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

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

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

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

The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of James I. and the Authorized Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to be but little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the Eighteenth Century.

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

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

cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later.

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

but in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it falls to 61, in Anatole France's prose, to 66, in Gabriele d' Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you think, have cooled her Southern blood? Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot colour always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the Cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's window.

We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt.

"Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neckcloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.

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

Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding—flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.

Oliver Twist and Nancy—merely acquaintances in the original story—with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player of the ships' band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island—observe the cunning of the plot!—who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman—doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then—a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear—tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall.

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

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

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

THE END

[Transcriber's notes: People using this book as a reference should be aware that some of the spelling and quotations are not necessarily accurate. Some obvious printing errors were corrected (gu'une->qu'une p96; natio->nation p223) Consistent archaic spellings of names of people and times were retained as is. Accenting was not 'corrected'. Some potential printer's errors left as is include: Gaugain may be Gauguin p237 (Paul Gauguin from context) Who the Holliday refered to in chapter V p244 was is unknown.

There are a lot of accented characters in this text. I have put most of such characters in square brackets. x - grave accent above letter x x - acute accent above letter x ẍ - umlaut above letter x x - circumflex above letter x ç - cedilla below c x mostly being vowels ae and oe ligatures have been replaced with the letters separately. PPing temp: Spellcheck complete.]

THE END