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Confessions of a Book-Lover

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Title: Confessions of a Book-Lover

Author: Maurice Francis Egan


        
Release date: December 24, 2007 [eBook #24003]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER ***




Produced by Elaine Walker, Janet Kegg and the Online
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CONFESSIONS OF A
BOOK-LOVER

BY

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN

[Illustration]

GARDEN CITY      NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1922




COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT

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




IN MEMORY OF

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

A MAN OF ACTION
IN LOVE WITH BOOKS




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                   PAGE

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

 II. POETS AND POETRY                       76
      France--Of Maurice de Gu['e]rin.
      Dante.
      English and American Verse.

III. CERTAIN NOVELISTS                     134

 IV. LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS     156

  V. BOOKS AT RANDOM                       205




CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER




CHAPTER I

MY BOYHOOD READING

_Early Recollections_


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

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

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

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

At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter
Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely
attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that
nobody could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The
Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a
good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my
mental vision every day of my life.

In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and
carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in
advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my
acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the International
Sunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geography
of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the
whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human
interest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand,
sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes
because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever
may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New
Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition
not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In
my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between
truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often very
difficult for an imaginative child.

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

Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in those
days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long
afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in
"The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that the
beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to
visualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, that
a sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was not
necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only
necessary for her to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them,
"My Wallace!" to know that she was the loveliest person in all Scotland.
But "The Scottish Chiefs" required the leisure of long holiday
afternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that I
had to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It was
worth the trouble, however.

Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother's
knee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she never
read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful
misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never
considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At
first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets
of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There
is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the
heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after
the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved
her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no
noise.

In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in
_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard
III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine
Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been
listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice
in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the
adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo
carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of
Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer
creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.

There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had
access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not
so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to
Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the
latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--the
shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may
be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little
Em'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind
was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as
much by the force of the style, by the suggestions of an unknown terror,
as by any facts which a child could grasp.

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

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

After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory
reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no
emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes
came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed,
but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George
Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George
Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful
book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges
in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales
about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the
ordinary common sense of geese!

Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one
unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from my
entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this
day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply
interested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come as
in the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school
books, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday School
opposite our house. They seemed to me to be stupid beyond all words.
There was not one really good fight in them all, and after an honest
villain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes
were very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared to
them. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hate
religion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that I
had Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were
equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended, were quite as
uninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They were
generally translated from the French, without vitality and without any
regard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down
one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima." As it
concerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might be
in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off the
ear of a High Priest's servant as was done in the New Testament. But no,
I was shocked to read in the very beginning, that

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

In that book I read no more that day!

But I discovered a volume I have never forgotten, which probably after
"The Young Marooners," had the greatest influence on me for a short
period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff in
it; it made me feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills;
and it taught a lot about the archaeology of Rome, for it was part of
that excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very great
book. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days of
Pompeii," I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but
in some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by Washington
Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." _Conspuez les livres des poup['e]es!_
What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, could
awaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailing
clouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes the
pomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates a
love for Spain and a romance of old Spain which can never die.

After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was given "Les Enfants des
Bois," by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was a
horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laborious
research in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures of
these infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but I
know that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctive
mood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a French
romance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin." It was of things
that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with
an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the
gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I
gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have
been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were
written by an author named L['e]on Gozlan.

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the
youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I
happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where
Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from
leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything
of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of
the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were
rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been
written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir
Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas
Nickleby."

"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter
afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable
city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to
work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a
kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it
was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas
Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which
generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you
never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly
know the flavour of Dickens. You can't laugh now as you laughed then.
Oh, the delight of Mr. Crummles's description of his wife's dignified
manner of standing with her head on a spear!

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

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

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

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

Julius Caesar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had
not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." It seemed to me that Brutus
was a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child,
and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not prevent
me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the
ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no
adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a
convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the
pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little
boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost
suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was
not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had
been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades
covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully
wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it
occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the
night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when
he threw the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill him at once,
by an upward thrust of the knife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It happened that a young man, in whom my father had a great interest,
was threatened with tuberculosis. An awful rumour was set abroad that he
was about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the back
numbers of the New York _Ledger_ containing a long serial story by Mrs.
Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the French
Revolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with a
description of a dance in an old ch[^a]teau, when the Marquise, who was
floating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
glove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where the
blood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find the
novel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my father
sent the numbers of the New York _Ledger_ to the apparently dying man.
"It's a horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any Christian
person reading the New York _Ledger_ at the point of death." The young
man, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed his
recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories.

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

It happened that my father was one of the directors of a local library,
and in it I found Bates's volume on the Amazon--I forget the exact title
of the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived in Para; I tried to
manufacture an imitation of the Urari poison with a view to
exterminating rats in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced, at intervals, a
thrilling novel, with the glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a
background. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I had ever read. He
held possession of my imagination, until he was forced out by a Mr.
Jerningham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany. Saint Malo
became the only town for me; I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and
the Stuarts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of Sir Walter
Scott, were displaced by the Vend['e]ans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in
the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No
doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of
scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never
discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were
very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never
was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the
Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful
experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be
expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers
coming into the open space in the Forest of Arden and hear their songs,
making the leaves of the trees quiver before they appeared. And Puck!
and Caliban! When I was young I was always very sorry for Caliban, and,
being very religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might have done
something for his soul.

There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be
to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were
persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one
opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I
preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered
somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a
fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was
"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the
stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he
disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere
prejudice.

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

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

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

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

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

Just about this time I read in Littell's _Living Age_ a novel called
"The Amber Witch," and some of Fritz Reuter's Low German stories; but
these were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may not have been
much of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "The
Virginians" or "Esmond." They were what my father called
"classics"--things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" was
quite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionary
history, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. I
recall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her
thumb to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This is
all that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neither
Henry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemed
to have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."

After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through a
book, given to me by my mother, about _la Vend['e]e_. It was a dull book,
but nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim the heroism of Henri
de la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists,
and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned the
compliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayette
a great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the beautiful Marie
Antoinette!

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


_The Bible_

The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, as
a moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable
value. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read it
constantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version and
the King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learned
to recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King James
version--which I always read when I went to one of my cousins--I found
the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time I
was limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as it
was considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testament
unexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raised
for some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a great
deal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and histories of the
Old Testament. I soon discovered that it was impossible to understand
the allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible.
What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had never
known the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field,
permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume if
one knew nothing about the Song of Solomon.

Putting aside the question as to whether young readers should be let
loose in the Old Testament or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
justified in including ignorance as the supremest virtue, he who does
not make himself familiar with Biblical ideas and phraseology finds
himself in after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. It used
to be said of the typical English gentleman that all he needed to know
was to ride after the hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most moderns. To construe
Horace, of course, meant that he should have at least a speaking
acquaintance with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature, and this
knowledge gave him a grip on the universal speech of all cultivated
people. However useless his allusions to Chlo[:e] and to Maecenas were in
the business of practical life, he was at least able to understand what
they meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the Latins stamped him
as speaking the speech of a gentleman.

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

Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. Even the poets often now
assume that Clytie is a name that requires an explanation and that
Daphne and her flight through the laurel do not bring up immediate
memories of Syrinx and the reeds. The Dictionary of Lampri[`e]re is covered
with dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid without an answering
glance of comprehension from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;
it is only that, in the modern system, the old mythology is not taken
very seriously.

Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be a necessary part of a
gentleman's education, there is no class of allusions from which we can
draw to lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we turn to the
Bible. This deprives conversation of much of its colour and renders it
rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young
people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a
rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a
Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when
he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost
sure to speak of Jonah and the whale!

It is disappointing to notice this gradual change that has taken place
in the attitude of the younger generation toward the Sacred Book. The
Sunday Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies of importance
and to overload the memories of their little disciples with a multitude
of texts, or to over-explain every allusion in the terms of physical
geography, etc., may in a measure be responsible for this, but they
cannot be entirely responsible. One must admit that diversities of
interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a religious point of view
will always be an obstacle to their use in schools where the children of
Jews, of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian denominations
assemble. But there is always the home, where the first impetus to a
satisfactory knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. The decay
of the practice of reading aloud in our homes is very evident in the
lack of real culture--or, rather, rudiments of real culture--in our
children. But there is no use in declaiming against this. Other times,
other manners; accusatory declamation is simply a luxury of Old Age!

Personally, my desultory reading of the Old and the New Testaments gave
me a background against which I could see the trend of the books I
devoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them;
besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for a
boy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standard
by which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expression
of life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamations
full of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love,
in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple
stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which
has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting
adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It
is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and
I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter
writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar,
and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They
may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of
their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more
you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human
he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes
it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission
has always been a great delight to me!

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

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

Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and with increasing delight
the letters of Madame de S['e]vign['e], I put her second as a writer of
letters to the great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield to his
sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew Lang's "Letters to Dead
Authors," and a very great letter I found in an English translation of
Balzac's "Le Lys dans la Vall['e]e."

It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with
these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often
reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take
money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he
worked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was very
grateful to Phoebe for remembering that he was a hungry man and in
need of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengers
Aquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking them
from Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able to
make their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had not
interfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked
"Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesus
were as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleased
that his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. I
always felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus would
give him a better chance of supporting himself.

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

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

It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote in
English, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different from
one another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great part
of my time in classes where Nepos and Caesar were translated by my dear
young friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator,
I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of the
translators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had no
interest whatever in the translations which we made daily for the
impatient ears of our instructors!

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

My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at school
when discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended to
conversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it came
to my turn I answered "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander
the Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I was
looked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, and
he asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, coming
suddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought with
beasts." This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dear
comrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer for
it as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they
discovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next composition
day, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "being
filled with all iniquity," and other evil things which brought down a
horrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such
plain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I was
only quoting St. Paul to the Romans.

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

And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have a
sympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, on
its way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiable
barbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help liking
the Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was a
Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him of
chastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given him
by Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! He
rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's. And one could easily
imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered into
the hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city!
And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, through
the nobility of a Roman law:

     For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not to
     signify the things laid to his charge,

and Agrippa's answer, after Paul's apologia:

     In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian!

But the story did not end then. I rehearsed over and over again what the
King Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautiful
Bernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finally
they did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity and
exquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paul
went to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the very
fineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment.
"This man," I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set at
liberty, if he had not appealed to Caesar."

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

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

And back again to St. Matthew--

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

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

     The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing.

     2 He hath set me in a place of pasture.

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

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

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

     Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


_Essays and Essayists_

I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerous
reading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptist
friends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading of
Emerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parish
never denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offered
his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to these
objections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading of
my boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parents
and guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain books
made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so in
words, the books I liked were always nearer to my heart than to my mind.
I owe a great debt to Emerson.

It was on a hot afternoon during the summer vacation that, near sundown,
sitting on the warm marble steps of our house, I dipped into an early
edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts and
to do good things, to lift myself above the petty things of the earth,
and to feel that to be an American was to be at once proud and humble.
Emerson's abrupt sentences, like a number of brilliants set close
together, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did not
get so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked the
lessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when he
mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I was
amiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege of
studying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on the
subject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and,
from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found out
his mistake.

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

I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays of
Emerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be really
American; in the second, and largely because of their quality, they
offered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which had
succeeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money and
luxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, where
simple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and moved
away into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumour
that some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagant
expenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
stopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of our
old-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. For
the first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as the
principal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons were
classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferous
atmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As to
his philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than the
religious opinions of Julius Caesar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged
to read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay.

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

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

In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul
Richter, of whose writings I remember only one line,

     I love God and little children,

I did not get very far into his "French Revolution." It seemed then an
unreal and lurid book.

Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had
from the Mechanics' Institute, of which my father was a committeeman,
delighted me beyond words. I liked Emerson's essay on "Friendship"
better than his, but for wit, quick repartee, general cheerfulness, he
reminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott's
Catherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was an
unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he
seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I
cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without
believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So
much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long
thoughts of which Longfellow sings.

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

I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modern
writer, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who
contributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazine
called the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and
Bismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that he
wrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were so
interesting and apparently so true that they really became part of my
life. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of all
modern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, I
should have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le
Sabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared to
an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip's
Church at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth.
Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series of
sketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like
other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like
those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and
purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken
out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with
pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, how they were endured!

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

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

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

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

Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for the
Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes the
beginning of the aesthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It may
seem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts in
Godey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and an
occasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of the
chromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every
self-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, very
good casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. My
father greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had been
celebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it as
almost "improper."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To quote further:

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. I
found him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with [`A] Kempis. His
philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a
very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my
English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he
said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even
philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the
works of Marcus Aurelius!"

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

Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to fill that "long-felt
want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No
doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might
have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and
art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately
tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.

By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made
apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double
and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real
violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a
bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green
ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the
effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was
artificial, or distorted from beauty or simplicity.

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

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




CHAPTER II

POETS AND POETRY

_France--Of Maurice de Gu['e]rin_


In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. These
were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eug['e]nie and her
coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.

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

How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that
library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided
by the critics of the period. I found Am['e]d['e]e Achard as interesting as
Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even
"La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending
her for her "vitality." I found Madame de G['e]rardin's "La Femme qui
D['e]teste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not
seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed
to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest
and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by
Octave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme
Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne
Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seigli[`e]re," by Jules
Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of
their predecessors.

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

Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
admirably correct.

Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
mentioned with rapt admiration.

But to come to the poets!

It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
that I discovered Maurice de Gu['e]rin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Gu['e]rin on the ground
of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
Testament at times.

Keats and Maurice de Gu['e]rin will be always associated in my mind. I
discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural
selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then
all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Gu['e]rin.

I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister
Eug['e]nie. The "Journal" ought never to be allowed to go out of fashion,
and probably it is only out of fashion in those circles which Mr.
Mencken so scorns, that devote themselves to imitations of Marie
Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
calm life of Eug['e]nie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to
understand the allusions, to plunge again into the journals, letters,
and poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin. Thus it happened that I had fallen upon
"Le Centaure" first. It is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me
the most appealing poem I had ever read.

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

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

After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the writings of Eug['e]nie de
Gu['e]rin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sister
together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate
and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice
loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read
the Journals of the De Gu['e]rins, I had leisure. A period of ill health
stopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days that
could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring
days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these
two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought
to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for
quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing
the impression that Maurice de Gu['e]rin made. It was a great surprise to
find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt
Whitman, who very rarely quoted any verse.

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

I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which Hamerton had corroborated,
in Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin's little sketches of outdoor scenery--sketches
which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any
pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.

As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin
had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper
on Maurice de Gu['e]rin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
piety should be sentimental, if Eug['e]nie's sentiment can be
characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was
evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware
that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the
average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.

The beloved home of Eug['e]nie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even
more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eug['e]nie, being
less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
charm of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
landscape, but the interior of a room:

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

And again:

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

Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite beauties in a
little space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short
outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in
this; but Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin exemplifies its value much more than any
other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing
this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to
recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_
which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent
amusements.

The devotion of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin to her brother resembles that of
Madame de S['e]vign['e] for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was
George Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her
characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the
Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De
Gu['e]rin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the
reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now
probably forgotten, and to go back to Keats.

After Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek
than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Gu['e]rin,
and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!

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

Maurice de Gu['e]rin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in
his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and
director, P[`e]re de Lamennais--the "M. F['e]li" of the little paradise
of la Ch['e]nie. To the delight of some of the more independent and
emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand,
Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have
tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be
almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it
did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.

De Gu['e]rin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing
poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual.
Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Tr['e]butien's
"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin." It would be folly
for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the
atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
Eug['e]nie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage,
and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
Maurice de Gu['e]rin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
this!--Maurice and Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, Keats, Madame de S['e]vign['e],
Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
related.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.

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

The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard
work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Centaure," to read
joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While
browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of
Tourgu['e]neff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found
Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has
now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of
Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these
poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the
hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from
Oxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that,
when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which he
had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect,
treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in
merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases,
very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and
partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in
English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.

But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Gu['e]rin lead us!
Here is another link--Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, and his jewelled and chiselled
sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."

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

      _Et seul le dur m['e]tal que l'amour fit docile
    Garde encore en sa fleur, aux m['e]dailles d'argent,
    L'immortelle beaut['e] des vierges de Sicile."_

A translation of which reads:

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

I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he
known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
_enrag['e]_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
prairie.


_Dante_

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

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

The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
capable of asking why Dante should be read.

Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for,
perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed
translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic
_tours de force_.

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

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

Gollancz says:

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

Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two years after Virgil's death
and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the
green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was
the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen
souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific
Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts
of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on
as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the
"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any
sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church
Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that
all children unbaptized by material water are doomed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor
does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There
is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the poet's faith--

    _Cos[`i] spir[`o] di quell' amore acceso;
      indi soggiunse: "Assai bene [`e] trascorsa
      d'esta moneta gi[`a] la lega e il peso;
    ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa."
      ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda,
      che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa."_

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

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

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

When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we
find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The
"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For
instance, there is the case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti.
Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his address is hardly tactful.
He is evidently surprised to find that Nino is not in Hell,

    When he came near to me I said to him;
      gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well
      that I have seen thee here and not in Hell.

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

     the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.

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

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

One must admit that there is an element of humour--not for the
victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought
guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
says,

    _E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta
      la riverenza delle somme chiavi,
      che tu tenesti nella vita lieta
      l' userei parole ancor pi[`u] gravi--_

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


_English and American Verse_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Mark the three words--

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

Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidly
becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
the reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any
"newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer," could he have made it more
splendid and appealing?

The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
is beyond the touch of time. The women in Fran[c,]ois Villon's "Ballade of
Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
beauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in _vers libre_;
its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that it
was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
perhaps eternal.

Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
Le['o]n; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
revolutionists.

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

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

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

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

     We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the
     seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most
     mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the
     common eight-syllable quatrain,

says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law,"

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

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

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

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

The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and
even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
the thought.

But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.

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

Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse
which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_
on that eminently important body.

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

And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
devout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions,
carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said,
Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitate
him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some
noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
carved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals.
We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance.
There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, though
they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.

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

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

The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of
"new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginning
to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and
amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas['e] and cynical
and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.

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

I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
trifle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is difficult for the simple minded to understand why Walter de la
Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as
an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to
say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his
cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of
modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about
an old-fashioned a[:e]roplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
centre of something interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring."
And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demod['e]_
because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediaeval
knights cut out of pasteboard.

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
Kreymborg and others new--_chacun [`a] son go[^u]t_--I feel that by
comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are
poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the
Christians.

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection.
Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful,
sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than
Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
themselves.

If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a
statuette of Leda and the Swan or Dana[:e] and the Descent of Jupiter as a
shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
the pulsations of the hearts of others.

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III

CERTAIN NOVELISTS


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

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

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

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

Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very different
causes. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of an
understanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
spirituality without which no great work can be effective. It was
because Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his
study of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from the
point of view of style, except "Barnaby Rudge," that he ever wrote,
probably due to the fact that, treading as he did on ground that was new
to him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel is
nevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with a
France that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as the
mauve tints through which certain artists see their figures and
landscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of a
great power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without that
training which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sources
of French history.

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

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

If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety
which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but
as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions,
I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American
reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has
become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a
time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all
self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of
culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's
statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not
think that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or of
Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more
pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of
Autolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"

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

One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side to
show what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were not
his. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not mean
innocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admit
that the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was no
conspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness,
however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither
Cervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.

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

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

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

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

But the best novels of American life seem to be written in order to be
forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phoebe Junior"--finds a slowly
decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
"Les Rois en Exil['e]" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
to be unread.

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

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

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

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

The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageant
of the "Table Round," is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but
no child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child has
suffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainable
hardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something or
other prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parents
are bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibres
of his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrod
has gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be so
unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"
Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real as
those parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens is
pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybody
admits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
to be pathetic.

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

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

     "Mr. Penrod Schofield!"

     Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again.

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

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

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

Dickens would not have done the scene quite this way; he could not have
so conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
gets it just right. He has created boy characters which will live
because they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after Mark
Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's "Child's
History of England." The two books have various gross faults in common
and these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
says that one of Dickens's is due to

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

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

When I was young enough to assist at meetings of Literary Societies,
where papers on Dickens were read, I was invariably informed that
"Charles Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman." There was no
reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
fact that he owned land, had not even a remote connection with "trade"
or that he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford or Cambridge, the
more modern definition would have been very different from what the
English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
Weller. Why not?

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

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

There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate the
romantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby." There are no really romantic
qualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero,
no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom
suddenly as the branch in "Tannh[:a]user" bloomed. Even Dickens can work no
miracle there.

It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of those
gentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as his
predecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "Tristram
Shandy," a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones," very
tiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of
eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was
brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian
Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance
between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the
adventures of the peerless Pickwick.

If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, he
ought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The Poor
Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias," and others too
numerous to mention.

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

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

Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!

George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. No
well-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. The
heroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, but
she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificiality
of Kingsley's "Hypatia," which I read at almost the same time, made me
admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth could
ever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or Catherine
Seton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring with
Blackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholastic
philosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consomm['e]_ of St.
Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemed
truer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as
_papier-mach['e]_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of the
time. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history,
but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and
as "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's reading
of Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, of
course. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and the
scene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel,
give me "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and probably fewer will
read it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the genius
of a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that it
almost defeated the end for which she worked.




CHAPTER IV

LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS


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

One of my most cherished books is the "Letters to People in the World,"
by Saint Francis de Sales. I have known people who have declared that it
is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a
book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint
Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the
relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of
pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this
charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal ch[^a]teau, he
never allowed the peasants on the domain to perform their usual duty,
which was to stay up all night and beat the waters of the ponds, or
perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his
friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could
not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that
the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back
to him; he could not see the old ch[^a]teau and the water in the moonlight,
or conceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved of their duty. I
can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as
I read the "Letters" of Madame de S['e]vign['e] or the "Memoirs" of the Duc
de Saint Simon.

I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English
translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--the
interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon.
Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to
become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic
author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without
the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture
of Mademoiselle de la Valli[`e]re looking hopelessly out of the window of
her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the
chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly,
holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis
XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?

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

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

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

Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of
Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the
contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the
Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the
worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good
peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He
earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de S['e]vign['e], for
which any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a
lifetime. But even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he
gives a picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is
shamelessly true. No living man to-day in political office, although he
might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so
interestingly shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if
you read him in French, you discover that he knew how to make
literature.

The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so
penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one.

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

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

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

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

Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of
Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more
about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through
certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that
I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could
be found. That autobiography is one of the gems of American history,
though it does not reveal the whole man. If he had been as frank as
Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but,
then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has
never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood
that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is
sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it
should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time
the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim
the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a
young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a
pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's
translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _[`a] la
mode de_ Madame de Sta[:e]l.

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

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

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

In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
and Philippe ['E]galit['e] were the most fascinating characters of the
French Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy
who was listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to
exclaim suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about
Judas!"

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

This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for
enlightening us as to the paternity of a son of Madame de Flahaut.
Morris, for a time that condoned the amourettes of Benjamin Franklin,
was virtuous. Madame de Flahaut, afterward Madame de Souza, gave Morris
a hint that he might easily supplant Tal

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