on -either sea or land. She was a power in the time of the first Napoleon. -She held out a long time at Sevastopol against the English, the French, -the Turks and the Sardinians. She defeated the Turks at Shipka Pass and -Plevna, and the Turks are the best soldiers in Europe. True, in the -war with Japan, she lost every battle. That was to be expected, for she -was all unready and her armies were outnumbered two to one from the -beginning. No one outside Russia, and few inside, has ever come within -a quarter million of a correct estimate of the Japanese strength. There -were not fewer than seven hundred thousand of these cantankerous little -devils in front of Gunshu Pass.” - -“Then they are—in a military sense—‘cantankerous,’” said the reporter. -“That is about the same as saying that they are good soldiers, is it -not?” - -“Oh, they fight well enough. Why shouldn’t they? They have something -to fight for; the pride of an honorable history; a government that -does not rob them; a civilization that is to them new and fascinating, -reared, as the superstructure of a glittering temple, upon an elder -one, whose stones were hewn and laid and wrought into beauty by their -forefathers, while ours were chasing one another through marshes with -flint spears. Best of all, they had a sovereign whom they adore as a -deity and love with a passionate personal attachment. What can you -do against such a people as that?—a people in whom patriotism is a -religion—a nation of poets, artists and philosophers, like the ancient -Greeks; of statesmen and warriors, like those of early Rome?” - -“If the Japanese are all that you think them,” said the reporter, “how -do you justify your pro-Russian sympathies?” - -“It is not the business of a student of military affairs to have -sympathies,” replied the Bald Campaigner, coldly; “but it is precisely -because they are that kind of people that their overthrow is, to -America, a military necessity. They are dangerous neighbors to so -feeble barbarians as we, with a government which all extol and none -respects—a loose unity and no illusions—a slack allegiance and no -consciousness of national life—a bickering aggregation of individuals, -man against man and class against class—a motley crowd of lawless, -turbulent and avaricious ungovernables!” - -He paused from exhaustion and mopped his shining pow with his -handkerchief. - -“Maybe Americans are like that,” assented the reporter, “but it is said -that we fight pretty well on occasion—in a civil war, for example.” - -“Certainly, all Caucasians fight ‘pretty well’ compared with other -Caucasians. The Japs are another breed.” - -The Inquiring Mind was convinced, but not silenced. “Suppose,” said he, -“that a collision ever occurs between an American and a Japanese fleet -or army on equal terms, what, in your honest judgment as a military -expert, will be the result?” - -“Damn them!” shouted the man of no sympathies, “we’ll wipe them off the -face of the earth!” - - - - - A JUST DECISION - - -“Ah, I have long hoped for this,” said the Sentimental Bachelor. - -“It is a good while now—I think it must be ever since Adam—that -Tyrant Man has had to pay all too dearly for the favor—and favors—of -the unfair sex. Of course, there is a difference in the value of -the advantages enjoyed. For illustration, there is the good will of -Celeste, of Babette, of Clarisse—best of all, of the incomparable -Clorinda! I say good will, for I speak of that which I myself have had -the supreme distinction to enjoy; and no gentleman, sir, will ever so -far forget himself as to call a lady’s preference for him by a stronger -name. Discretion, sir, discretion—that is what every man of sense and -feeling goes in for.” - -The Timorous Reporter signified such approval as was consistent with -the public interest and the prosperity of the press. - -“As I was saying, the good will of the admirable Nanette, the most -excellent Lucia—excellent no longer, alas, for she is dead—of the -superb Héloise, and I might, perhaps, add to the list one or two -others, is above price and beyond appraisement. Yet it was not to be -had for nothing; the gods are not so kind. I have suffered, sir, I have -paid, believe me. - -“What am I coming to? Why, this, my lad, this. The supreme court of one -of our States has decided that, in proving an intention of marriage on -the part of a male defendant, what the lady plaintiff may have said -to others about it is not competent evidence. ‘Hearsay evidence’? -Why, yes; the honorable court was polite enough to call it so, but, -doubtless, if, with all due respect for the ladies mentioned—Herminia, -Adèle, Demetria and the others—I may venture to say so, the real ground -of exclusion of such evidence is its incredibility. I trust to your -discretion not to report me as uttering that opinion; not for the world -would I wound the sensibilities of the adorable Miranda, most veracious -of her sex.” - -The speaker paused, gazing pensively at vacancy as if communing with -the day before yesterday. The reporter endeavored to reveal by his -manner a policy of expectation. - -“My dear boy,” resumed the Sentimental Bachelor, “if you aspire to the -good will of a woman, and are marriageable, you should be prepared and -willing to have it believed by all her friends that your intentions -are honorable—yes, sir; you must submit to be placed in that false -position: it is a part of the price. True, you may swear the lady to -secrecy; and Congreve says that no one is so good as a woman to keep a -secret, for, although she is sure to tell it, yet nobody will believe -her. Alas! he underestimated human credulity, which is the eighth -wonder of the world. Beware of human credulity; it is always ready to -believe the worst. - -“What’s that? You have had sweethearts that did not say you wanted to -marry them; women friends that did not say you were in love with them? -Fortunate man! But consider how young you are. It is a just inference -that they too are young. Youth is the season of veracity; wait. As -these excellent young ladies (whom Heaven bless) grow older—as they -miss more and more the attentions of men—as they dwell more and more -upon joys of the irrevocable past, they will have a different story to -tell, and right mercifully is it decreed that they shall believe it -themselves. Why, even the once charming Doretta finds, I am told, a -consolation for the horrors of age and whist in the dream of repeated -proposals from me—Meeee! Ah, well, it were inhuman to deny to one -to whom I gave so much the happiness of stating the amount of the -benefaction. Far be it from me to bring down her gray hairs in sorrow -to the truth. - -“But, suppose, my dear young friend, that I were wealthy enough to -be sued for breach of promise of marriage—which Heaven forbid! You -see how this righteous decision of that supreme court would remove -from me the temptation and necessity of contradicting a lady. Oh, it -is a great decision! It marks a notable advance in the apprehension -of the underlying motives of human action. For they are human—except -Iphigenia, who is divine. Not so beautiful as Perdita; not so -intelligent as Lorena; not so devoted as Janette; so young as Marie; -so faithful as Theodora—peerless Theodora! But Iphigenia—she has the -cleverness to be so very new! It makes a difference.” - -Remarking that Bulwer was a most admirable writer, the Timorous -Reporter took his leave. - - - - - THE LION’S DEN - - -“I can not accept the view,” said the Sentimental Bachelor, looking up -from his piano stool, “that because one has a houseful of books and -pictures one is necessarily a lover of literature and art. I have a -few myself—not many; but you will observe that my book-cases have not -glass doors; on the contrary (if you understand the significance of -that phrase), they are beautiful examples of the cabinetmaker’s craft, -harmonizing well with the architectural and color schemes of the rooms -containing them. But the devil a book can you see in them without -opening them. - -“Why is that? Because, in the first place, books are not beautiful—at -least none of those within the means of any but a millionaire. Even -the most costly and sumptuous of them are angular, blocklike objects, -displeasing to the eye. Unless bound with special reference to the room -in which they are to turn their backs on you, most of them will be out -of harmony with their environment and with one another. - -“Yes, you see here scattered about, mostly on the floor, a few books” -(the Sentimental Bachelor indicated them by a graceful gesture of his -right hand) “that are as unlovely as any. But these are volumes having -for me a peculiar value from pleasant or tender association—just as -any article might have—just, in fact, as that rug has, upon which the -divine Janette has deigned to set her little feet. Ah, Janette the -adorable!—Melissa being dead. - -“You dare to think, no doubt, that with glass doors to my book-cases -I should be better able to find readily any particular volume that -I might want. Pardon me, but it is unworthy of you to impute to me -so deep and dark an ignorance. I should be sorry if ever I failed to -put my hand on any desired book in the darkest night. Believe me, my -friend, it is not the book-lover who displays his books in a show-case. - -“As to pictures, if I were so unfortunate as to own all the treasures -of the Dresden galleries, you would see no more than one painting in a -room. That is the Japanese way, and the Japanese are the only civilized -people in our modern world; they are born artists all, though some -neglect their mental heritage and go out as cooks. Think of it!—a -people among whom the arranging of three cut flowers in a vase (they -know not the dreadful ‘bouquet’) is an art having its principles and -laws, its learned professors to expound them, its honorable place in -the curriculum of public and private education! - -“Trust the Japanese to be always right in a matter of art. His instinct -is as infallible as that of the ancient Greek; and our European -‘schools’ of painting are already greatly indebted to him. It is a -silly new picture in which the Japanese influence can not be traced. -I’m ordering my dependent young brother from Paris to Tokio to study -art—the little rascal! - -“One painting in a room fixes attention; two divide it; more than two -disperse it. Than a wall plastered with bad canvases I know of nothing -more distracting and confusing except a wall plastered with good -ones. It is like a swarm of pretty girls, or a table d’hôte dinner in -a country hotel, where all you are to eat is brought in at once and -arranged round your plate. It kills the appetite. - -“Why does one do that sort of thing? To impress one’s visitors—to show -off. No, no; it is not because one is fond of paintings and never -tires of them. Be pleased to exercise your faculty of observation. I -passed a few weeks recently at the country house of a friend. Before -I had been half an hour in the place he had taken me through all the -rooms and shown me a hundred of his ‘art treasures’—paintings by famous -‘masters.’ (Maybe I had my own opinion as to that.) For my pleasure? -Why, no; he allowed me less than a half minute to each. Gadzooks! can -a fellow digest a painting that he has _bolted_? No, sir; ’twas for -gratification of his vanity of possession. During the weeks that I -remained in his house I never once caught him, nor any member of his -family, standing before any one of all those pictures, silently ‘taking -it in.’ The purpose of the pictures was to supply an opportunity for -his visitors’ envy and compel their tongues to the service of his ears. - -“You observe on my walls here,” the veteran virtuoso continued, -revolving slowly on his pivot, “one water-color and a lot of -trifles—photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, and so forth—most of them -rather bad. The painting itself is none too good; I should not like to -have my taste in such things judged by it. But observe: it is the work -of a young friend, and into every inch of it he has put something of -his heart, for it was done in the hope of pleasing me. The carved oak -frame, too, is one of his own creation, the mat (of copper)—all. Would -the costliest and ugliest of old masters give me as much pleasure? You, -yes; but, dear fellow, you are not considered. - -“See that pen-and-ink head—there are better. But it is a first attempt, -done by the uninstructed young girl whose photograph you see alongside. -She is to be a great artist some day, but none of her work will have to -me the interest and value of that. - -“Ah, those faded and soiled little photographs—Mary, Hélène, Katy, the -divine Josie and the rest—you need not look at them; they are merely -little soft spots for _my_ eyes to fall upon and rest. Why, sir, -there’s not the most trifling object in this room but has a hundred -tender recollections clinging to it like bats to a stalactite—swarming -about it like bees about Hymettus. Should I replace them with ‘works of -art’ bought in the shops and damnably authenticated? - -“This room is for me. I live here, read here, write here, smoke here. -Wherever my eye falls, it rests upon something that starts a train -of thought and emotion infinitely more agreeable, and I believe more -profitable, than any suggested by the work of a hand that I never -grasped, guided by however sure an eye that never looked into mine. -Don’t, I pray you, take the trouble to appear to be interested in these -things, such as a country maiden might decorate her sleeping room -withal. (Ah, happy country maiden, untaught in the black art of showing -off!) Don’t, I beg, give anything here a second glance: ‘there was no -thought of pleasing thee’ when it was put here. - -“Come,” concluded the Sentimental Bachelor, taking his hat and stick, -“let us go to the Park. I want to show you the fine Rembrandt that I -presented to the Art Gallery. Celestine adored it.” - - - - - THE MARCH HARE - - - - - A FLOURISHING INDUSTRY - - -The infant industry of buying worthless cattle, inoculating them -with pleuro-pneumonia and tuberculosis, and collecting the indemnity -when they are officially put to death to prevent the spread of the -contagion, is assuming something of the importance and dignity of a -national pursuit. The proprietors of one of the largest contageries on -Long Island report that the outlook is most encouraging; they begin -each fiscal year with a large surplus in their treasury. Some of the -Western companies, too, have been highly prosperous and intend to mark -their gratification by an immediate issue of new shares as a bonus. - -The effect of this industry upon pastoral pursuits is wholesome. The -stock ranges of Texas, Wyoming and Montana thrill with a new life, -and it is estimated that their enlargement during the next few years -will bring not less than five million acres of public land into the -service of man and beast. The advantage to manufacturers of barbed-wire -fencing is obvious, while the indirect benefit to agriculture through -the enhanced price of this now indispensable material will supply -the protectionist with a new argument and a peculiar happiness. -Cattle-growing has hitherto been attended with great waste. A large -percentage of the “stock on hand” was unsalable. Failure of the cactus -crop, destitution of water and prevalence of blizzards, together with -such natural ills as cattle flesh is heir to, have frequently so -reduced the physical condition of the herds that not more than a half -would be acceptable to the buyer. The ailing remainder were of little -use. A few of the larger animals could be utilized by preparing them -as skeletons of buffaloes for Eastern museums of natural history, -but the demand was limited: nine in ten were suffered to expire and -become a dead loss. These are now eagerly sought by agents of the -contageries, purchased at good prices, driven by easy stages to the -railways and, arriving at their final destination, duly infected. -They are said to require less infection than they would if they were -in good condition, with what the life insurance companies are pleased -to call a fair “expectation of life.” Some of the breeders prefer to -isolate these failures and do their own infecting; but the tendency -in the cattle trade, as in all others, is toward division of labor. -The regular infectionaries possess superior facilities of inoculation, -and government inspectors prefer to do business at a few great -pleuro-pneumoniacal and tubercular centers rather than make tedious -journeys to distant ranges. The trend of the age is, in fact, toward -centralization. - -The effect of the new industry upon commerce cannot be accurately -foreseen, but it is natural to suppose that it will largely increase -the importation of lowgrade cattle from South America. Hitherto it has -not been profitable to import any that were unfit for beef. But if the -_Bos inedibilis_, the milkless crowbait and other varieties “not too -good for human nature’s daily food”—in fact not good enough—can be -laid down in New York or New Orleans at a cost of not more than thirty -dollars each, including the purchase price of ten cents, and inoculated -before they have eaten their heads off, there would seem to be a -reasonable margin of profit in the traffic. If not, the legal allowance -for their condemnation and slaughter can be easily increased by -legislative action. If Congress will do nothing to encourage capital in -that direction the States most benefited by this extension of American -commerce can respond to the demand of the hour with a judicious -system of bounties. Importation of cheap foreign cattle eligible to -pleuro-pneumonia and the junior disorder will provide employment to a -great number of persons who, without apt appropriation’s artful aid, -might languish on farms and in workshops, a burden to the community and -a sore trial to themselves. - - - - - THE RURAL PRESS - - -There will be joy in the household of the country editor what time the -rural mind shall no longer crave the unwholesome stimuli provided by -composing accounts of corpulent beetroots, bloated pumpkins, dropsical -melons, aspiring maize, and precocious cabbages. Then the bucolic -journalist shall have surcease of toil, and may go out upon the meads -to frisk with kindred lambs, frolic familiarly with loose-jointed colts -and exchange grave gambolings with solemn cows. Then shall the voice -of the press, no longer attuned to praise of the vegetable kingdom, -find a more humble but not less useful employment in calling the animal -kingdom to the evening meal beneath the sanctum window. - -To the overworked editor life will have a fresh zest, a new and -quickening significance. The hills shall seem to hump more greenly up -to a bluer sky, the fields to blush with a tenderer sunshine. He will -go forth at dawn executing countless flip-flaps of gymnastic joy; and -when the white sun shall redden with the blood of dying day, and the -pigs shall set up a fine evening hymn of supplication to the Giver -of All Swill he will be jubilant in the editorial feet, blissfully -conscious that the editorial intellect is a-ripening for the morrow’s -work. - -The rural newspaper! We sit with it in hand, running our fingers over -the big, staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano, -drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight -one disports him in the deep void of its nothingness, as who should -swim in air! Here is nothing to startle, nothing to wound. The very -atmosphere is suffused and saturated with “the spirit of the rural -press;” and even one’s dog sits by, slowly dropping the lids over -its great eyes; then lifting them with a jerk, tries to look as if -it were not sleepy in the least degree. A fragrance of plowed fields -comes to one like a benediction. The tinkle of ghostly cowbells falls -drowsily upon the ear. Airy figures of prize esculents float before -the half-shut eyes and vanish before perfect vision can attain to -them. Above and about are the drone of bees and the muffled thunder of -milk-streams shooting into the foaming bucket. The gabble of distant -geese is faintly marked off by the barking of a distant dog. The city, -with all its noises, sinks away, as from one in a balloon, and our -senses swim in the “intense inane” of country languor. We slumber. - -God bless the man who invented the country newspaper!—though Sancho -Panza blessed him long ago. - - - - - “TO ELEVATE THE STAGE” - - -The existence of a theatrical company, composed entirely of Cambridge -and Harvard _alumni_ who have been in jail strikes the imagination with -a peculiar force. In the theatrical world the ideal condition conceived -by certain social philosophers is being rapidly realized and reduced -to practice. “It does not matter,” say these superior persons, “what -one does; it is only important what one is.” The theater folk have long -been taking that view of things, as is amply attested by the histrionic -careers (for examples) of Mrs. Lily Langtry and Mr. John L. Sullivan. -Managers—and, we may add, the public—do not consider it of the least -importance what Mrs. Langtry _does_ on the stage, nor how she does -it, so long as she _is_ a former favorite of a Prince and a tolerably -fair counterpart of a Jersey cow. And who cares what Mr. Sullivan’s -pronunciation of the word “mother” may be, or what degree of sobriety -he may strive to simulate?—in seeing his performance we derive all our -delight from the consciousness of the great and godlike thing that he -has the goodness to _be_. - -It is needless to recall other instances; every playgoer’s memory is -richly stored with them; but this troupe of convicted collegians is -the frankest application of the principle to which we have yet been -treated. At the same time, it opens up “vistas” of possibilities -extending far-and-away beyond what was but yesterday the longest -reach of conjecture. Why should we stop with a troupe of educated -felons? Let us recognize the principle to the full and apply it with -logical heroism, unstayed by considerations of taste and sense. Let us -have theater companies composed of reformed assassins who have been -preachers. A company of deaf mutes whose grandfathers were hanged, -would prove a magnetic “attraction” and play to good houses—that -is to say, they would _be_ to good houses. In a troupe of senators -with warts on their noses the pleasure-shoving public would find an -infinite gratification and delight. It might lack the allurement -of feminine charm, most senators being rather old women, but for -magnificent inaction it would bear the palm. Even better would be a -company of distinguished corpses supporting some such star inactor, -as the mummy of his late Majesty, Rameses II of Egypt. In them the -do-nothing-be-something principle would have its highest, ripest and -richest development. In the broad blaze of their histrionic glory Mrs. -Langtry would pale her uneffectual fire and Mr. Sullivan hide his -diminished head. - -From the example of such a company streams of good would radiate in -every direction, with countless ramifications. Not only would it -accomplish the long desired “elevation of the stage” to such a plane -that even the pulpit need not be ashamed to work with it in elicitation -of the human snore, but it would spread the light over other arts and -industries, causing “the dawn of a new era” generally. Even with the -comparatively slow progress we are making now, it is not unreasonable -to hope that eventually Man will cease his fussy activity altogether -and do nothing whatever, each individual of the species becoming a -veritable monument of philosophical inaction, rapt in the contemplation -of his own abstract worth and perhaps taking root where he stands to -survey it. - - - - - PECTOLITE - - -This is one of the younger group of minerals: it was discovered -by a German scientist in 1828. For its age it is an exceptionally -interesting stone—if it is a stone. Its most eminent and distinguishing -peculiarity is described as the “property of parting with minute -splinters from its surface upon being handled, these splinters -or spicules piercing the hand, producing a pain similar to that -experienced by contact with a nettle.” - -In the mineral kingdom pectolite ought to take high rank, near the very -throne. In its power of annoying man it is a formidable competitor -to several illustrious members of the vegetable kingdom, such as the -nettle, the cactus, the poison ivy and the domestic briar. There -are, indeed, several members of the animal kingdom which hardly -excel it in the power of producing human misery. Considering its -remarkable aptitude in that bad way its rarity is somewhat difficult to -understand, and is perhaps more apparent than real. Professor Hanks -says that previously to its discovery in California it had been found -in only eight places. If upon investigation these should turn out to be -Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, Australia and the two -Polar continents, the unnatural discrepancy between its objectionable -character and its narrow distribution would be explained away, and -pectolite seen to be “in touch” with its sister malevolences, whose -abundance is usually in the direct ratio of their noxiousness to man. - -In his efforts to make this uncommon mineral known, advance its -interests and bring it into closer relations with mankind, Professor -Hanks is winning golden opinions from the manufacturer of arsenic, the -promoter of the Canadian thistle, and the local agent of the imported -rattlesnake. The various uses to which it can be put are obvious and -numberless. As a missile in a riot—the impeller wearing a glove, -but the other person having nothing to guard his face and eyes—its -field of usefulness will be wide and fertile. Small fragments of it -attractively displayed here and there about the city will give a rich -return of agony when thoughtlessly picked up. For village sidewalks -inimical to the thin shoe of the period it would be entirely superior -to the knotty plank studded with projecting nail heads. With a view -to these various “uses of adversity,” it would be well for Professor -Hanks to submit careful estimates of the cost of quarrying it and -transporting it to places where it can be made to do the greatest harm -to the greatest number. To assist and further the purposes of Nature, -as manifested in the character of the several agencies and materials -which she employs, is the greatest glory of science. A human being -assailed by all the natural forces, seizing a stone to defend himself -and getting a fistful of pectolitic spiculæ, is a spectacle in which -one can get as near and clear a glimpse of the Great Mystery as in any; -and science is now prepared to supply the stone. - - - - - LA BOULANGÈRE - - -A once famous American actress, Miss Mary Anderson—sometimes, I think, -called “Our Mary”—was an accomplished baker. Among her personal -friends, those at least who had the happiness to dine at her home, -she had a distinguished reputation as a bread-maker. She was once -persuaded to make public the prescription that she used, through the -London _Times_, thus materially enlarging her practice by addition of -many new patients. I regret my inability to reproduce the prescription -here for the benefit of such house-keepers as are unfettered by -Colonial tradition—who, not having inherited the New World system from -their great-grandmothers, might be accessible to the light of a later -dispensation. For bread-making is, I think, a progressive science in -which perfection is not attained at a bound by merely “dissolving the -political bands” which connect one country with another. - -History is garrulous of our Revolutionary sires: their virtues and -other vices are abundantly extolled; but concerning our Revolutionary -dames the trumpet of fame remains mysteriously and significantly -reticent—a phenomenon not easily accounted for on any hypothesis -which assumes or concedes their worth. Historians, poets and those, -generally, who have possession of the public ear and hold it from -generation to generation, seem to feel that the less said about these -merry old girls the better. I believe the secret of it lies in the -consciousness of the literary class that the mothers of the Republic -made treasonably bad bread, and that their sins of that sort are -being visited upon their children, even to these third and fourth -generations, and (which is worse) practiced by them. No doubt the -success of the Revolutionary War would have been achieved later if -our brave grandfathers had not been fortified in body and spirit by -privation of the domestic loaf of the period, known to us through the -domestic loaf of our own. To immunity from the latter desolating agency -the soldiers on both sides in the more recent and greater conflict were -obviously indebted for the development of that martial spirit which -made them so reluctant to stop fighting and go home. It must be said, -however, in defence of the Bread of Our Union that if one is going to -eat the salt-spangled butter which also appertains to the home of the -brave it really does not greatly matter what one eats it on. - -America’s dyspepsia is not entirely the product of the frying-pan, -the pie and the use of the stop-watch at meals. Any wholesome reform -in bread-making as practiced darkly in the secrecy of our kitchens, -will materially mitigate the national disorder; though even bread made -according to the plans and specifications of Our Mary can hardly be -expected to manifest all its virtues if eaten blazing hot. Whatever -may be the outcome of Mistress Mary’s quite contrary way of imparting -her sacred secret to a foreign newspaper and ignoring the press of her -own country—whether anybody now compounds bread after her prescription -or not, or if anybody does, whether anybody else will eat it—this much -was accomplished: she showed that at least one American woman was not -afraid to tell the world and the public prosecutors how she made bread. -As a bread-maker she was indubitably gifted with the divine audacity of -genius. - - - - - ADVICE TO OLD MEN - - -It goes without saying that among the elements of success a broad and -liberal total abstinence is chief. The old man who gets drunk before -dinner is born to failure as the sparks fly upward. Diligence in -business is another qualification that needs not be particularly dwelt -upon; the old man who seeks his ease while his young and energetic -employees, trained to habits of industry, are stealing all the profits -of the business will find his finish where he did not lose it. He is -beyond the reach of remonstrance. - -Study the rising old man. You will find him invariably distinguished -by seriousness. He is not given to frivolity. He does not play at -football. He does not contribute jokes to the comic papers. He does not -waste his time kissing the girls. The rising old man is all business. -We can all be that way if we are old enough to have no infrangible -habits. - -As to manners, and these are of the utmost importance, a deferential -and reverent attitude toward youth has a commercial value that it -would be hard to appraise too highly. Remember, old man, that the youth -whom you employ to-day you may serve to-morrow, if he will have you. It -is worth while to make him admire you, and the best way to do so is to -show him that you respect him. There are certain virtues that win the -admiration of all; let him think that you think that he has them. - -A most desirable quality in an old man is modesty. It is not only -valuable as a mental equipment necessary to success, it is right and -just that you should have it. Pray do not forget, in the exultation of -growing old, that age is peculiarly liable to error through the glamour -of experience. To the errors of age and experience are attributable -most of those failures which come to us in the later life. We can not -help being old, but Heaven has not denied us the opportunity to take -counsel of youth and ignorance. Some one has said that the way to -succeed is to think like a philosopher and then act like a fool. The -thinking being needless, a mere intellectual luxury, and therefore a -sinful waste of the time allowed us for another and better purpose, -renounce it. As to action, study the young. Every successful man was -once young. - -Do not try to get anything for nothing: when you have obtained a -liberal discount for cash you have done much; do the rest by paying the -cash. An honest old man is the pride and glory of his son. - -Dig, save, fast, go as nearly naked as the law allows, and if Heaven -does not reward you with success you will nevertheless have the -satisfaction that comes of the consciousness of being a glittering -example to American age. - - - - - A DUBIOUS VINDICATION - - -Hardly any class of persons enjoys complete immunity from injustice -and calumny, even if “armed with the ballot”; but probably no -class has so severely suffered from Slander’s mordant tooth as our -man-eating brethren of that indefinite region known as the “Cannibal -Islands.” Nations which do not eat themselves, and which, with even -greater self-denial, refrain from banqueting on other nations, have -for generations been subjected to a species of criticism that must -be a sore trial to their patience. Every reprobate among us who has -sense enough to push a pencil along the measured mile of a day’s task -in a newspaper office without telling the truth has experienced a -sinful pleasure in representing anthropophagi as persons of imperfect -refinement and ailing morals. They have been censured even, for murder; -though surely it is kinder to take the life of a man whom you set apart -for your dinner than to eat him struggling. It has been said of them -that they are particularly partial to the flesh of missionaries. - -It appears that this is not so. The Rev. Mr. Hopkins, of the Methodist -Church, who returned to New York after a residence of fifteen years in -the various islands of the South Pacific, assured his brethren that in -all that period he could not recollect a single instance in which he -was made to feel himself a comestible. He averred that his spiritual -character was everywhere recognized, and so far as he knew he was never -in peril of being put to the tooth. - -His testimony, unluckily, has not the value that its obvious sincerity -and truth merit. In point of physical structure he was conspicuously -inedible; so much so, in truth, that an unsympathetic reporter coldly -described him as “fibrous” and declared that in a country where -appetizers are unknown and pepsin a medicine of the future, Mr. Hopkins -could under no circumstances cut any figure as a viand. And this same -writer meaningly inquired of the cartilaginous missionary the present -address of one “Fatty Dawson.” - -Fully to understand the withering sarcasm of this inquiry it is -necessary to know that the person whose whereabouts it was desired to -ascertain was a co-worker of Mr. Hopkins in the same missionary field. -His success in spreading the light was such as to attract the notice -of the native king. In the last letter received from Mr. Dawson he -explained that that potentate had just done him the honor to invite him -to dinner. - -Mr. Hopkins being a missionary, one naturally prefers his views to -those of anyone who is still in the bonds of iniquity, and moreover, -writes for the newspapers; nevertheless, I do not see that any harm -would come of a plain statement of the facts in the case of the Rev. -Mr. Dawson. He was not eaten by the dusky monarch—in the face of Mr. -Hopkins’ solemn assurance that cannibalism is a myth, it is impossible -to believe that Mr. Dawson was himself the dinner to which he was -invited. That he was eaten by Mr. Hopkins himself is a proposition -so abysmally horrible that none but the hardiest and most impenitent -calumniator would have the depravity to suggest it. - - - - - THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE - - -When man undertakes for some sordid purpose to disturb the balance of -natural forces concerned in the conservation and in the destruction -of life on this planet he is all too likely to err. For example, when -some public-spirited Australian, observing a dearth of donkeys in his -great lone land, thoughtfully imported a shipload of rabbits, believing -that they would grow up with the country, learn to carry loads and -eventually bray, he performed a disservice to his fellow colonists -which they would gladly requite by skinning him alive if they could -lay hands on him. It is well known that our thoughtless extermination -of the American Indian has been followed by an incalculable increase -of the grasshoppers which once served him as food. So strained is -the resulting situation that some of our most prominent seers are -baffled in attempting to forecast the outcome; and it is said that -the Secretary of Agriculture holds that farming on this continent is -doomed unless we take to a grasshopper diet ourselves. - -The matter lends itself to facile illustration: one could multiply -instances to infinity. We might cite the Australian ladybird, which -was by twenty well defined and several scientists brought here and -acclimated at great expense to feed upon a certain fruit pest, but -which, so far, has confined its ravages mainly to the fruit. - -The latest, and in some ways the most striking, instance of the peril -of making a redistribution of the world’s fauna, is supplied by the -beautiful tropical isle of Jamaica, home of the Demon Rum. It appears -that someone in Jamaica was imperfectly enamored of the native rats, -which are creatures of eminent predacity, intrepid to a degree that -is most disquieting. This person introduced from a foreign land the -mongoose—an animal whose name it seems prudent to give in the singular -number. The mongoose, as is well known, is affected with an objection -to rats compared with which the natural animosity of a dog to another -dog is a mild passion indeed, and that of a collector of customs to -holy water seems hardly more than a slight coolness. Jamaica is now -ratless, but, alas, surpassingly tickful. The ticks have so multiplied -upon the face of the earth that man and beast are in equal danger of -extinction. The people hardly dare venture out-of-doors to plant the -rum vine and help the north-bound steamers to take on monkeys. The -mongoose alone is immune to ticks. - -It appears that when this creature had effaced the rats it was itself -threatened with effacement from lack of comestible suited to its -tooth; but instead of wasting its life in repinings and unavailing -regrets—instead of yielding to the insidious importunities of -nostalgia, it fell upon the lizards and banqueted royally if roughly; -and soon the lizards had gone to join the rats in the Unknown. Now, -the Jamaica lizard had for countless ages “wittled free” upon ticks, -maintaining among them a high death-rate with which, apparently, their -own dietetic excesses (for ticks are greatly addicted to the pleasures -of the table) had nothing to do. The lizard abating his ravages, -through being himself abated by the mongoose, the tick holds dominion -by the unchallenged authority of numbers. Man, the whilom tyrant, flees -to his mountain fastnesses, the rum vine withers in the fields and the -north-bound steamer sails monkeyless away. Jamaica’s last state is -worse than her first and almost as bad as ours. She is as yet, however, -spared the last and lowest humiliation that a brave and generous people -can experience; her parasites do not pose as patriots, nor tickle the -vanity of those whom they bleed. - - - Transcriber’s Notes: - - - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). - - Blank pages have been removed. - - A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE -BIERCE, VOLUME 10 *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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