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

Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de 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 how a man who became so penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations. But one must remember that the confessors of his period—the period of the founding of the French Academy—had a great respect for mere literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni, General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one.

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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 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

a very narrow escape from some rancid butter of which the cook had been very liberal.

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 which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against Burr, because, Morris writes,

Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in the President's chair!

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:

one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle.

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 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 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 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.

My mother and I had expected of you something more edifying, something that would lead us to the reading of good and elevating books. At college I looked on literature as something apart. Since I have come home to Georgia, I find that it is better for me to submit myself to the direction of our good Baptist clergyman, and have no books on our library shelves that I cannot read aloud to the young. One of your favourites, Madame de Sévigné, shocks me by the cruelty of her description of the death of the famous poisoner, Madame de Brinvilliers. And I do not think that the pages of the Duc de Saint-Simon should be read by young people.

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, 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."

"Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice," says one of the highest authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological science writes, "A cheerful heart is what the Muses love."

Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety—of which a word by and by—is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others, it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency; and thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence infer at least a probability of such cause in cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows, it is not overtroubled by those of others, however tender and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt for its cowardice.

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 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 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):

Put on my first new lace-band: and so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more. I am sorry to hear that the news of the selling of Dunkirk is taken so generally ill, as I find it is among the merchants; and other things, as removal of officers at Court, good for worse; and all things else made much worse in their report among people than they are. And this night, I know not upon what ground, the gates of the City ordered to be all shut, and double guards everywhere. Indeed I do find everybody's spirit very full of trouble: and the things of the Court and Council very ill taken; so as to be apt to appear in bad colours, if there should ever be a beginning of trouble, which God forbid!

Or,

29th (Lord's day).

This morning I put on my best black cloth suit, trimmed with scarlet ribbon, very neat, with my cloak lined with velvet, and a new beaver, which altogether is very noble, with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago.

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:

This day died Mr. Sam Pepys, a very worthy, industrious and curious person.... He lived at Clapham with his partner, Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble house and sweete place, where he enjoyed the fruite of his labours in greate prosperity. He was universally belov'd, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skill'd in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially.... Mr. Pepys had been for neere 40 years so much my particular friend, that Mr. Jackson sent me compleat mourning, desiring me to be one to hold up the pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hindered me from doing him this last office.

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—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 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 discern 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:

Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this simple and obvious—in no way unpleasant—truth; therefore one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory—or sufficient—ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh crosslights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had taught them and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards—between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc:—

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

The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he meant as satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to a profession.

The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered.

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, biographies. 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, 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 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:

Swinburne tested him [Henry Adams] then and there by one of his favourite tests—Victor Hugo; for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; De Musset was unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.

Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to sustain himself on the wing like De Musset, or even like Hugo; but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.

The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendours of Hugo and Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he had made on Hugo; "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and uttered the words: "Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!" Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: "Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"

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 vulgarity 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 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 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 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 Caesar 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!

"'I call a cat a cat,' as Boileau put it," remarked Heine. "I would like to know how many men in a hundred are disappointed in the women they marry."

"Just as many as have too much imagination," said Augustus.

"No," said Johnson, shaking his head violently and speaking suddenly in an excited tone. "No. Those who are disappointed are such as are possessed of imagination without judgment; but a man whose imagination does not outrun his judgment is seldom deceived in the realisation of his hopes. I suspect that the same thing is true in the art of poetry, of which Herr Heine is at once a master and a judge. For the qualities that constitute genius are invention, imagination and judgment; invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed; imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind, and enables him to convey to the reader the various form of nature, incidents of life and energies of passion; and judgment, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality. A man who possesses invention and imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of possibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, however, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may attribute the small number of poets who have flourished in the world, and the great number of happy marriages among civilised mankind."

"It appears that I must have possessed imagination after all," said Francis.

"If you will allow me to say it," said Caesar in his most suave tones, and turning his heavy black eyes upon the king's face, "you had too much. Had you possessed less imagination and more judgment, you might many times have destroyed the Emperor Charles. To challenge him to fight a duel was a gratuitous and very imaginative piece of civility; to let him escape as you did more than once when you could easily have forced an engagement on terms advantageous to yourself, was unpardonable."

"I know it," said Francis, bitterly. "I was not Caesar."

"No, sir," said Johnson in loud, harsh tones, "nor were you happy in your marriages—"

"I adore learned men," whispered Francis to Lady Brenda. He had at once recovered his good humour.

"A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element of judgment is necessary in the selection of a wife," continued the doctor.

"I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall in love with each other," said Lady Brenda.

"Intuition, madam," replied Johnson, "means the mental view; as you use it you mean a very quick and accurate mental view, followed immediately by an unconscious but correct process of deduction. The combination of the two, when they are nicely adjusted, constitutes a kind of judgment which, though it be not always so correct in its conclusions, as that exercised by ordinary logic, has nevertheless the advantage of quickness combined with tolerable precision. For, in matters of love, it is necessary to be quick."

"Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon," said Francis, laughing.

"And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his house clean," returned the doctor.

"Do you believe that people always fall in love very quickly?" asked Lady Brenda.

"Frequently, though not always. Love dominates quite as much because its attacks are sudden and unexpected, as because most persons believe that to be in love is a desirable state."

"Love," said Caesar, "is a great general and a great strategist, for he rarely fails to surprise the enemy if he can, but he never refuses an open engagement when necessary."

[1]

"Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto mi fur moetrati gli spiriti magni che del verderli in me stesso 'n esalto"

—INFERNO.

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 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:

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any guaranty that they will. Make it a guaranty—and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am überhaupt in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't smile at this—it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess....

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"! 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 mediaeval 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.

This doctrine of the inspired priesthood of authors is exaggerated and dangerous. Neither has it, you see, prevented him from writing "The Wonderful Visit." Artists should feel, and if necessary be told, that they are on their honour to do their best. That will do. If they flatter themselves that they are messengers from the Father of Light whenever they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any emotional hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a short time afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in a quite different direction. Sincerity of the moment is not sincerity; those who have watched England's prime minister know that.

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 tells us that the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not begin with—Qui fit, Maecenas? 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:

Lenit albescens animos capillus Litium et rixae cupidos protervae; Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa, Consule Planco.

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 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:

Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us, Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles, Nor old age imminent, Nor the indomitable hand of Death.

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—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 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."



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.

I do seldom see the great swans, but father says that they are not unusual in the wide stretches of the Delaware.

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

Father allowed me [writes the good Quaker boy, in 1734] to accompany my Indian friend, Oconio, to Watson's creek, that we may gather wild fowl after the Indian manner. With great eagerness, I accompanied Oconio, and thus happened it. We did reach the widest part of that creek early in the morning, I think the sun was scarcely an half-hour high. Oconio straightway hid himself in the tall grass by the water, while I was bidden to lie in the tall grass at a little distance. With his bow and arrows, Oconio quickly shot a duck that came near, by swimming within a short distance of him. I marvelled much with what skill he shot, for his arrow pierced the head of the duck which gave no alarming cry.... Oconio now did fashion a circlet of green boughs, and so placed them about his head and shoulders that I saw not his face; he otherwise disrobed and walked into the stream. He held in one hand a shotten duck, so that it swam lustily, and, so equipped, was in the midst of a cluster of fowl, of which he deftly seized several so quickly that their fellows took no alarm. These he strangled beneath the water, and, when he had three of them, came back with caution to where the thick bushes concealed him. He desired that I should do the same, and with much hesitation I disrobed and assumed the disguise Oconio had fashioned; then I put forth boldly towards the gathered fowl, at which they did arise with a great clamour, and were gone. I marvel much why this should have been, but Oconio did not make it clear, and I forbore, through foolish pride, to ask him. And let it not be borne in mind against me [pleads the good Quaker boy] that, when I reached my home, I wandered to the barn, and writing an ugly word upon the door, sat long and gazed at it. Chagrin doth make me feel very meek, I find, but I set no one an example by speech or act, in thus soothing my feelings in so worldly a manner.

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

the earliest salamanders, the pretty Maryland yellow throat nests in the hollows of its broad leaves, and rare beetles find a congenial home in the shelter it affords.

"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 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 "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 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 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:

He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the most puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to confessions of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the result of tortuous reflections on the enigmas of life and revelation. Perhaps the following paragraph enables us to understand the permanent temper of his mind most truly:

"As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith: the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossible est. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion."

Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of theology, aside, Sir Thomas lends himself to those 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 democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in this way:

Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another filed before him, according to the quality of his desert and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of well-ordered politics: till corruption getteth ground;—ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn;—every one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase anything.

[2] Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who admired his quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The Young Enchanted" of George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius."

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 translation, 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 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:

As for Cicero, I am of the common judgment, that besides learning there was an exquisite eloquence in him: He was a good citizen, of an honest, gentle nature, as are commonly fat and burly men: for so was he. But to speake truly of him, full of ambitious vanity and remisse niceness. And I know not well how to excuse him, in that he deemed his Poesie worthy to be published. It is no great imperfection to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him that he never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie of his name. Concerning his eloquence it is beyond all comparison, and I verily believe that none shall ever equall it.

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 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'oeuvres. 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.

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 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 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 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 that divine food which Christ gave out in the upper room. À Kempis says:

My soul longs to be nourished with Thy body; my heart desires to be united with Thee.

Give Thyself to me and it is enough; for without Thee no comfort is available.

Without Thee I cannot subsist; and without Thy visitation I cannot live.

And, therefore, I must come often to Thee, and receive Thee for the remedy, and for the health and strength of my soul; lest perhaps I faint in the way, if I be deprived of this heavenly food.

For so, O most merciful Jesus, Thou wast pleased once to say, when Thou hadst been preaching to the people, and curing sundry diseases: "I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way."

Deal now in like manner with me, who has left Thyself in the sacrament for the comfort of Thy faithful.

For Thou art the most sweet reflection of the soul; and he that shall eat Thee worthily shall be partaker and heir of everlasting glory.

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:

Behold, then, O Lord, my abjection and frailty [Ps. xxiv. 18], every way known to Thee.

Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire [Ps. lxviii. 15], that I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly cast down forever.

This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in Thy sight, to find that I am so subject to fall and have so little strength to resist my passions.

And although I do not altogether consent, yet their assaults are troublesome and grievous to me, and it is exceedingly irksome to live thus always in a conflict.

Hence my infirmity is made known to me, because wicked thoughts do always much more easily rush in upon me than they can be cast out again.

Oh, that Thou, the most mighty God of Israel, the zealous lover of faithful souls, wouldst behold the labour and sorrow of Thy servant, and stand by me in all my undertakings.

Strengthen me with heavenly fortitude, lest the old man, the miserable flesh, not fully subject to the spirit, prevail and get the upper hand, against which we must fight as long as we breathe in this most wretched life.

Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and miseries are never wanting; where all things are full of snares and enemies.

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.

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:

but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work written in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect expression of an emancipation from moral restraints far advanced. The Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared. The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for their safety to the nation-state rather than to the solidarity of Christendom; and the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it, consisted in absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one man who should embody its unity, strength, and authority.

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:

(1) The essence of a State is "sovereignty," defined as "supreme power." (2) A sovereign State has the right to declare war upon any other sovereign State for any reason that seems to it sufficient. (3) An act of conquest by the exercise of superior military force entitles the conqueror to the possession of the conquered territory. (4) The population goes with the land and becomes subject to the will of the conqueror.

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. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne sent me, says:

Down to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 the most odious crime ever committed against a civilized people was, no doubt, the first partition of Poland; yet at the time not a voice was raised against it. Louis XV. was "infinitely displeased," but he did not even reply to the King of Poland's appeal for help. George III. coolly answered that "justice ought to be the invariable rule of sovereigns"; but concluded, "I fear, however, misfortunes have reached the point where redress can be had from the hands of the Almighty alone." Catherine II. thought justice satisfied when "everyone takes something." Frederick II. wrote to his brother, "The partition will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, and Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the same consecrated body, which is Poland." Only Maria Theresa felt a twinge of conscience. She took but she felt the shame of it. She wrote: "We have by our moderation and fidelity to our engagements acquired the confidence, I may venture to say the admiration, of Europe.... One year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to endure it, and that nothing in the world has cost me more than the loss of our good name." It is a strange phenomenon that in matters where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly pronounces judgment and spontaneously condemns, the solid mass of moral conviction should count for nothing in affairs of state. Against it a purely national prejudice has never failed to prevail.

Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons so clearly; nor does Sir Thomas Browne touch so 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

is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.

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 Lincoln, 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 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 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"!