CONFESSIONS OF A
BOOK-LOVER

BY

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN

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

1. My Boyhood Reading
   • Early Recollections.
   • The Bible.
   • Essays and Essayists.
2. Poets and Poetry
   • France—Of Maurice de Guérin.
   • Dante.
   • English and American Verse.
3. Certain Novelists
4. Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs
5. Books at Random

[Pg 1]

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[Pg 2]
irretrievably lose when you lose a friend—if you
are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend—for
even the memories of him are embittered; but no
great author can ever have done anything that
will make the book you love less precious to you.

The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves,
I know, of miscellaneous reading, and no
modern moralist will agree with Madame de
Sévigné that “bad books are better than no books
at all”; but Madame de Sévigné may have meant
books written in a bad style, or feeble books, and
not books bad in the moral sense. However, I
must confess that when I was young, I read several
books which I was told afterward were very bad
indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody
told me! The youthful mind must possess something
of the quality attributed to a duck’s back!
I recall that once “The Confessions of Rousseau”
was snatched suddenly away from me by a careful
mother just as I had begun to think that Jean
Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as
queer as some of the people I knew. I believe
that if I had been allowed to finish the book, it
would have become by some mental chemical process
a very edifying criticism of life.[Pg 3]

“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.[Pg 4]
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[Pg 5]
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[Pg 6]
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[Pg 7]
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”[Pg 8]
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[Pg 9]
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[Pg 10]
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[Pg 11]
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

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[Pg 12]
feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills;
and it taught a lot about the archæology of Rome,
for it was part of that excellent story. I have always
looked on “Fabiola” as a very great book.
Then at Christmas, when my father gave me
“The Last Days of Pompeii,” I was in a new
world, not alien to the world of “Fabiola,” but
in some way supplementary to it. This gift was
accompanied by Washington Irving’s “Tales of
the Alhambra.” Conspuez les livres des poupées!
What nice little story books, arranged for the
growing mind, could awaken such visions of the
past, such splendid arabesques and trailing clouds
of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it
makes the pomegranate and the glittering crescents
live forever, and creates a love for Spain and
a romance of old Spain which can never die.

After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was
given “Les Enfants des Bois,” by Elie Berthet in
French, to translate word for word. It was a
horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and
the laborious research in the dictionary prevented
me from enjoying the adventures of these infants.
I cannot remember anything that happened to
them; but I know that the book gave me an ever-[Pg 13]enduring
distrust of the subjunctive mood in the
Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy
of a French romance called “Les Aventures de
Polydore Marasquin.” It was of things that
happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It
went very well, with an occasional use of the
dictionary, until I discovered that the gentleman
was about to engage himself to a very attractive
monkeyess. I gave up the book in disgust, but
I have since discovered that there have been lately
several imitators of these adventures, which I think
were written by an author named Léon Gozlan.

About this time, the book auction became a
fashion in Philadelphia. If your people had respect
for art, they invariably subscribed to a publication
called the Cosmopolitan Art Magazine,
and you received a steel engraving of Shakespeare
and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh very much
in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed
doublet and very well-fitting hose, and another
steel engraving of Washington at Lexington. If
your people were interested in literature, they frequented
the book auctions. My father had a great
respect for what he called “classical literature.”
He considered Cowper’s “The Task” immensely[Pg 14]
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[Pg 15]
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[Pg 16]
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-[Pg 17]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[Pg 18]
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![Pg 19]

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[Pg 20]
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.[Pg 21]

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

Julius Cæsar interested me; but Brutus filled me
with exaltation. I had not then read Shakespeare’s
“Julius Cæsar.” It seemed to me that
Brutus was a model for all time. Now, understand
I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers
every night and morning, but this did not prevent
me from hating the big bully of the school, who
made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a[Pg 22]
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[Pg 23]
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,[Pg 24]
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[Pg 25]
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,[Pg 26]
it was a story of the French Revolution, and the
last number that I was allowed to read ended with
a description of a dance in an old château, when
the Marquise, who was floating through the minuet,
suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid
glove of her right hand! I was never permitted
to discover where the blood came from; I should
like to find out now if I could find the novel. I
remember that my mother was terribly shocked
when my father sent the numbers of the New York
Ledger to the apparently dying man. “It’s a
horrible thing,” my mother said, “to think of any
Christian person reading the New York Ledger at
the point of death.” The young man, however,
did not die; and I rather think my father attributed
his recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of
his favourite stories.

There were certain other serial stories I was
ordered to read; they were stories of the Irish
Brigade in France. My mother, I remember, disapproved
of them because Madame de Pompadour
was frequently mentioned, and she thought that
my father regarded the lady in question too tolerantly.
These romances were, I think, written by
a certain Myles O’Reilly who was in some way con[Pg 27]nected
with the army. This procedure of reading
aloud was not always agreeable, as my father
frequently went to sleep in the middle of a passage
and forgot what I had already read. The
consequence was that I was obliged to begin
the same old story over again on the following
evening.

It happened that my father was one of the directors
of a local library, and in it I found Bates’s
volume on the Amazon—I forget the exact title of
the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived
in Para; I tried to manufacture an imitation of
the Urari poison with a view to exterminating rats
in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and
had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I produced,
at intervals, a thrilling novel, with the
glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a background.
I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I
had ever read. He held possession of my imagination,
until he was forced out by a Mr. Jerningham
who wrote a most entrancing book on Brittany.
Saint Malo became the only town for me;
I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and the Stuarts,
whom I had learned to love at the knees of
Sir Walter Scott, were displaced by the Vendéans.[Pg 28]

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 in[Pg 29]clined
to regard them with tolerance. He thought
I would be better employed in absorbing “Tom
and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian Bob,”
by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to this, and
substituted “Lady Violet; or the Wonder of Kingswood
Chace,” by the younger Pierce Egan, which
she considered more moral.

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[Pg 30]
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[Pg 31]
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 Shake[Pg 32]speare’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[Pg 33]
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[Pg 34]
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[Pg 35]
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[Pg 36]
to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry
soldier. This is all that I can recall of those delectable
pages. But, later, neither Henry Peterson’s
“Pemberton” nor Dr. Weir Mitchell’s “Hugh
Wynne” seemed to have the glory and the fascination
of the long-lost “Quaker Soldier.”

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

When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed,
as the result of my reading, a great belief
in all lost causes. I had become exceedingly
devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor
had sent me a copy of “Willy Reilly and His
Colleen Bawn,” perhaps as an antidote to the
lingering effects of “Boccaccio.” I was rather
troubled to find so many “swear words” in it, but[Pg 37]
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[Pg 38]
without a knowledge of the Bible. What would
“Ruth among the alien corn” mean to a reader
who had never known the beauty of the story
of Ruth? And the lilies of the field, permeating
all poetical literature, would have lost all their
perfume if one knew nothing about the Song of
Solomon.

Putting aside the question as to whether young
readers should be let loose in the Old Testament
or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are
justified in including ignorance as the supremest
virtue, he who does not make himself familiar with
Biblical ideas and phraseology finds himself in
after-life with an incomplete medium of expression.
It used to be said of the typical English gentleman
that all he needed to know was to ride after the
hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so
absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most
moderns. To construe Horace, of course, meant
that he should have at least a speaking acquaintance
with one of the masterpieces of Roman literature,
and this knowledge gave him a grip on
the universal speech of all cultivated people.
However useless his allusions to Chloë and to
Mæcenas were in the business of practical life,[Pg 39]
he was at least able to understand what they
meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the
Latins stamped him as speaking the speech of a
gentleman.

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

Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion.
Even the poets often now assume that Clytie is a
name that requires an explanation and that Daphne
and her flight through the laurel do not bring up
immediate memories of Syrinx and the reeds.
The Dictionary of Lamprière is covered with
dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid
without an answering glance of comprehension
from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance;[Pg 40]
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[Pg 41]
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[Pg 42]
boy at school learns to love, in the Old Testament,
there are the most moving, tender, and simple
stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to
the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to
look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures,
the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing
episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth
to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned
that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of
letter writers, but as a figure of history more
interesting than Julius Cæsar, and certainly more
modern. Young people delight in human documents.
They may not know why they delight
in these documents, but it is because of their humanity.
Now who can be more human than St.
Paul? And the more you read his epistles, and
the more you know of his life, the more human he
becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not,
and the way he “takes it out” of those unreasonable
people who would not accept his mission has
always been a great delight to me!

Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure
to pick out the phases of his history—a history
that even then seemed to be so very modern, and to
a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real.[Pg 43]
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[Pg 44]
with increasing delight the letters of Madame de
Sévigné, I put her second as a writer of letters to the
great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield
to his sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew
Lang’s “Letters to Dead Authors,” and a very great
letter I found in an English translation of Balzac’s
“Le Lys dans la Vallée.”

It must not be understood that I put St. Paul
in the same category with these mundane persons.
Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often reasonably
mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker
rather than take money from his clients,
and one could imagine him as preaching while he
worked. He frankly made collections for needy
churches, and he was very grateful to Phœbe for
remembering that he was a hungry man and in
need of homely hospitality. He was interested in
his fellow passengers Aquilla and Priscilla whom he
met on board the ship that was taking them from
Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they
had not been able to make their salt in Corinth,
where, however, their poverty had not interfered
with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent
marked “Ephesus” was sure to have a good sale
anywhere. The tents from Ephesus were as[Pg 45]
fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St.
Paul was pleased that his two disciples should have
a chance of being more prosperous. I always felt,
too, that, in his practical way, he knew that
Ephesus would give him a better chance of supporting
himself.

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

The constant reading of St. Paul led me to the
Acts of the Apostles, and I found St. Luke very
good reading, though I often wished that, as I
understood he had some reputation as an artist,
he had adorned his writings with illustrations.[Pg 46]

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

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

My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute
one Friday at school when discipline was[Pg 47]
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.[Pg 48]

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

And there was the good centurion—Christ always
seemed to have a sympathy for soldiers—who
was willing to save Paul when the ship, on its way
to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita
where the amiable barbarians showed him no
small courtesy. And one could not help liking the
Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix,
whose wife was a Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted
when the Apostle spoke to him of chastity
and of justice to come, yet hoped that money
would be given him by Paul, and frequently sent
for, and often spoke with him. And how fine
seemed the Apostle’s belief in his nobility as a
Roman citizen! He rendered unto Cæsar the[Pg 49]
things that were Cæsar’s. And one could easily
imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa
and Bernice entered into the hall of audience with
the tribunes and principal men of the city! And
one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself
nobly, through the nobility of a Roman law:

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

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

It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet[Pg 50]
Micheas, who had previously struck me as of no
importance at all, and I read:

And back again to St. Matthew—

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:[Pg 51]

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[Pg 52]
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[Pg 53]
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[Pg 54]
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 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.[Pg 56]

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[Pg 57]
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[Pg 58]
was a rumour that some of these sought unlimited
opportunities for extravagant expenditure.
We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly
stopping before the white doors and
the green window-shutters of our old-fashioned
colonial houses. They had made money through
the war. For the first time in our lives we boys
heard of money making as the principal aim of
life. The fact that these successful persons were
classed as “shoddy” did not lessen the value of
the auriferous atmosphere about us. Emerson
was a corrective to this materialism. As to his
philosophy or theology, that did not concern me
any more than the religious opinions of Julius
Cæsar, whose “Commentaries” I was obliged to
read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of
essay.

By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle.
The inflation of his style did not deter me from
thoroughly enjoying the paper on “Novalis.”
That on “Cagliostro,” however, was my favourite.
It introduced me intimately to the French Revolution.
I disliked this great charlatan for his
motto, “Tread the lilies under foot.” I was for
the Bourbons! The French Revolution, as a fact,[Pg 59]
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[Pg 60]
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 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 un[Pg 61]believer,
a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely
indignant; he seemed to me to be a very
pious gentleman, with that wit and humour
which I seldom found in professedly pious books;
and to this day I cannot hear Montaigne talked
of as a precursor of Voltaire without believing
that there is something crooked in the mind of the
talker. So much for the impressions made in youth,
so much for the long, long thoughts of which Longfellow
sings.

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.[Pg 62]

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[Pg 63]
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 re[Pg 64]cently,
and failed; but let me say that, allowing
for receptivity and what one may call temperament,
I know of no book more revealing as to the
relations of nature and art than “A Painter’s
Camp.” I recall vividly the words of the beginning
of the preface to the first edition:

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

Everything in life was rather conventional, rather
fixed, for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia,
to which our country owes the beginning of
the æsthetic awakening, had not yet taken place.
It may seem strange to this generation that we
were limited to the wood-cuts in Godey’s Lady’s
Book, the illustrations in Harper’s Magazine, and
an occasional picture in some short-lived periodi[Pg 65]cal.
The reign of the chromo had just begun.
Rogers’s groups were a fixture in nearly every self-respecting
house, though I am glad to say, in my
own family, very good casts of the Clytie and the
Discus-thrower filled their place. My father greatly
admired Power’s Greek Slave, whose praises had
been celebrated in the 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:[Pg 66]

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[Pg 67]
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:

The chapters on “Concerning Moonlight in Old
Castles,” “The Coming of the Clouds,” and the
little sketches, like “Loch Awe after Sunset, Sept.[Pg 68]
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:

And:

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.

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[Pg 71]
self-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated
in the chapters on “Women and Marriage,” “To a
Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage,”
but I thought the author very wise indeed, and
found many other pages which were intensely
stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they
like; I owe a great deal to him; and, though I
might be induced to throw “The Intellectual Life”
to the Young Wolves of the Beginning of this
Century, I shall always insist that “A Painter’s
Camp” ought to be included in every list of books.

It was George Eliot who sent me to “The Following
of Christ,” and she interested me in Saint Teresa,
that illustrious woman so well compounded of
mysticism and common sense, of whom, however,
I could find no good “Life.” But Thomas à Kempis
was a revelation! He fitted into nearly every
crisis of the soul, but all his words are not for
every-day life. He seems to demand too much of
us poor folk of the world. Later, I came to understand
that the counsel of perfection which Christ
gave to the rich young man was not intended
for the whole world, and many fine passages in
À Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than
my own.[Pg 72]

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

It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely
staked off little plots, each with its own date.
The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous
reading which every normal man ought to
cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for
the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps
hands with a thousand other books. It has always
seemed to me that “Sesame and Lilies”
would not have been conceived by Ruskin if he
had not heard well an echo of “The Following of
Christ.” There was a time when the lovers of
Ruskin who wanted to read “The Stones of
Venice” and the rest at leisure, felt themselves
obliged to form clubs, and to divide the expense,[Pg 73]
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[Pg 74]
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[Pg 75]
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.[Pg 76]

CHAPTER II

Poets and Poetry

France—Of Maurice de Guérin

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

One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia;
and the Mercantile Library—now dreadfully
shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy[Pg 77]
of access as to its shelves—had an excellent collection
of volumes in French.

How often in later life I blessed the discriminating
collectors of that library! Nothing worth
while at that time, even “L’Homme” of Ernest
Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was
not always guided by the critics of the period. I
found Amédée Achard as interesting as Octave
Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get
through even “La Petite Fadette,” although the
critics were constantly recommending her for her
“vitality.” I found Madame de Gérardin’s “La
Femme qui Déteste Son Mari” one of the cleverest
plays I had yet read. I have not seen it since; but,
outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed to
me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and
the human interest and the suspense were so admirably
kept up. There were some plays by
Octave Feuillet—”Redemption” was one and “Le
Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre,” which divided
my admiration with the management of
“Adrienne Lecouvreur,” by Scribe, and “Mademoiselle
de la Seiglière,” by Jules Sandeau. The
French playwrights of to-day have not even the
technique of their predecessors.[Pg 78]

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![Pg 79]

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[Pg 80]
he had gone too far—still it was a pleasant thing to
shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting these
trenchant words when the novels of the lady in
question were mentioned with rapt admiration.

But to come to the poets!

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

Keats and Maurice de Guérin will be always
associated in my mind. I discovered them about
the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the
only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare,
and that Keats had no intellectual value what[Pg 81]ever.
But I was not looking for intellectual value.
I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific
jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and
the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which
was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted
myself to De Guérin.

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

Keats’s Greece seems somehow to be a Greece
too full of modern colour, too unclassical. This
was a mistake, of course, due to the fact that all
my Greek reading had been filtered through professors
and textbooks; and all my Greek seeing had[Pg 82]
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:

After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the
writings of Eugénie de Guérin and her brother—I
inevitably think of this brother and sister together.
There always lingers about the genius of these two
delicate and sensitive beings a certain perfume of
the white lilac which Maurice loved. It happened
that through the amiability of my father, when I
read the Journals of the De Guérins, I had leisure.
A period of ill health stopped my work—I had
begun to study law—and there were long days
that could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount
Park in the early spring days, when it seems most
appropriate to associate one’s self with these two
who ought to be read in the mood of the early
spring, and they ought to be read slowly and even
prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for quoting
a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late
‘seventies showing the impression that Maurice
de Guérin made. It was a great surprise to find
part of the sestette copied in the “Prose Writings”[Pg 84]
of Walt Whitman, who very rarely quoted any
verse.

I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which
Hamerton had corroborated, in Eugénie de Guérin’s
little sketches of outdoor scenery—sketches
which always have a human interest. I had not
yet begun to take any pleasure in Wordsworth;
and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be able to
enjoy nature for itself—nature unrelieved or unimproved
by human figures—had no attractions for
me. And here the dear Edward Roth came in, and
confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments
with other clever Philadelphians, Doctor[Pg 85]
Nolan, the scientist who loved letters, and that
amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.

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

The beloved home of Eugénie, La Cayla, was not
a gay place. It was even more circumscribed than
Miss Mitford’s “Village”; but Eugénie, being less
“Anglo-Saxon” than Miss Mitford, had more[Pg 86]
sentiment and a more sensitive perception of the
meaning of nature—though, when it comes to
sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who
often masquerades under the shelter of “Anglo-Saxonism,”
is as sentimental as the most sentimental
of sentimentalists. This is what I mean
by the landscape charm of Eugénie de Guérin, and
yet the picture in this case is not a landscape, but
the interior of a room:

[Pg 87]

And again:

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

The devotion of Eugénie de Guérin to her brother
resembles that of Madame de Sévigné for her
daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George Sand
who discovered the genius of that brother, though[Pg 88]
her characterization of the qualities of his genius
did not please the Christian soul of his sister. It
was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De Guérin’s place
in French literature; and I recall now that the
reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems
of David Gray, now probably forgotten, and to go
back to Keats.

After Maurice de Guérin’s “Le Centaure” I
found Keats even less Greek than I thought he
was, because he was less philosophical than De
Guérin, and because he did not concern himself
with the gravest questions of life; but, after all,
Keats is the poet for the poets!

My dear friend, Edward Roth—whom James
Huneker celebrates in his “Steeplejack”—named
Spenser as “the poet of the poets”; but Spenser
is too hard to read—even harder than Chaucer,
and certainly more involved, while no poets that
ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full
of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later,
it seemed absurd for the French poets of a certain
genre to call themselves symbolists. When
Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because
he felt. It was not necessary for him to search
laboriously for the colour of a word. The thing[Pg 89]
itself coloured the word—and Keats, working hard
in a verbal laboratory, would have been an anomaly.
It was not necessary for him to study carefully
the music of his verse as Campion did or
Coventry Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed
to have done—though one cannot have suspected
that Sidney Lanier’s elaborate laboratory
was erected after his best verse had been written.

Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was
probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by
the defection of his old friend and director, Père
de Lamennais—the “M. Féli” of the little paradise
of la Chénie. To the delight of some of the
more independent and emancipated of the literary
circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice
was becoming more pantheistic than Christian.
He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an
altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost
equally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain,
although it did not change her love or make a rift
in her belief in him.

De Guérin is a singing poet in a language which
is used by few singing poets for serious themes.
There are few lyric poems in French, like the
“Chanson de Fortunio” of Alfred de Musset. It[Pg 90]
was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found
the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual.
Sainte-Beuve calls it “the familiar Alexandrine
reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all
the little turns of an intimate talk.” Eugénie
complains that “it sings too much and does not
talk enough.” However, one of the most charming
of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold’s
seems almost “common,” is that preceding Trébutien’s
“Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice
de Guérin.” It would be folly for me to try to
permeate the mind of any other person with the
atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I
think of the first delight of reading at leisure the
poems of Maurice and the letters of Eugénie. I
might just as well attempt to make a young man of
our time feel the thrill that came when we were
young and first heard the most beautiful of all
love songs—”Come into the Garden, Maud!”

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior
giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich
Villagers if they did me the honour to read
this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better
taste and is not so imitative—and paraphrases of
this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of[Pg 91]
the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
Tennyson, like De Guérin, had bent the
old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly
help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that
Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical
verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice
de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial
characteristics in common, send us back to
Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who
wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to
all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this!—Maurice
and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame
de Sévigné, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan
Campion—and yet they are all related.

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

The received methods of “teaching” the classics
in what people call “the dead languages”[Pg 92]
nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul,
while they may develop certain hidden abilities of
the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues
very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
honestly believed that the Roman Empire had
risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin
language might live! The logical result of this
teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical,
ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover
something about the Roman Empire, in order that
it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious
Empire had lived and died in order to produce
an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists,
managed to make the Romans interesting in
conversation; he always impressed one that the
Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets,
which he admitted were full of colour and life,
were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and
aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to
describe them!

The impossibility of getting anything out of the
study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had
read Maurice de Guérin’s “Centaure,” to read[Pg 93]
joyously an edition of the “Idyls of Theocritus” in
French. While browsing I found on the shelves
of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourguéneff
in the same language. This delayed me a little.
I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the
Bohn Edition, which I think has now become
the beneficent “Everyman’s Library.” I revelled!
The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been discovered,
but some of the dialogues in these poems
contained all the best of their essences. My friends
among the hard workers at the “Classics” scorned
me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford who
gave us lessons three or four times a week and
held that, when we were able to translate at sight
a certain page of Greek which he had composed
himself from various great authors, that we were
perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no
difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to
saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to
Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the
original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly
from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr.
Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too paraphrastic.
It is from the “Cyclops”:[Pg 94]

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[Pg 96]
of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets
did not entice us to hear their echoes.

But to how many links of a long chain does
Maurice de Guérin lead us! Here is another link—José
de Herédia, and his jewelled and chiselled
sonnets—the “Antique Medal” with its peerless
sestette, which combines the essential meanings of
Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

A translation of which reads:

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[Pg 97]
had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good
guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was
a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart.
It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that
one reads Theocritus in English rather than in
Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic;
but, although my classical friends, or rather my
friends enragé of the “Classics,” honestly despise
me for making this confession, I shamelessly enjoy
Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even
using it as a “crib” to the forgotten Greek text
rather than begin a course of Grecian philology
and to lose the perfume of the crushed thyme or
the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
prairie.

Dante

A constant reader is one who always returns to
his first loves. He may find them changed because
he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead
who never goes back to “Ivanhoe” to renew the
thrill of the famous tournament or to discover
whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age,[Pg 98]
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[Pg 99]
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[Pg 100]
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,”

Gollancz says:

Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two
years after Virgil’s death and drew certain souls[Pg 101]
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:

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[Pg 103]
that this Emperor’s donation of territory was an
evil gift. Dante, who, by the way, was nearer to
the old records and this tradition of the older time,
is a witness against Lord Bryce’s assertion that
the documents of Constantine’s donation were
mediæval forgeries. Dante believed, however,
that the donation was invalid, because the successor
of St. Peter, being of the spirit, could not
accept temporal power. This he asserts in his
“De Monarchia,” which was for a time on the
“Index.” Times have changed, and “De Monarchia”
and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” are no
longer in the “Index,” though Balzac and Dumas,
in French, are. But many of the Faithful in the
United States console themselves by assuming that,
as in the case of Dr. Zahm’s “Religion and Science,”
this the method of the Sacred Congregation
is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm’s book,
suppressed in Italian, received the proper “imprimatur”
in English! So may “The Three Musketeers”
and may “Monte Cristo” be regarded as
coming under the ban in the original, but as tolerated
in the translation?

Dante’s bitterness against certain Popes made
no rift in his creed, nor does it seem to have made[Pg 104]
him less respected by the Roman Court. There
is in the “Paradiso” that great passage on the
poet’s faith—

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[Pg 105]
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,

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

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[Pg 106]
blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one
may mightily well

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,

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[Pg 107]
great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as
crown princes by the groups that gather about
them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good
sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry
is a good sign. Tennyson’s “Dream of Fair
Women” and his portrait studies broke in on the
old tradition. “The Lady of Shalott,” with its
pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of
commonplace into something very beautiful, was
new.

We who succeeded Stedman by some years
loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were
not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures
which he labelled “King Arthur” and “Sir Galahad”
and “Sir Percival.” They were too much
like what the English people at that time insisted
that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot
would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the
fire of Milton’s “Lucifer.” But the lyricism of
Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now
as it was then. It is the desire for “independence,”
the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that
calls itself audacity, which brushes away the
delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply
because he does not represent a Movement. And[Pg 108]
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:

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[Pg 110]
novelist of the day before yesterday mostly deals.
If Mr. James Huneker had translated this into
the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with
minutely carved jewels, glowed with a perfume
and colour of crushed roses, and choked the reader
with the odour of musk. But could he have made
it any “newer”? Or if he could have made it
“newer,” could he have made it more splendid
and appealing?

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

Much affectionate reading of poetry—and poetry[Pg 111]
read in any other way is like the crackling of small
sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day—leads
one to consider the structure of verse and to
ask how singing effects are best produced. This
inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger
poets to throw aside the older conventions, and,
imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even
newer composers, to produce that “free verse”
which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or
the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating
to the intolerant to find writers, young
in experience if not always young in age, talking of
themselves as discoverers—brave or audacious discoverers—as
adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or
Cortez, or Ponce de León; and then, to hear some
of the old and conventional violently attacking
these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
revolutionists.

The truth is that vers libre has its place, and it
ought to have a high place; but the writer who attempts
it must have a very perfect ear for the
nuances of music and great art in his technique
applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples
of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few.
Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or[Pg 112]
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.

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[Pg 113]
charm of the poem—only one stanza, of four, is
given here—lies in the management of the rhythm.

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

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[Pg 114]

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[Pg 115]
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[Pg 116]
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[Pg 117]
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”?[Pg 118]

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[Pg 119]
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[Pg 120]
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[Pg 121]
revive, no very modern poet seems to have become
a part of the daily lives of the young, who declare
that the world is changed, and that the Old
hold no torches for them by which they can discover
what they really want! The more things
change, the more they remain the same! And
the young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously
and smoked a cigarette in private now
reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs
at a cigarette in public whenever she feels like it.
She is really no more advanced than the girl of
the period of the eighties, and not any more astonishing.
It’s the same old girl! And the young
men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and
who were rather bored by the thinness of their
aftermath, the æsthetic poets, really got more
colour and amazement and delight out of the
flashing of the meteors than the youth of to-day
seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blasé
and cynical and bored with life; but nobody was
really bored because there were too many amusing
and delightful things in the world—as there are
now.

Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and
burning Southern lights and his intensities and his[Pg 122]
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![Pg 123]

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.[Pg 124]

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:

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

The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry
that is hard and clear and never blurred or indefinite,
and he holds that concentration is the
very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for
“free verse” as for the principle of liberty. But
why does he fight? If “free verse” is musical, if
it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in
terms that appeal to the mind or the heart or the
imagination, why should it be necessary to fight
for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make[Pg 126]
men of straw in order “to fight” for them; but all
the world loves a poet, if the poet once touches
its heart. “The Toys” of Coventry Patmore is a
good example of what “free verse” ought to be.
But it is not free because it is lawless; its freedom
is the freedom of all true art which does not ignore,
which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern
the expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington’s
“Daisy” is certainly a less appealing poem
than that one in which Swinburne sings of the lady
who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!

José de Herédia, in “Les Trophées,” is both an
Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration
and the science of the Sibyl without her contortions.
It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude
of the professional makers of “free verse”
should have arrayed a small and angry group
against them; and this group will have none of
Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of
great courage and originality. There are others,
however, who may not be imitators of Robert
Frost, but who seem as if they were. Tennyson’s
“Owl,” which is looked on to-day as an example of
Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S.
Eliot’s “Cousin Nancy”:[Pg 127]

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.[Pg 128]

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

By comparison with the original of the “Idylls
of the King” this statement seems to be true.
Sir Thomas Malory’s knights and ladies—by
modern standards they would hardly be called
“ladies”—do not bear the test of even the most
elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus’s
“Hamblet” are from those in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
“Idylls of the King,” their bursts of exquisite
lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities,[Pg 129]
and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory
with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning
and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic
over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and
others new—chacun à son goût—I feel that by
comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets
are not rich. They are poor because they seem to
leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.

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

If you compare the “Idylls” of Tennyson with
those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily
see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the[Pg 130]
originals; they are not even paraphrases—to turn
again from painting to literature. They are fine
in themselves, and the critics of the future, more
reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will
give them their true place. As for Browning, it is
only necessary to read the Italian writers of the
Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
poems that touch on that period. He is always
modern. With all his efforts he cannot understand
that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
which made the Renascence possible. He seems
to assume that the Catholic Church in the time of
the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
struggled with Christianity. The fact is that
paganism had melted into Christianity and Christianity
had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence
to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan
or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of
gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was
nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a
pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin.
It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
beautiful and essentially poetical, even when
he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life[Pg 131]
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[Pg 132]
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 satis[Pg 133]factory
quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon,
in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It
is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern
poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is
a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion
when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts.
This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times
and joyous at times, but if their philosophers represent
them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential
points of their lives.

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.[Pg 134]

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 rea[Pg 135]son,
which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was
hard to laugh at Mark after a time. Compared
to him, the “Pickwick Papers” had an infinite
variety. There were other things in Dickens
which were finer than anything in “Pickwick,”
but the humour of Pickwick had a softness about
it, a human interest, a lack of coarseness, which
placed it immeasurably above that of Mark Twain.

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[Pg 136]
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[Pg 137]
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[Pg 138]
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 pessi[Pg 139]mistic
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 Amer[Pg 140]ican
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,[Pg 141]
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[Pg 142]
“The Breadwinners” now? Or who, except the
professional “teacher” of literature, recalls “Prue
and I”? Or that succession of Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s novels, almost unequalled as pictures
of a section of our life, each of which better
expresses her talent than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?
The English and the French have longer memories.
Mrs. Oliphant’s “Chronicles of Carlingford”—some
of us remember “Miss Majoribanks”
or “Phœbe Junior”—finds a slowly decreasing
circle of readers. And while “Sapho” is almost
forgotten, “Les Rois en Exilé” and “Jack” are
still parts of current French literature. But
“Unleavened Bread” or “The Damnation of
Theron Ware” or “Elsie Venner” or the “Saxe
Holm’s Stories” are so much of the past as to be
unread.

To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott’s
stories perennially bloom. And, for some strange
reason, the weird “Elsie Dinsmore” series is found
under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody
gives the Rollo books to anybody. Why? One
may begin to believe that that degeneracy which
the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes
adapted to the subway is supposed to in[Pg 143]dicate,
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[Pg 144]
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[Pg 145]
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.

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

[Pg 148]

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[Pg 149]
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[Pg 150]
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.[Pg 151]

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

It increases our admiration of him to examine
the works of those gentlemen who are set down in
the textbooks of literature as his predecessors.
Some of these learned authors mention Sterne’s
“Tristram Shandy,” a very dull and tiresome
narrative; and “Tom Jones,” very tiresome, too,
in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of eighteenth-century
life. And later, Pierce Egan’s
“Tom and Jerry.” I was brought up to consider
the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
and permitted to read “Tom and Jerry; or
The Adventures of Corinthian Bob” as part of
the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
analysis of a German research-worker to find any
real resemblance between the artificial dissipations
of “Tom and Jerry” and the adventures of the
peerless Pickwick.[Pg 152]

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[Pg 153]
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[Pg 154]
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[Pg 155]
Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or
Catherine Seton. But as it happened that just
at this time I was labouring with Blackstone
(Judge Sharswood’s Notes), with a volume of
scholastic philosophy “on the side”—I think it
was Jourdain’s consommé of St. Thomas Aquinas
in French—Romola was a decided relief, and she
seemed truer and more interesting in every way
than Hypatia, who was as papier-maché as her
whole environment is untrue to the history of the
time. An historical novel ought not necessarily
to be true to history, but it ought to be illuminating
and interesting, as “Hypatia” is not and as
“Romola” is. So it makes no difference whether
George Eliot’s reading of Savonarola is correct or
not, though it ought to be correct, of course.
Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous
Tito! and the scene in the barber shop! And if
you want a good, mouth-filling novel, give me
“Middlemarch.” Few persons read it now, and
probably fewer will read it in the future. It is
nevertheless a great monument to the genius of a
woman who had such an infinite quality for taking
pains, that it almost defeated the end for which
she worked.[Pg 156]

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.[Pg 157]

One of my most cherished books is the “Letters
to People in the World,” by Saint Francis de Sales.
I have known people who have declared that it is
entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for
them. For me, it is a book of edification and a
guide to life; and the “Letters” of Saint Francis
himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual
matters or the relations of spiritual matters to
life, are to me a constant source of pleasure. I
remember reading aloud to a friend the passage
in which this charming Bishop writes that, when
he slept at his paternal château, he never allowed
the peasants on the domain to perform their usual
duty, which was to stay up all night and beat the
waters of the ponds, or perhaps of the moat, around
the castle, so that the seigneur and his friends
might sleep peacefully. My friend was very
much bored and could not see that it represented a
social point of view, which showed that the Saint
was much ahead of his time! It did not bring
old France back to him; he could not see the old
château and the water in the moonlight, or conceive
how glad the peasants were to be relieved
of their duty. I can read the “Letters” of Saint
Francis de Sales over and over again, as I read the[Pg 158]
“Letters” of Madame de Sévigné or the “Memoirs”
of the Duc de Saint Simon.

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

But because I love to linger in the society of
the Duc de Saint Simon and Cardinal de Retz, it
does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
and ingenuous youth to the society of these[Pg 159]
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[Pg 160]
brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century.
This Frenchman really fought with beasts for the
life of children, and was the only real reformer in
the France of his time.

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

The only wonder in my mind has always been[Pg 161]
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.

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[Pg 163]
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 auto[Pg 164]biography,
and then to such letters of his as could
be found. That autobiography is one of the
gems of American history, though it does not reveal
the whole man. If he had been as frank as
Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have
been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could
ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has never
been done! Even the seemingly reckless James
Huneker understood that thoroughly. But the
autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sufficiently
frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to
me that it should be read just after one has finished
for the second or third time the memoirs of
Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty
to acclaim the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto
Cellini, and I have known a young woman
who read them reverently in the holy service of
culture as a pendant to a textbook on the Renascence,
and followed him by Jowett’s translation of
the “Republic of Plato.” She may safely be left
to her fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris
were not in her course of reading, and they seem
almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
them to anybody. There are passages in
them which might shock the Prohibitionist, and[Pg 165]
also those persons who believe in divorce à la mode
de Madame de Staël.

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

In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well
how to serve his country efficiently; and he was too
sensible of the debt of that country to France and
too sympathetic with the essential genius of the
French people not to do his best to serve her, too.
The original verses in his memoirs are the worst
things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote
verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of
all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, cultivated,
plastic within reasonable limits, and not
corroded with a venom of partisan politics. I repeat,
with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that
no better picture has ever been given of the aristocratic
society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.[Pg 166]

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

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

To persons who might censure Gouverneur
Morris’s frankness one may quote a short passage
from Boswell’s “Johnson.” “To discover such
weakness,” said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson,[Pg 167]
speaking of the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald,
“exposes a man when he is gone.” “Nay,”
said the pious and great lexicographer, “it is an
honest picture of human nature.”

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

In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic
verses to Madame de Flahaut; the Queen’s circle
at Versailles is worried about the fidelity of the
troops; the Count d’Artois holds high revelry in
the Orangery; De Launey’s head is carried on a
pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered men lie
in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is
not disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is
invited for three o’clock, to the house of Madame[Pg 168]
la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o’clock
the Countess herself came to announce dinner.
Morris is happy in the belief that his hunger will be
equal to the delayed feast. For this day, he thinks
he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He
is corroborated in his opinion that Madame de
Beauharnais is a poetess by

But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth
beneath. It seems to me that there is no more
interesting and useful book on the French Revolution
than this autobiography. It ought to be placed
near De Tocqueville’s “Ancient Régime” and
“Democracy in America.”

On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the
general opinion that Mr. Jefferson was considered
a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would be chosen
President by the House of Representatives. The
gentlemen of the House of Representatives believed
that Burr was vigorous, energetic, just, and
generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was “afflicted
with all the cold-blooded vices, and particularly
dangerous from false principles of government[Pg 169]
which he had imbibed.” Virginia would be, of
course, against Burr, because, Morris writes,

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

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

But, then, Morris had had money transactions
with the Lafayettes. Morris believed that no man
ever existed who controlled himself so well as
Washington. Shall we put the “Diary” just after
the “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” not
far from Beveridge’s “Marshall” and at least on
the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?

I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and
of Gouverneur Morris many times with a dip now
and then, by way of a change, into the Autobiography
of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a
change from the kickshaws of France to the roast[Pg 170]
beef of old England. This autobiography never
seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
authors to be industrious and hard-working. It
is more than that. It is the expression of the life
of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing, and
who writes about himself so well and so sincerely
that he gives us an insight into a phase of
English character which none of his novels ever
elaborated.

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

As a typical Englishman brought up in the country,
he liked to hunt. Hunting is a prerogative of
the leisurely and the rich. He obtained leisure at[Pg 171]
a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through
the same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a
manliness and lack of sentimentalism which endears
this book to me. It is so much the fashion
in our day to declare that society is against us when
we have to work unremittingly for what we want,
that Trollope’s honesty is refreshing, and, though
most readers will consider the word rather absurd
as applied to him—inspiring!

In earlier days every American was brought up
with a prejudice against Mrs. Trollope’s “Domestic
Manners of the Americans,” as we were all taught
to hate “American Notes,” by Dickens. We all
softened toward Dickens later, and it would be
difficult to read the simply told story of the heroic
devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his
mother without believing that the recording angel
in no way holds her responsible for her rather
vulgar book.

How fascinating to the budding author is the
record of sales of the books written by Trollope as
he ascended the ladder of popularity! How he
managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning
he does not tell us. They are not so easily managed
now. And there is the story of the pious[Pg 172]
editor who began the serial publication of “Rachel
Ray,” and although paying Trollope his honorarium,
stopped it abruptly because there was a
dancing party in the story! In all this the author
of “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers”
nothing extenuates nor puts down aught in malice.
And I must say that for me this autobiography
is very good reading. As the sailor once said of a
piece of rather solid beef, “There’s a great deal
of chaw in it.”

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

[Pg 173]

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

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

While I write this, I have in mind a little essay
of great charm and value by Coventry Patmore on
“Modern Ideas of Purity,” which goes deeper
into the fundamentals of morality than any other
modern work on the subject. And, by the way,[Pg 174]
having read “The Age of Innocence,” “Main
Street,” “Moon Calf,” “Miss Lulu Bett,” and
several other novels, I turn from their lack of
gaiety to find a reason why art should not be
gloomy, and here it is, from Coventry Patmore’s
“Cheerfulness in Life and Art.”

There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of
Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter,
but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which is
not quite the real thing. It is too sentimental
and rather too laboured. These two authors,
who, if the value of a writer could really depend
on the majority of the votes cast for him, would,
with the goldenrod, be our national flowers, seem
to work too hard in the pursuit of cheerfulness.

Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman
what supported the pleasant town of Stratford-on-Avon.
He replied at once, “The Shakespearian
industry!” Now the cheerfulness of both Mr.
Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter,
like the cheerfulness of “Pollyanna,” seems to be
very much of an industry. It is not at all like
the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous
and unconscious, which one finds in the really great
authors. Why the modern realist should believe
that to be real he must be joyless—in the United
States, at least—is perhaps because he feels the
public need of protest against the optimistic[Pg 176]
sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and
the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a
serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright
nor Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just
as serious a mistake as to assume that the late
Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
had no value. They pleased exactly the
same class of people, in their day, which delights
in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They
answered to the demand of a public that is moral
and religious, that needs to be taken into countries
which savoured something of Fairyland, and
yet which are framed by reality. However, as
long as Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold
Bell Wright, and novelists of higher philosophical
aspirations, like the author of “The Age of Innocence,”
and “Blind Mice,” and “Zell,” and “Main
Street,” continue to write, there is no danger that
the general crowd of American readers will be
shocked or corrupted by the “Memoirs” of the
Duc de Saint-Simon or of the Comtesse de Boigne.
So I feel that I am absolved from the responsibility
of misleading any young reader to sup on the
horrors of the description of the death of Madame
de Brinvilliers as painted by Madame de[Pg 177]
Sévigné or to revel among the groups of Italians
who range through the scenes drawn by Benvenuto
Cellini.

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

Or,

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

One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn
had been able to decipher some of the hidden
things in Mr. Pepys’s “Diary,” he would have
written this tribute, under the date of May 26,
1703:

All the teachings of the histories of our student
days force us to look on Charles II. as one of the
weakest of English kings; but when we come to
enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to
see that there is much to be said for him as a
monarch, and that he did more for England under
difficult circumstances than conventional history
has given him credit for.

It took many years for me to find any diary or
memoir that appealed to me as much as that of
Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you
what formal history never does; he takes you into
the heart of his time, and introduces you into the
centre of his mind and heart. In literature, in
poetry and prose, the reader hopes that the roofs
of houses or the tops of heads might be taken off,
so that we could see with an understanding eye
what goes on. The interest of the human race,
though it may be disguised rhetorically, is the
interest that everybody finds in gossip. Malicious
gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us
know our fellow men and women somewhat as
we know ourselves—but perhaps more clearly[Pg 180]—can
never be rooted out of normal human
nature.

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

Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical
book that compares in a way with the perennial
favourites of mine I have been writing about.
And this is “The Education of Henry Adams,”
and almost contemporaneously the “Letters of
William James.” It is easy to understand the
delight with which intelligent people welcomed
“The Education of Henry Adams.” Unconsciously
to most of us, it showed elaborately what
we talked about in our graduation essays and what
we believed in a vague way—that education consists
in putting value on the circumstances of life,
and regarding each circumstance as a step either
forward or backward in one’s educational progress.
This is the lesson which young Americans are[Pg 181]
taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter;
and which Samuel Smiles beat into the
heads of the English. Henry Adams’s lesson,
however, is not taught in the same way at all.
There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures,
painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
looks on the phenomena of life as no other American
has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other
American has ever expressed them. The judicious
and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may
shrink with horror from me when I say that I put
at once “The Education of Henry Adams,” for
my delectation, beside the “Apologia pro Vita Sua”
of Cardinal Newman!

There is the same delicate egoism in both; there
is the same reasonable and well-bred reticence.
There is one great difference, however; while
Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is
determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not
quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
not. And yet Henry Adams is more human,
more interesting than Cardinal Newman, for,
while Newman is almost purely intellectual and
so much above the reach of most of us, Adams is
merely intelligent—but intelligent enough to dis[Pg 182]cern
the richness of life, and mystical enough to
long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman
not only longs, but reasons and acts. It was not
the definition of the unity of God that troubled
Adams. It was the question of His personality.
The existence of pain and wretchedness in the
world was a bar to his understanding that a personal
Christ should be equal in divinity with God,
in fact, God Himself.

Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain
was no barrier to faith in a personal God. I am
speaking now only from my own point of view;
others who like to read both Newman and Adams
may look on this view as entirely negligible.
What other American than Adams would have
so loved without understanding the spirit of Saint
Francis d’Assisi:

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

After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his
thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of
that very great American John Burroughs. It is
the facts of life as seen through his personality,
the changes in our political history as analyzed so
skilfully by him after the manner of no other man
that make his book supremely interesting.

The real man is not hidden in “The Education
of Henry Adams.” We can no longer talk of the
degeneracy of American literary taste when we
know that this very American, characteristic, and
illuminating book was a “best seller” in our
country for several months. Some who like to
bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and
of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply
due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and
therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate
book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biog[Pg 185]raphies.
This view may be dismissed with a
scornful wave of the hand.

When I took up “The Education of Henry
Adams,” I was informed that it was “pathetic.”
Personally, it has never struck me that Henry
Adams, as far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He
did not assume an air of pathos when he read my
review in Scribner’s Monthly—before it became the
Century—of the novel “Democracy.” Mr. Richard
Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the
time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
his return he read the things I had said about a
novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be entirely
un-American.

Mr. Henry Adams’s book, in my opinion, has no
element of pathos. Adams lived a rare and interesting
life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
by tradition and education that he knew
how to appreciate beauty wherever he found it,
and to give reasons for its being beautiful. Against
the rough material obstacles in life, which are
supposed to be good for a man, but are not at all
good, since they absorb a great deal of energy
that is subtracted from his later life, he was not
obliged to struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt,[Pg 186]
the greatest of all modern Americans, who was a
man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
compelled to look up to social strata above him,
and, whatever the enraged democrats may say,
this in itself is a great advantage. One can see
from his “Education” that his material difficulties
were so slight that he could take them cheerfully,
even in our world where poverty is both a blunder
and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness.
Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his
heart. His description of the death of his sister is
heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his
griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of
friends, no man more pleasant surrounding. He
was free in a way that few other men are free, and
to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he
does not always take advantage, that is one of
the most appealing qualities of his book. It is a
great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with
him, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the
power of using wings, whether he uses them or not.

There are many reasons for the success of his
book. The chapters on “Diplomacy,” on “Friends
and Foes,” on “Political Morality,” and on “The
Battle of the Rams” are new contributions to our[Pg 187]
history. More than that, they elucidate conditions
of mind which are generally wrapped up, for
motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical
verbiage.

Some of the reviewers found “The Education”
egotistical. This is too strong a term. These
memoirs would have no value if they were not
egotistical; and if the term “egotistical” implies
conceit or self-complacency or the desire to show
one’s better side to the public, “The Education”
does not deserve it. A man cannot write about
himself without writing about himself. This seems
very much like a platitude. And Henry Adams
writes about himself with no affectation of modesty.
If anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation
he sometimes took a tone which made him
appear to those who knew him slightly as below
the average of the real Henry Adams.

Here, for instance, is a good passage:

The Chose sublime is an Adamesque touch! It
gives the last delicate tint to the impression.
Page after page gleams with such impressions and
such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly.
But he lacks faith! He is the discoverer of the
twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the discoverer
of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He
perceived the real architecture of both the Cathedral
of Chartres and of “The Song of Roland.”
How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons
seem in comparison with his volume on Chartres,
and their conclusions are so laboured and ineffective
in comparison with the lightning-like
glance with which he pierces the real meaning of
the twelfth century. He has his limitations, and
he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects
on the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century
ignorance, the half-educated vul[Pg 190]garity
of most of the writers in German and
English who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages,
one cannot help giving grateful thanks for having
found Henry Adams.

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

The man that cannot read his chapter on “Eccentricity”
over and over again is incapable of appreciating
some of Pepys’s best passages! Books
to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small
space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my[Pg 191]
opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books
listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us
will make his own shelf of books. The book for
me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or
uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms
are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes
literature when he exercises his critical vocation;
Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque
Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give
delight. There are no really good French critics
to-day, probably because they have so little material
to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his
vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews
knows his line and the value of background and
perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand;
but there are many leaves in our forests of critical
writing and not much wood. Literary criticism
is becoming a lost art with our English brethren,
who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes.
The admitted existence of cliques and claques
in London makes us distrustful. You were worked
into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips’s
“Herod” until you found that half a score of notices
of this tragedy were written by the same hand!

It seems almost impossible that “The Letters of[Pg 192]
William James” should appear shortly after “The
Education of Henry Adams,” and, though the
Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly
redolent of New England. We had begun to forget
our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs.
Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as
writers of modern folk stories; but the Atlantic
Monthly has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
of New England. That Boston which in
the Atlantic had always been a state of mind has
become different from the real old Boston.

In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole
of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had begun
to stain our map of culture with the modulated
tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned
to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe—leaving
out “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which I always
found detestable—to “Elsie Venner” and to “The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” in the hope that
the flavour of New England, which I found to my
horror was growing faint in me, might be retained.
There is always “The House of the Seven Gables!”

But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten
pages of Mrs. Stowe with great pleasure,
something she said reminded me of Walter Savage[Pg 193]
Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor
which had ever attracted me, “The Imaginary
Conversations.” There was an interlude of enjoyment
and exasperation. He shows himself so
malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable
of comprehending some of the historical persons he
presents to us. But there are compensations, all
the same. Whatever one may think of the animus
of Landor, one cannot get on without an occasional
dip into “The Imaginary Conversations.”
Suddenly Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford’s
“With the Immortals,” and I rediscovered
Marion Crawford’s Heinrich Heine! To have discovered
Heine in Zangwill’s “In a Mattress Grave”
was worth a long search through many magazines.
Like Stevenson’s “Lodging for the Night,” Zangwill’s
few pages can never be obliterated from the
heart of a loving reader—by a loving reader I mean
a reader who loves men a little more than books.

You will remember that Crawford’s Immortals
appear at Sorrento where Lady Brenda and Augustus
and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine
flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver
Lodge could only bring back to life, or induce to
come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius Cæsar[Pg 194]
and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together
with that group of semi-happy souls who live on
the “enamelled green” of Dante, spiritism might
have more to say for itself!

Strange as it may appear, it does not seem to be
so much of a descent, or of a break in the chain of
continuity, to turn to hear William James speak in
letters, which have the effect of conversation.
From the very beginning of his precious book I
somehow feel that I am part of the little circle
about him. The conversation goes on—Mr. James
never loses sight of the point of view and sympathies[Pg 197]
of the party of the second part—and you are not
made to feel as an eavesdropper.

Standing on the ladder, unhappily a rather shaky
ladder, to put back “With the Immortals” on the
shelf, I pass Wells’s great novel of “Marriage,”
which I would clutch to read again, if I had not already
begun this Letter of James—written to his
wife:

Personal expression is, after all, what we long for
in literature. Cardinal Newman tells us, I think,
in his “Idea of a University,” that it is the very essence
of literature. Scientia is truth, or conclusions
stated as truths which stand irrespective of the
personality of the speaker or writer. But literature,
to be literature, must be personal. It is good
literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader
like myself does not, perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently
with the philosophy of William James as
represented in these “Letters.” One has a languid
interest in knowing what he thought of Bergson
and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but for the
constant reader his detachment or attachment to
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so
important as his personal impressions of both the
little things and the big things of our contemporary
life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you
must, if you are at all in love with life, become a
Jamesonian after you have read the “Letters”![Pg 199]
And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope,
may resemble his father in time, has arranged them
so well, and kept himself so tactfully in the background,
that you feel, too, that whether young
Henry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most understanding
human being. The only way to read
these “Letters” is to dip into them here and there,
as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the
vinegar on drop by drop. To use an oriental metaphor,
the oil of appreciation is stimulated by the
acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper
of humour. Frankly, since I discovered William
James as a human being I have begun to read him
for the same reason that I read Pepys—for pure
enjoyment!

A friend of mine, feeling that I had taken the
“Letters of William James” too frivolously, told
me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to counteract
my mediæval philosophy and too cheerful view of
life. Just as if I had not struggled with Mr.
Wells, and irritated myself into a temperature in
trying to get through his latest preachments! I am
not quite sure what I said of Mr. Wells, but I find,
in an article by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy in the
“New Statesman,” just what I ought to have said.[Pg 200]

William James helped me to wash the bad taste
of Mr. Wells’s god out of my mouth. It seems remarkable
that such a distinguished man of talent—if
he were dead, one would be justified in saying a
man of genius—should not have been able to invent
a more attractive and potent Deity. Voltaire,
while making no definition, did better than that;
but Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells,
and he had an education such as no modern writer
has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those
who, like the Athenians, are always seeking new
things, can take Mr. Wells’s dogmatisms seriously?
Is it not in one of his “Sermones” that Horace[Pg 201]
tells us that the merchant wants to be a sailor and
the sailor a merchant? Does he not begin with—Qui
fit, Mæcenas? But Horace says nothing of
the authors of fiction—Stevenson calls them very
lightly “filles de joie,”—who insist on being boldly
and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
might have invented a better god than Wells;
but he had too much good taste and too much
knowledge of man in the world to attempt it.

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

Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved
himself very much, showed in his translations of
“The Odes and Epodes” that he could almost love
something as well as himself. It does not become[Pg 202]
me to recommend books—everybody to his own
taste!—but I should like to say that for those whose
Latin has become only a faint perfume of attar of
roses, like that which is said to cling faintly to one
of the desks of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, the
translations of our dear Horatius by Lord Lytton
is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the
most charming and most wise of pagan poets.

Horace says:

We might have, in spite of the awful examples
of Mr. Wells and the other preachers, who ought to
confine themselves to finer things, desired that
Horace should have gone further and told us what
kind of books we ought to read in our old age.
His choice was naturally limited; it was impossible
for him to buy a book every week, or every month.
The publishers were not so active in those days.
But he might have indicated the kind of book that
old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
have tried “Robinson Crusoe,”—the unequalled[Pg 203]—and
“Swiss Family Robinson”; but they seem too
grown up for me now. I have taken to “King
Solomon’s Mines” and “Treasure Island” and that
perfect gem of excitement and illusion, “The Mutineers,”
by Charles Boardman Hawes. I read it,
and I’m young again. I trust that some enterprising
bookseller will unblushingly compile a
library for the old, and begin it with “The Mutineers!”
The main difficulty with the Old or the
Near Old is that the fear of shocking the Young
makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they
express intense interest in new and ponderous
books, in the presence of Youth—when they ought
to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances.
But if the Old really want to save their faces, and
at the same time enjoy glimpses of that fountain
of youth which we long for at every age, let them
acquire two books—Clifford Smyth’s “The Gilded
Man” and “The Quest of El Dorado,” by Dr. J. A.
Zahm, whose nom de plume was H. J. Mozans.
There you have the real stuff. Together, these
two books are a combination of just what the Old
need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke
he cannot dream with any facility when he grows[Pg 204]
old; and if he has not possessed himself of these two
volumes, he cannot have acquired that basis for
dreams which the energetic Aged greatly need.
“The Gilded Man” is frankly a romance, and yet,
strangely enough, a romance of facts, and “The
Quest of El Dorado” is the only volume in the
English language when it deals with the El Dorado;
it has all the most attractive qualities of a romance.

But they are not enough. To them I add, “Bob,
Son of Battle,” which the author of “Alice For
Short,” discovered late in life. It is the greatest
animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is
nobly human, and the Black Killer devilishly human,
and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs, invented
by clever writers. A great book! It is
too thrilling; it reminds of “Wuthering Heights”;
I shall, therefore, read this evening some of Henry
Van Dyke’s Canadian stories, and end the day with
“Pride and Prejudice.”[Pg 205]

CHAPTER V

Books at Random

Among nature books that gave me many happy
hours on the banks of the Delaware—imperial
river!—is Charles C. Abbott’s “Upland and Meadow.”
“Better,” Mr. Abbott says, “repeat the
twelve labours of Hercules than attempt to catalogue
the varied forms of life found in the area of
an average ramble!” Soit! And better than that,
“to feel that whatever creature we may meet will
prove companionable—that is, no stranger, but
rather an amusing and companionable friend—assures
both pleasure and profit whenever we
chance abroad.”

Who that has made “Upland and Meadow” his
companion can forget the extracts from the diary
of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced
the number of wild ducks and geese, he says, even
then. But, nevertheless, Watson’s Creek was
often black with the smaller fowl.[Pg 206]

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

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

“Upland and Meadow” gives one occasion for
thought on the subject of raccoons. “Foolish
creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning
coons are forced to quest or die.”

For a stroll by the Thames—I mean the New
England Thames—there is no book like Ik Marvel’s
“Dream Life,” but for a day near the Delaware—imperial
river!—give me “Upland and Meadow.”

And then with what assurance of satisfaction[Pg 208]
may one turn for refreshment to the continual
charm of John Burroughs’s books, “Riverby” and
“Pepacton.” Burroughs’s opinions upon the problems
of humanity are more tiresome than John
Bunyan’s opinions on theology; but to go with
him among the birds and the plants, to hope with
him that the soaring lark of England may find its
way down through Canada to our hedges, to look
with him into the nests in the shrubs that border
our roads is to begin to feel that joy in being an
American of the soil that no other author gives.
He cured the young New England poets and the
singers of the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills
of celebrating the English thrush and the nightingale,
as if those birds sang on the Palisades.

There is an epithet I should like to apply to
John Burroughs, but he might not like it if he were
alive. I recall the case of a pleasant Englishman
who admired two American girls very much, because,
as he said, they were “so homely.” In fact,
they were rather pretty girls, and he had not used
the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
with which I like to describe John Burroughs.
Forty years ago, I met him at Richard Watson
Gilder’s. He was young then, and delightfully[Pg 209]
“homely” in the sense in which the Englishman
used the word. Some of the refined ladies at Mrs.
Gilder’s objected to his “crude speech,” for even
in the eighties there were still précieuses. The
truth is that his rural use of the vernacular was
part of the charm. It never spoiled his style;
but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which
smelt of the good soil of the country.

Thoreau’s “Walden” always reminds me—a
far-fetched comparison but I will not apologize for
it—of “As You Like It” played in one way by
Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia
Marlowe in another. Madame Dybwad, being
nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life,
gives us an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of
“homeliness”; but Julia Marlowe’s, like Ada
Rehan’s “Rosalind,” has something of the artificial
character of Watteau. “Walden,” then, is somewhat
too varnished; but “Riverby” and “Pepacton”
are “homely” and “homey.”

To return to memoirs for a moment, that most
delightful of all mental dissipations for a leisurely
man. In looking for the second volume of “Walden”—for
fear that I should have done Thoreau an
injustice—I find the “Memoirs of the Comtesse de[Pg 210]
Boigne.” One cannot imagine anything more unlike
Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John
Burroughs! Why is Madame de Boigne on the
same shelf with these two lovers of nature? Madame
de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She
loved the world and the manifestations of the
world, and—not to be ungallant—she is more like
an irritated mosquito than like the elegant camellia
japonica to which she would prefer to be
compared.

There is a great deal of solid comfort in the
revelations of Madame de Boigne; she is at times
so very untruthful that her malice does no real
harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors
so well; and gives the atmosphere of French Society
before and during the Revolution in a most
fascinating way. She always thinks the worst,
of course; but a writer of memoirs who always
thought the best would be as painfully uninteresting
as Froude is when he describes the character
of Henry VIII. But this is a digression.

Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the
style of Sir Thomas Browne as displaying a
“rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom.” Mr.
Mencken cannot accuse any modern Englishman[Pg 211]
or American of imitating, in his desire to be academic,
Browne’s hyperlatinism or his use of
Latin words, like “corpage,” “confinium,” “angustias,”
or “Vivacious abominations” and “congaevous
generations.”

Mr. Symonds says:

Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of
theology, aside, Sir Thomas lends himself to those[Pg 212]
moments when a man wants to dip a little into
the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly
all the modern novelists who describe men seem to
think that their interior life is purely emotional.
Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to
make his heroes, or his semi-heroes (there are no
good real honest villains in fiction now) lead lives
that are not at all interior. And yet every man
either leads an interior life, or longs to lead an
interior life, of which he seldom talks. He wants
inarticulately to know something of the art of
meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when
he is successful, is largely due to the fact that he
has never been taught how to cultivate the spiritual
sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert
and a group of his imitators great contentment in
the state to which they were called. As a book of
secular meditation the “Religio Medici” is full of
good points. For instance, Sir Thomas starts one
on the road to meditation on the difference between[Pg 213]
democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism
in this way:

There are singular beings who have tried to
read “Religio Medici” continuously. Was it
Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one
of this class? “How do you like Shakespeare?”
the amiable donor asked. “I can’t say yet; I
have not finished him!” It seems almost miraculous
that human beings should exist who take this
attitude toward Sir Thomas Browne, his “Urn
Burial” or his “Christian Morals.” It seems almost
more miraculous that this attitude should be
taken toward Montaigne, and that some folk
should prefer the “Essays of Montaigne” in the
pleasant, curtailed edition of John Florio’s trans[Pg 214]lation,
edited by Justin Huntly McCarthy! These
small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot
have the original French, or the leisure to
browse over the big volume of Florio’s old book as
it was written, Mr. McCarthy’s edition is an
agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It
somehow or other reminds one of that appalling
series of cutdown “Classics,” so largely recommended
to a public that is seduced to run and
read. A condensed edition of Froissart may do
very well for boys; but who can visualize the kind
of mind content with a reduced version of “Vanity
Fair”?

Montaigne is a city of refuge from the whirling
words of the uplifters. At times I have been compelled
from a sense of duty, a mistaken one, to read
whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose “Marriage” and
“The New Machiavelli” and “Tono-Bungay,”
will be remembered when “Mr. Britling”—by the
way, what did Mr. Britling see through?—shall
be forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn
to Montaigne. It amazed me to hear Montaigne
called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward
the eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and
he has fewer superstitions. It was his humanity[Pg 215]
and his love for religion that turned him from
Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for
Plato. He is a real amateur of good books. Listen
to this:

Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that
ever the book written by Brutus on Virtue was
lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch.
He would rather know what talk Brutus had with
some of his familiar friends in his tent on the night
before going to battle than the speech he made
to his army. He had no sympathy with eloquent
prefaces, or with circumlocutions that keep the
reader back from the real matter of books. He
does not want to hear heralds or criers. How he[Pg 216]
would have hated the flare of trumpets that precedes
the entrance of the best sellers! And the
blazing “jackets,” the lowest form of modern art,
would have made him rip out the favourite oaths
of his province with violence.

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

He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner;
he does not care for the hors d’œuvres. Note how
he rushes with rather rough weapons to the translation,
by his dying father’s command, of Theologia
naturalis sive liber creaturarum magistri
Raimondi de Sebonde. He thinks that it is a good
antidote for the “new fangles” of Luther, who is
leading the vulgar to think for themselves and to
reject authority. His analysis of himself in the
essay “Of Cruelty” is the message of a sane man
to sane men; and he does not hesitate to point out
the fact that no hatred is so absolute as that which
Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity.
The discord between zeal for religion and the fury
of nationality concerns him greatly, and he does
not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to his
contemporaries on the subject.[Pg 217]

In Montaigne’s time the theories which Machiavelli
had gathered together in “The Prince,”
governed Europe. One can see that they do
not satisfy Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.

“‘The Prince,'” declares Villari, “had a more
direct action on real life than any other book in
the world, and a larger share in emancipating
Europe from the Middle Ages.”

It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the
“Essays” of Michel de Montaigne give me as
much pleasure, but not so much edification, as
the precious sentences of Thomas à Kempis.
They are foils; at first sight there seems to be no
relationship between them; and yet at heart
Michel de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic,
has much in common with Thomas à Kempis.
If there were no persons in the world capable of
being Montaignes, Thomas à Kempis would have
written for God alone. He would have resembled
an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber
had erected. On the side toward the altar it was
foliated and exquisitely carved in a manner that
pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
toward the people and not the side toward the[Pg 218]
Presence of God, it was entirely plain and unornamented!

The friendship of Thomas à Kempis I owe to
George Eliot. Emerson might easily perish; Plato
might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even
Rudyard Kipling might exist only in tradition;
but the loss of all their works would be as nothing
compared to the loss of that little volume which
is a marvellous guide to life. The translations of
Thomas à Kempis into English vary in value.
Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of
À Kempis in deleting the passages on the Holy
Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing Thomas à
Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the
philosophy of his love of Christ limps when the
mystical centre of it, the Eucharist, is cut out.
If that meeting in the upper room had not taken
place during the paschal season, if Christ had not
offered His body and blood, soul and divinity to
his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas à
Kempis would never have written “The Following
of Christ.” The Bible, even the New Testament,
is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St.
Paul’s Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what[Pg 219]
better interpretation of the doctrines of Christ as
applied to everyday life can there be found than in
this precious little book?

You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather
what comfort you can from the philosophy of
Thoreau’s “Walden”—which might, after all, be
more comfortable if it were more pagan. The
Pan of Thoreau was a respectable Pan, because he
was a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in
Keble’s “Christian Year” if you can; but À
Kempis overtops all! It is strange, too, what an
appeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers in
Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with
every day. And George Eliot was a remarkable
example of this, for, in spite of her habitual reverence,
she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox
dogmas. Another paradox seems to be in the
fact that Thomas à Kempis appeals so directly
and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to
those who have secluded themselves from the
world. At first, I must confess that I found this
a great obstacle to my joy in having found him.

If Montaigne frequently drove me to À Kempis,
À Kempis almost as frequently in the beginning
drove me back to Montaigne. It was not until[Pg 220]
I had become more familiar with the New Testament
that I began to see that À Kempis spoke
as one soul to another. In this world for him
there were only three Facts—God, his own soul,
and the soul to whom he spoke.

It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many
of my friends who looked on the Last Supper as a
mere symbol of love and hospitality, should cling
to “The Following of Christ” with such devotion.
Even the example of an intellectual friend of
mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in Italy,
could not make it clear. He often asserted that he
did not believe in God; and yet he was desolate
if on a certain day in the year he did not pay some
kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
Padua!

I have known him to break up a party in the
Adirondacks in order to reach the nearest church
where it was possible for him to burn a candle in
honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious
anniversary! As long as he exists, as long as he
continues to burn candles—les chandelles d’un
athée—I shall accept without understanding the
enthusiasm of so many lovers of À Kempis, who
cut out the mystical longings for the reception of[Pg 221]
that divine food which Christ gave out in the
upper room. À Kempis says:

To every soul, oppressed and humble, À Kempis
speaks more poignantly than even David, in that
great cry of the heart and soul, the De Profundis:

There is no pessimism here, for Thomas à
Kempis gives the remedies, the only remedies
offered to the world since light was created before
the sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to
him the sins of the intellect are worse than the
sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe
it. They both knew their hearts and the
world; and the world has never invented any
remedy so effective as that which À Kempis offers.[Pg 223]

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

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

Montaigne felt rather than understood the
cruelty and brutality of the state traditions of his
time; and these traditions were seriously combatted
when the United States made brave efforts
both at Versailles and Washington. Doctor
Hill sums up the essential principles which guided
the world from the Renascence to the year 1918:[Pg 224]

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

There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea
of freedom was kept alive, in the miasma which
poisoned “The Prince” and Machiavelli’s world, by
men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A
better understanding of the principles of these men
would have made Milton less autocratic—Lucifer,
though a rebel, was not a democrat—and Voltaire
less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the
French Republic lately named a war vessel, was the
friend of Frederick the Great and of Catherine II.[Pg 225]
Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir
Thomas Browne and Montaigne sent me, says:

Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons
so clearly; nor does Sir Thomas Browne touch so[Pg 226]
unerringly the canker in the root of the politics of
his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the
works of either without contrasting them with the
physiocrats of the eighteenth century, who tore up
the cockles and the wheat together.

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

Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive;
but he is not so constructive as to build a road
through the marsh of confusion into which that
conflict of dialects in the English language—a
language which is grammarless and dependent
upon usage—has left us. He tells us that good
writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
throwing overboard the principles so
elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lin[Pg 228]coln,
in standing unaware of them. Whether this
is true in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered
that Lincoln was fed, through his reading,
on the results of those linguistic principles
which are with us in English tradition. It is the
usage of Cardinal Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson
or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln himself,
which those who want to write good English follow
rather than the elaborate rules of confused English
grammar which are forgotten almost as soon as
they are learned.

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

As the English language, spoken everywhere,
must depend on good usage, and the bad usage of
to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow,
it is regrettable that no scientific study of the
American vocabulary or of the influences lying at
the root of American word-formation—to quote
Mr. Mencken—has as yet been made. The elder[Pg 229]
student was content with correcting the examples
of bad English in Blair’s “Rhetoric.” Later, he
read “The Dean’s English,” very popular at one
time, Richard Grant White’s “Words and Their
Uses,” and perhaps a little book called “The Verbalist.”
To this, one of the most bewildering books
on the manner of writing English ever written,
Herbert Spencer’s “Philosophy of Style” was
added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer’s lack of a
sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories
that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy
to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so
lacking as in the “Philosophy of Style.” Its
principles have a perennial value and nearly every
author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated
them with variations; but Spencer’s method of presenting
them is as involved as any method adopted
by a philosopher could be—and that is saying a
good deal.

The English of the universities hold that Americans
are the slave of Webster’s Dictionary; and
this is true of a certain limited class of Americans.
The English public speaker allows himself more
freedom in the matter of pronunciation than very
scrupulous Americans do. Lord Balfour’s speeches[Pg 230]
at the Washington Conference offered several examples
of this.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has
decided that Webster’s Dictionary is the American
dictionary, and I propose to consider all its decisions
as final,” said, in hot argument, a New
York lawyer who habitually uses “dontcha know”
and “I wanta.” Shakespeare, he regards as an
author whose English ought to be corrected; and
he became furious over what he called the mispronunciation
of “apotheosis,” which he said a
favourite preacher had not uttered according to
Webster. And I have known literary societies in
the South to be disrupted over the use of the word
“nasty” by a Northern woman; and, as for
“bloody,” Mr. Mencken shows us that one of the
outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
convention was his permitting the heroine of
“Pygmalion” to use it on the stage. There is one
Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the
use of the word “consummated” in a phrase like
“the marriage was consummated in the First Baptist
Church at high noon”!

In spite of democratic disapproval, some will[Pg 231]
still hold that “lift” is better than “elevator,” and
“station” better than “dépot.” Though these
are departures from the current vernacular. We
speak English often when our critical friends in
England imagine that we are speaking American.
I have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has
cultivated English traditions of speech, to shrink
in horror at the mention of “flap-jack” and “ice-cream.”
He could never find a substitute in real
English for “flap-jack,” but he always substituted
“ices” for “ice-cream.” On one occasion I heard
him inveigh against the horror of the word “pies,”
for those “detestable messy things sold by the ton
to the uncivilized”; and he spent the time of lunch
in pointing out that no such composition really existed
in polite society; but when his “cook general”
was seen approaching with an unmistakable “pie,”
the kind supposed by the readers of advertisements
to be made by “mothers,” and ordered
hastily because of the coming of the unexpected
guest, he was cast down. The guest tried to save
the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry
as “a tart.” The host shook his head—”a tart,”
in English, could never be covered!

Mr. Mencken shows us that “flap-jack,” “mo[Pg 232]lasses,”
“home-spun,” “ice-cream” are old English;
that “Bub,” which used to shock London
visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial
English; and that “muss” is found in “Antony
and Cleopatra.” I wish I had known that when I
was young; it would have saved me a bad mark for
paraphrasing “Menelaus and Paris got into a muss
over Helen.” But probably the use of “row” to
express that little difficulty would not have saved
me!

The best judge of Madeira in Philadelphia always
said “cheer” for “chair” and “sasser” for
“saucer” and “tay” for “tea” and “obleged” for
“obliged”; and he drank from his saucer, too; and
his table was always provided with little dishes,
like butter plates, for the discarded cups. His example
gave me a profound contempt for those
newly rich in learning who laugh without understanding,
who are the slaves of the dictionary, and
who are so “vastly” meticulous. This old gentleman
was an education in himself; he had lived at
the “English court”—or near it—and when he
came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured.
I once fell from grace; but not from my reverence
for him, by making a mistake in my search[Pg 233]
for knowledge which involved his age. It was
very easy to ask him whether Anne Boleyn had
asked for a “cheer” but not easy to escape from
the family denunciation that followed. It seemed
that he had not lived at or near the court of Henry
VIII!

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

The Bible won against the prudery of the new
English; prudery will go very far, and I can recall
the objection of an evangelical lady, in Philadelphia,
who disliked the nightly saying of the “Ave
Maria” by a little Papist relative. This was not[Pg 234]
on religious grounds; it was because of “blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” in the prayer.
The little Papist had been taught to repeat the
salutation of the Angel Gabriel in Latin, so, at
bedtime, he changed to “Benedictus fructus ventris
tui” and the careful lady thought it sounded
“more decent”!

Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken’s
revelation that “ante” came into our language
through the Spanish; he says,

It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr.
Mencken’s judgment in regard to that very great
philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of
the English language, another great Dane, Doctor
Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It
has rare elements of strength in its simplicity. In
English the subject almost invariably precedes the
verb and the object follows it; even in English
poetry this usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson,
its observance might be counted at 80,[Pg 235]

That our language has only five vowels, which
have to do duty for more than a score of sounds, is
a grave fault; and the unhappy French preacher
who, from an English pulpit, pronounced “plough”
as “pluff” had much excuse. But on the other
hand, why do the French make us say “fluer de
lis,” instead of “fleur de lee”? And “Rheims”?
How many conversational pitfalls is “Rheims”
responsible for!

There is no book that ought to give the judicious
such quiet pleasure or more food for thought or
for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken’s
“The American Language,” except Burton’s “Anatomy
of Melancholy,” Boswell’s “Johnson,” the
“Devout Life” of Saint Francis de Sales, Pepys’s
“Diary,” the “Letters” of Madame de Sévigné,
Beveridge’s “Life” of Marshall, and the “Memoirs”
of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book for odd moments;
yet it is a temptation to continuous reading;
and a precious treasure is its bibliography! And
how pleasant it is to verify the quotations in a library;
preferably with the snow falling in thick[Pg 236]
flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape,
even after dinner is announced. Mr. Mencken is a
benefactor!

It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken’s
audacious disregard of English grammar in theory
has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
and of his own style. If dead authors could
write after the manner in which Mr. Andrew Lang
has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
Spencer’s opinions of Mr. Mencken’s volumes.
If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle want
really to please a small but discriminating public,
let them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr.
Mencken’s statements on the growth of the
English language! In my time we were expected
to take Spencer’s “Philosophy of Style” very seriously.
There is no doubt that his principles have
been repeated by every writer on style, including
Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important “English
Composition,” since Mr. Spencer wrote; but the
method of Spencer’s expression of his principles reminds
one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished
before he met Beatrice.

There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us
think of writing as a science and art; his philosophy[Pg 237]
of style is right enough. But while he provokes
puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more
meat in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A College
Magazine” than in all the complications in style
in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.

And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the
author of a little volume which I keep by my side
ever since Mr. Frederick O’Brien and the terrifying
Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific.
It is Charles Warren Stoddard’s “South Sea Idyls.”
And if one wants to know how to read for pleasure
or comfort—for reading or writing does not come
by nature—there is “Moby Dick,” by Herman
Melville, the close friend of the Hawthornes and a
writer so American that Mr. Mencken must love
him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.

Mr. Herbert Spencer and “The South Sea
Idyls” bring the flâneur—the chief business of a
flâneur of the pavements (we were forbidden in
old Philadelphia to say “sidewalks”) is to look
into unrelated shop-windows; but the flâneur
among books finds none of his shop-windows unrelated—back
to Mr. Mencken, who does not give
us the genesis of a word that sounded something
like “sadie.” It meant “thank you.” Every[Pg 238]
Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants
interfered, and they often did interfere. You
might say “apothecary” or “chemist”; but you
should never say “druggist.” I trust that it is
no breach of confidence to repeat that the devout
and very distinguished of modern Philadelphians,
Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two
languages in his neighbourhood, one for the ears
of his parents and one for the boys in the street.
One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
lad I met the other day. “But you haven’t
a Yorkshire accent!” “No, sir,” he said, “my
parents whipped it out of me.” But there is, in
New York City, at least the beginning of one
American language—the language of the street.

In considering the impression that books have
usually made on me, I have often asked myself
why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure
and even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his
own answer to this. For the plots of novels, I
have always had very little respect, although I
believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is
absolutely necessary to a really good novel, and
that it is the very soul of a romance. Of memoirs[Pg 239]—even
the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de
Créquy have always been very agreeable to me;
I have never been so dull or so tired, that I could
not find some solace in the Diary of Mr. Pepys,
in the Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless
journal of Mr. Boswell; and even the revelations
of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were
worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame
d’Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles
of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres,
that it seems like a new discovery in
psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker’s
“Young Boswell” and those precious diaries including
that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington.
Life is worth living!

I must confess that I have never found any
poet excepting King David whom I liked because
he taught me anything. Didactic “poetry” wearies
me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When
people praise Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,”
because it is dogmatic, I am surprised—for if I
found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all
its splendour for me. The Apocalypse and “The
Hound of Heaven” are glorious visions of truth
at a white heat.[Pg 240]

Tennyson’s “Two Voices” loses all its value
when it ceases to be a picture and becomes an
important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
didactic symbolism of his “Faerie Queen” might
be lost forever with no great disadvantage to
posterity if his splendid “Epithalamion” could be
preserved. Browning’s optimism has always left
me cold, and I never could quite understand why
most of his readers have set him down as a great
philosopher. All may be well with the world, but
I could never see that Browning’s poetry proved
it in any way. When the time comes for a cultivated
English world—a thoughtful English-speaking
world—to weigh the merits of English-speaking
poets, Browning will be found among the first.
Who has done anything finer in English than “A
Grammarian’s Funeral”? Or “My Last Duchess,”
or “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” or some of the
passages in “Pippa Passes”? Who has conceived
a better fable for a poem than that of “Pippa”?
And as for Keats, the world he discovered for us
is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than
all the philosophies of Wordsworth.

To me, the intense delight I have in novels and
poems is due to their power of taking me out of[Pg 241]
myself, of enlightening me as to my own faults and
peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and
of raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of
gaiety of heart.

As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson
once applied to works of fiction becomes more and
more regrettable. He compared the followers of
this consoling art to “filles de joie.” He doubtless
meant that these goddesses—”les filles de joie” are
always young—gave us visions of the joy of life;
that they might be sensuous without being sensual;
but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There
are novels, like Mrs. Jackson’s “Ramona,” which
are joyous and serious at once. Or take “The
Cardinal’s Snuff Box” or “Pepita Jiminez.”

Every constant reader has his favourite essayists.
As a rule, he reads them to be soothed or
to be amused. In making my confession, I must
say that only a few of the essayists really amuse
me. They are, as a rule, more witty than humorous,
and generally they make one self-conscious,
being self-conscious themselves. There
are a hundred different types of the essayist.
Each of us has his favourite bore among them.
Once I found all the prose works of a fine poet and[Pg 242]
friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of
a constant reader. “Why?” I asked. “The result
of a severe sense of duty!” he said.

Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility
and failed, though she gained in the end a greater
title. Her works are insufferably and complacently
conceited, and yet I always look at their
bindings with respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died
too soon, has given us, in her first volume—unfortunately
the only one—a new view of this Empress
of Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame
Roland could have been nourished by that most
stimulating of all books—”The Devout Life of
St. Francis de Sales.” Monseigneur de Sales is,
to my mind, the most practical of all the essayists,
even when he puts his essays in the form of letters.
Next comes Fénelon’s and—I know that I shall
shock those who regard his philosophy as merely
Deistic—next comes, for his power of stimulation,
Emerson.

It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too
late, that these confessions may be taken as didactic
in themselves; in writing them I have had
not the slightest intention of improving anybody’s
mind but simply of relieving my own, by button-[Pg 243]holing
the reader who happens to come my way.
I should like to add that what is called the coarseness
of the eighteenth-century novel and romance
is much more healthful than the nasty brutality
of a school of our novelists—who make up for
their lack of talent and of wide experience by
trying to excite animal instincts. Eroticism
may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in
common with the process of “cooking stale cabbage
over farthing candles,” to use Charles Reade’s
phrase.

If my habit of constant reading had not taught
me the value of calmness and patience, I should
like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
for thanking God is that Americans have produced
a literature—the continuation of an older literature
with variations, it is true,—that has added to
the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need
mention only one book, “The Scarlet Letter,”
and I am glad to end my book by writing the name
of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England,
or with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the
other continental nations, are no longer to our
disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
writes of American books to put—in his own mind,[Pg 244]
at least—a title to his discourse that reminds me
of Miss Blanche Amory’s “Mes Larmes.” It is
an outworn tradition. American literature is robust
enough for smiles.

It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not
self-conscious. It is rapidly taking to itself all the
best traditions of the older literature and assimilating
them. Christopher Morley and Heywood
Broun and Don Marquis and Mencken write—at
their best—as lightly and as trippingly as any past
master of the feuilleton. There is nobody writing
in the daily press in Paris to-day who does the
feuilleton as well as they do it. If you ask me
whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention
to what they say, I shall answer, No. But
their method is the thing. Will they live? Of
course not. Is Émile de Girardin alive? Or all the
clever ones that James Huneker found buried and
could not revive? One still reads the “Portraits de
Femmes,” of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
something more than a “columnist.” And these folk
will be, too, in time! At any rate, they are good
enough for the present.

Who, writing in French or in any language,
outre-mer, does better, or as well, as Holliday?[Pg 245]
And where is the peer of Charles S. Brooks in
“Hints to Pilgrims”? “Luca Sarto,” the best
novel of old Italian life by an American—since Mrs.
Wharton’s “Valley of Decision”—proved him to
be a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better
psychologically than Mrs. Wharton, but here
there’s room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent
and insular at long intervals.

“Luca Sarto” dropped like the gentle rain from
heaven; and then came “Hints to Pilgrims.”
This I wanted to write about in the Yale Review,
but the selfish editor, Mr. Cross, said that he preferred
to keep it for himself!

“Hints to Pilgrims” is the essence of the modern
essay. Strangely enough, it sent me back to the
“Colour of Life” by the only real précieuse living
in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read that
with new delight between certain paragraphs in
Brooks’s paper “On Finding a Plot.” Why is not
“Hints to Pilgrims” in its fourteenth edition? Or
why has it no claque? The kind of claque that
is so common now—which opens suddenly like
a chorus of cicadas in the “Idylls of Theocritus”?
After all, your education must have been well be[Pg 246]gun
before you can enjoy “Hints to Pilgrims,”
while for “Huckleberry Finn” the less education
you have, the better. Mr. Brooks writes:

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

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

How he loved books! And he seemed to have
read all the right things in his youth; you forgot
time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
with you about them. He could drop from
Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in whom he had not much
interest, since he was a gourmet and did not
regard sausages as the highest form of German
art!) and his descents and ascents from book to
book were as smooth as Melba’s sliding scales—and
her scales were smoother than Patti’s.[Pg 249]

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

THE END