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

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

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

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

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

And again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre même s'use. Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;

Et seul le dur métal que l'amour fit docile Garde encore en sa fleur, aux médailles d'argent, L'immortelle beauté des vierges de Sicile."

A translation of which reads:

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

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

Dante

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

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

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

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

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

Nessun maggior dolors, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria;

Gollancz says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Così spirò di quell' amore acceso; indi soggiunse: "Assai bene è trascorsa d'esta moneta già la lega e il peso; ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa." ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda, che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa."

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

È sillogismo, che la mia ha conchiusa acutamente si, che in verso d' ella ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa."

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

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

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

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

the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.

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

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

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

E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta la riverenza delle somme chiavi, che tu tenesti nella vita lieta l' userei parole ancor più gravi—

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

English and American Verse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark the three words—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies—by modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"—do not bear the test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and others new—chacun 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 Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III

CERTAIN NOVELISTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Penrod Schofield!"

Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV

LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS

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

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

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

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

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