Title: The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10
Author: Bierce, Ambrose
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10" ***

This book is indexed by ISYS Web Indexing system to allow the reader find any word or number within the document.

AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10 ***



                          THE COLLECTED WORKS
                           OF AMBROSE BIERCE

                               VOLUME X

                           [Illustration: N]



   _The publishers certify that this edition of_

                        THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
                            AMBROSE BIERCE

    _consists of two hundred and fifty numbered sets, autographed by
    the author, and that the number of this set is_ ......



                             THE COLLECTED
                               WORKS OF
                            AMBROSE BIERCE

                               VOLUME X

                              TANGENTIAL
                                 VIEWS

                            [Illustration]

                         NEW YORK & WASHINGTON
                     THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
                                 1911

                       _FREDERICK_      _POLLEY_

                          COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
                     THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY



                               CONTENTS


  THE OPINIONATOR

    THE NOVEL
    ON LITERARY CRITICISM
    STAGE ILLUSION
    THE MATTER OF MANNER
    ON READING NEW BOOKS
    ALPHABÊTES AND BORDER RUFFIANS
    TO TRAIN A WRITER
    AS TO CARTOONING
    THE S. P. W.
    PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY AUTHORS
    WIT AND HUMOR
    WORD CHANGES AND SLANG
    THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS
    ENGLAND’S LAUREATE
    HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING
    VISIONS OF THE NIGHT

  THE REVIEWER

    EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS
    “THE KREUTZER SONATA”
    EMMA FRANCES DAWSON
    MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF
    A POET AND HIS POEM

  THE CONTROVERSIALIST

    AN INSURRECTION OF THE PEASANTRY
    MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS
    A DEAD LION
    THE SHORT STORY
    WHO ARE GREAT?
    POETRY AND VERSE
    THOUGHT AND FEELING

  THE TIMOROUS REPORTER

    THE PASSING OF SATIRE
    SOME DISADVANTAGES OF GENIUS
    OUR SACROSANCT ORTHOGRAPHY
    THE AUTHOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY
    ON POSTHUMOUS RENOWN
    THE CRIME OF INATTENTION
    FETISHISM
    OUR AUDIBLE SISTERS
    THE NEW PENOLOGY
    THE NATURE OF WAR
    HOW TO GROW GREAT
    A WAR IN THE ORIENT
    A JUST DECISION
    THE LION’S DEN

  THE MARCH HARE

    A FLOURISHING INDUSTRY
    THE RURAL PRESS
    TO “ELEVATE THE STAGE”
    PECTOLITE
    LA BOULANGÈRE
    ADVICE TO OLD MEN
    A DUBIOUS VINDICATION
    THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE



                            THE OPINIONATOR



                               THE NOVEL


Those who read no books but new ones have this much to say for
themselves in mitigation of censure: they do not read all the new ones.
They can not; with the utmost diligence and devotion—never weary in
ill doing—they can not hope to get through one in a hundred. This, I
should suppose, must make them unhappy. They probably feel as a small
boy of limited capacity would in a country with all the springs running
treacle and all the trees loaded with preserved fruits.

The annual output of books in this country alone is something
terrible—not fewer, I am told, than from seven thousand to nine
thousand. This should be enough to gratify the patriot who “points
with pride” to the fact that Americans are a reading people, but does
not point with anything to the quality of what they read. There are
apparently more novels than anything else, and these have incomparably
the largest sales. The “best seller” is always a novel and a bad one.

In my poor judgment there have not been published in any one
quarter-century a half dozen novels that posterity will take the
trouble to read. It is not to be denied that some are worth reading,
for some have been written by great writers; and whatever is written by
a great writer is likely to merit attention. But between that which is
worth reading and that which was worth writing there is a distinction.
For a man who can do great work, to do work that is less great than the
best that he can do is not worthwhile, and novel-writing, I hold, does
not bring out the best that is in him.

The novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears
to painting. With whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted,
it must lack that basic quality in all art, unity, totality of effect.
As it can not all be seen at once, its parts must be seen successively,
each effacing the one seen before; and at the last there remains no
coherent and harmonious memory of the work. It is the same with a story
too long to be read with a virgin attention at a single sitting.

A novel is a diluted story—a story cumbered with trivialities and
nonessentials. I have never seen one that could not be bettered by
cutting out a half or three-quarters of it.

The novel is a snow plant; it has no root in the permanent soil of
literature, and does not long hold its place. It is of the lowest form
of imagination—imagination chained to the perch of probability. What
wonder that in this unnatural captivity it pines and dies? The novelist
is, after all, but a reporter of a larger growth. True, he invents his
facts (which the reporter of the newspaper is known never to do) and
his characters; but, having them in hand, what can he do? His chains
are heavier than himself. The line that bounds his little Dutch garden
of probability, separating it from the golden realm of art—the sun and
shadow land of fancy—is to him a dead-line. Let him transgress it at
his peril.

In England and America the art of novel-writing (in so far as it is an
art) is as dead as Queen Anne; in America as dead as Queen Ameresia.
(There never was a Queen Ameresia—that is why I choose her for the
comparison.) As a literary method it never had any other element
of vitality than the quality from which it has its name. Having no
legitimate place in the scheme of letters, its end was inevitable.

When Richardson and Fielding set the novel going, hardly more than
a century-and-a-half ago, it charmed a generation to which it was
new. From their day to ours, with a lessening charm, it has taken the
attention of the multitude, and grieved the judicious, but, its impulse
exhausted, it stops by its inherent inertia. Its dead body we shall
have with us, doubtless, for many years, but its soul “is with the
saints, I trust.”

This is true, not only locally but generally. So far as I am able
to judge, no good novels are now “made in Germany,” nor in France,
nor in any European country except Russia. The Russians are writing
novels which so far as one may venture to judge (dimly discerning
their quality through the opacity of translation, for one does not
read Russian) are, in their way, admirable; full of fire and light,
like an opal. Tourgenieff, Pushkin, Gogol and the early Tolstoi—these
be big names. In their hands the novel grew great (as it did in
those of Richardson and Fielding, and as it would have done in those
of Thackeray and Pater if greatness in that form of fiction had been
longer possible in England) because, first, they were great men, and
second, the novel was a new form of expression in a world of new
thought and life. In Russia the soil is not exhausted: it produces
without fertilizers. There we find simple, primitive conditions, and
the novel holds something of the elemental passions of the race,
unsophisticated by introspection, analysis of motive, problemism,
dissection of character, and the other “odious subtleties” that
go before a fall. But the blight is upon it even there, with an
encroachment visible in the compass of a single lifetime. Compare
Tolstoy’s _The Cossacks_ with his latest work in fiction, and you will
see an individual decadence prefiguring a national; just as one was
seen in the interval between _Adam Bede_ and _Daniel Deronda_. When the
story-teller is ambitious to be a philosopher there is an end to good
storytelling. Novelists are now all philosophers—excepting those who
have “stumbled to eternal mock” as reformers.

With the romance—which in form so resembles the novel that many
otherwise worthy persons are but dimly aware of the essential
distinction—matters are somewhat otherwise. The romancist has not
to encounter at a disadvantage the formidable competition of his
reader’s personal experience. He can represent life, not as it is,
but as it might be; character, not as he finds it, but as he wants
it. His plot knows no law but that of its own artistic development;
his incidents do not require the authenticating hand and seal of any
censorship but that of taste. The vitality of his art is eternal;
it is perpetually young. He taps the great permanent mother-lode of
human interest. His materials are infinite in abundance and cosmic
in distribution. Nothing that can be known, or thought, or felt, or
dreamed, but is available if he can manage it. He is lord of two worlds
and may select his characters from both. In the altitudes where his
imagination waves her joyous wing there are no bars for her to beat
her breast against; the universe is hers, and unlike the sacred bird
Simurgh, which is omnipotent on condition of never exerting its power,
she may do as she will. And so it comes about that while the novel
is accidental and transient, the romance is essential and permanent.
The novelist, whatever his ability, writes in the shifting sand; the
only age that understands his work is that which has not forgotten the
social conditions environing his characters—namely, their own period;
but the romancist has cut his work into the living rock. Richardson
and Fielding already seem absurd. We are beginning to quarrel with
Thackeray, and Dickens needs a glossary. Thirty years ago I saw a
list of scores of words used by Dickens that had become obsolete.
They were mostly the names of homely household objects no longer
in use; he had named them in giving “local color” and the sense of
“reality.” Contemporary novels are read by none but the reviewers and
the multitude—which will read anything if it is long, untrue and new
enough. Men of sane judgment and taste still illuminate their minds
and warm their hearts in Scott’s suffusing glow; the strange, heatless
glimmer of Hawthorne fascinates more and more; the Thousand-and-One
Nights holds its captaincy of tale-telling. Whatever a great man does
he is likely to do greatly, but had Hugo set the powers of his giant
intellect to the making of mere novels his superiority to the greatest
of those who have worked in that barren art might have seemed somewhat
less measureless than it is.

  1897.



                         ON LITERARY CRITICISM


                                   I

The saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can
never know, nor hope to know, if he is a good workman. In literary
criticism there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence
by which to test the work. Sainte-Beuve says that the art of criticism
consists in saying the first thing that comes into one’s head.
Doubtless he was thinking of his own head, a fairly good one. There is
a difference between the first thing that comes into one head and the
first thing that comes into another; and it is not always the best kind
of head that concerns itself with literary criticism.

Having no standards, criticism is an erring guide. Its pronouncements
are more interesting than valuable, and interesting chiefly from the
insight that they give into the mind, not of the writer criticised,
but of the writer criticising. Hence the greater interest that they
have when delivered by one of whom the reader already knows something.
So the newspapers are not altogether unwise when asking an eminent
merchant to pass judgment on a new poet, or a distinguished soldier
to “sit” in the case of a rising young novelist. We learn something
about the merchant or the soldier, and that may amuse. As a guide to
literary excellence even the most accomplished critic’s judgment on his
contemporaries is of little value. Posterity more frequently reverses
than affirms it.

The reason is not far to seek. An author’s work is usually the product
of his environment. He collaborates with his era; his co-workers are
time and place. All his neighbors and all the conditions in which they
live have a hand in the work. His own individuality, unless uncommonly
powerful and original, is “subdued to what it works in.” But this is
true, too, of his critic, whose limitations are drawn by the same iron
authority. Subject to the same influences, good and bad, following
the same literary fashions, the critic who is contemporary with his
author holds his court in the market-place and polls a fortuitous jury.
In diagnosing the disorder of a person suspected of hydrophobia the
physician ought not to have been bitten by the same dog.

The taste of the many being notoriously bad and that of the few
dubious, what is the author to do for judgment on his work? He is to
wait. In a few centuries, more or less, may arise a critic that we call
Posterity. This fellow will have as many limitations, probably, as the
other had—will bow the knee to as many literary Baäls and err as widely
from the paths leading to the light. But his false gods will not be
those of to-day, whose hideousness will disclose itself to his undevout
vision, and in his deviations from the true trail he will cross and
chart our tracks. Better than all, he will know and care little about
the lives and characters, the personalities, of those of us whose work
has lasted till his time. On that coign of vantage he will stand and
deliver a juster judgment. It will enable him to judge our work with
impartiality, as if it had fallen from the skies or sprung up from the
ground without human agency.

One can hardly overrate the advantage to the critic of ignorance of his
author. Biographies of men of action are well enough; the lives that
such men live are all there is of them except themselves. But men of
thought—that is different. You can not narrate thought, nor describe
it, yet it is the only relevant thing in the life of an author.
Anything else darkens counsel. We go to biography for side lights on
an author’s work; to his work for side lights on his character. The
result is confusion and disability, for personal character and literary
character have little to say to each other, despite the fact that
so tremendous a chap as Taine builded an entire and most unearthly
biography of Shakspeare on no firmer foundation than the “internal
evidence” of the plays and sonnets. Of all the influences that make for
incapable criticism the biographer of authors is the most pernicious.
One needs not be a friend to organized labor to wish that the fellow’s
working hours might be reduced from twenty-four to eight.

Neither the judgment of the populace nor that of the critics being
of value to an author concerned about his rank in the hierarchy of
letters, and that of posterity being a trifle slow, he seems to be
reduced to the expedient of taking his own word for it. And his
opinion of himself may not be so far out of the way. Read Goethe’s
conversations with Eckermann and see how accurately the great man
appraised himself.

When scratched in a newspaper Heine said: “I am to be judged in the
assizes of literature. I know who I am.”

About the shrine of every famous author awaits a cloud of critics to
pay an orderly and decorous homage to his genius. There is no crowding:
if one of them sees that he can not perform his prostration until
after his saint shall have been forgotten along with the intellectual
miracles he wrought, that patient worshiper turns aside to level his
shins at another shrine. There are shrines enough for all, God knows!

The most mischievous, because the ablest, of all this sycophantic
crew is Mr. Howells, who finds every month, and reads, two or three
books—always novels—of high literary merit. As no man who has anything
else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a
month—and I will say for Mr. Howells that he is a conscientious
reader—and as some hundreds are published in the same period, one is
curious to know how many books of high literary merit he would find if
he could read them all. But Mr. Howells is no ordinary sycophant—not
he. True, having by mischance read a book divinely bad, even when
judged according to his own test, and having resolved to condemn
nothing except in a general way—as the artillerists in the early days
of the Civil War used to “shell the woods”—he does not purpose to lose
his labor, and therefore commends the book along with the others;
but as a rule he distributes the distinctions that he has to confer
according to a system—to those, namely, whose work in fiction most
nearly resembles his own. That is his way of propagating the Realistic
faith which his poverty of imagination has compelled him to adopt and
his necessities to defend. “Ah, yes, a beautiful animal,” said the
camel of the horse—“if he only had a hump!”

To show what literary criticism has accomplished in education of the
public taste I beg to refer the reader to any number of almost any
magazine. Here is one, for instance, containing a paper by one Bowker
on contemporary English novelists—he novelists and she novelists—to
the number of about forty. And only the “eminent” ones are mentioned.
To most American readers some of the books of most of these authors
are more or less familiar, and nine in ten of these readers will
indubitably accept Mr. Bowker’s high estimate of the genius of the
authors themselves. These have one good quality—they are industrious:
most of them have published ten to forty novels each, the latter number
being the favorite at this date and eliciting Mr. Bowker’s lively
admiration. The customary rate of production is one a year, though
two are not unusual, there being nothing in the law forbidding. Mr.
Bowker has the goodness to tell us all he knows about these persons’
methods of work; that is to say, all that they have told him. The
amount of patient research, profound thought and systematic planning
that go to the making of one of their books is (naturally) astonishing.
Unfortunately it falls just short of the amount that kills.

Add to the forty eminent English novelists another forty American,
equally eminent—at least in their own country—and similarly
industrious. We have then an average annual output of, say, eighty
novels which have the right to expect to be widely read and
enthusiastically reviewed. This in two countries, in one of which the
art of novel writing is dead, in the other of which it has not been
born. Truly this is an age of growing literary activity; our novelists
are as lively and diligent as maggots in the carcass of a horse. There
is a revival of baseball, too.

If our critics were wiser than their dupes could this mass of
insufferable stuff be dumped upon the land? Could the little men and
foolish women who write it command the persevering admiration of
their fellow-creatures, who think it a difficult thing to do? I make
no account here of the mere book-reporters of the newspapers, whose
purpose and ambition are, not to guide the public taste but to follow
it, and who are therefore in no sense critics. The persons whom I
am considering are those ingenious gentlemen who in the magazines
and reviews are expected to, and do, write of books with entire
independence of their own market. Are there anywhere more than one,
two or three like Percival Pollard, with “Gifford’s heavy hand” to
“crush without remorse” the intolerable rout of commonplace men and
women swarming innumerous upon the vacant seats of the dead giants and
covering the slopes of Parnassus like a flock of crows?

Your critic of widest vogue and chief authority among us is he who is
best skilled in reading between the lines; in interpreting an author’s
purpose; in endowing him with a “problem” and noting his degree of
skill in its solution. The author—stupid fellow!—did not write between
the lines, had no purpose but to entertain, was unaware of a problem.
So much the worse for him; so much the better for his expounder.
Interlinear cipher, purpose, problem, are all the critic’s own, and
he derives a lively satisfaction in his creation—looks upon it and
pronounces it good. Nothing is more certain than that if a writer of
genius should “bring to his task” of writing a book the purposes which
the critics would surely trace in the completed work the book would
remain forever unwritten, to the unspeakble advantage of letters and
morals.

In illustration of these remarks and suggesting them, take these
book reviews in a single number of _The Atlantic_. There we
learn, concerning Mr. Cable, that his controlling purpose in
_The Grandissimes_ was that of “presenting the problem of the
reorganization of Southern society”—that “the book was in effect a
parable”; that in _Dr. Sevier_ he “essayed to work out through personal
relations certain problems [always a problem or two] which vexed him
regarding poverty and labor”; that in _Bonaventure_ he “sets himself
another task,” which is “to work out [always something to ‘work out’]
the regeneration of man through knowledge”—a truly formidable “task.”
Of the author of _Queen Money_, we are told by the same expounder
that she has “set herself no task beyond her power,” but “had it in
mind to trace the influence of the greed for wealth upon a section of
contemporaneous society.” Of Mr. Bellamy, author of _Looking Backward_
(the heroine of which is not Mrs. Lot) we are confidently assured in
ailing metaphor that “he feels intensely the bitter inequalities of
the present order” of things and “thinks he sees a remedy,”—our old
friends again: the “problem” and the “solution”—both afterthoughts of
Mr. Bellamy. The “task” which in _Marzio’s Crucifix_ Marion Crawford
“sets himself” is admirably simple—by a “characteristic outwardness”
to protect us against “a too intimate and subtle corrosive of life.”
As a savior of the world against this awful peril Crawford may justly
have claimed a vote of thanks; but possibly he was content with that
humbler advantage, the profit from the sale of his book. But (it may be
protested) the critic who is to live by his trade must say _something_.
True, but is it necessary that he live by his trade?

Carlyle’s prophecy of a time when all literature should be one vast
review is in process of fulfilment. Aubrey de Vere has written a
critical analysis of poetry, chiefly that of Spenser and Wordsworth. An
_Atlantic_ man writes a critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical
analysis. Shall I not write a critical analysis of the _Atlantic_ man’s
critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical analysis of poetry? I
can do so adequately in three words: It is nonsense.

Spenser, also, it appears, “set himself a task,” had his “problem,”
“worked it out.” “The figures of his embroidered poem,” we are told,
“are conceived and used in accordance with a comprehensive doctrine
of the nature of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly meant to enforce
through the medium of his imagination.” That is to say, the author
of _The Faerie Queene_ did not “sing because he could not choose but
sing,” but because he was burdened with a doctrine. He had a nut to
crack and, faith! he must crack it or he would be sick. “Resolved into
its moral elements” (whether by Aubrey de Vere or the _Atlantic_ man
I can only guess without reading de Vere’s work in two volumes, which
God forbid!) the glowing work of Spenser is a sermon which “teaches
specifically how to attain self-control and how to meet attacks from
without; or rather how to seek those many forms of error which do
mischief in the world, and to overcome them for the world’s welfare.”
Precisely: the animal is a pig and a bird; or rather it is a fish. So
much for Spenser, whom his lovers may re-read if they like in the new
light of this person’s critical analysis. It is rather hard that, being
dead, he can not have the advantage of going over his work with so
intelligent a guide as Aubrey de Vere. He would be astonished by his
own profundity.

How literary reviewing may be acceptably done in Boston may be judged
by the following passage from the Boston _Literary Review_:

“When Miss Emma Frances Dawson wrote _An Itinerant House_ she was
plainly possessed of a desire to emulate Poe and turn out a collection
of stories which, once read, the mention of them would make the blood
curdle. There is no need to say that Poe’s position is still secure,
but Miss Dawson has succeeded in writing some very creditable stories
of their kind.”

The reviewer that can discern in Miss Dawson’s work “a desire to
emulate Poe,” or can find in it even a faint suggestion of Poe, may
justly boast himself accessible to any folly that comes his way. There
is no more similarity between the work of the two writers than there
is between that of Dickens and that of Macaulay, or that of Addison
and that of Carlyle. Poe in his prose tales deals sometimes with the
supernatural; Miss Dawson always. But hundreds of writers do the same;
if that constitutes similarity and suggests intentional “emulation”
what shall be said of those tales which resemble one another in that
element’s omission? The truth probably is that the solemn gentleman
who wrote that judgment had not read Poe since childhood, and did not
read Miss Dawson at all. Moreover, no excellence in her work would
have saved it from his disparaging comparison if he had read it. “Poe’s
position” would still have been a “secure,” for to such minds as his it
is unthinkable that an established fame (no matter how, when or where
established) should not signify an unapproachable merit. If he had
lived in Poe’s time how he would have sneered at that writer’s attempt
to emulate Walpole! And had he been a contemporary of Walpole that
ambitious person would have incurred a stinging rap on the head for
aspiring to displace the immortal Gormley Hobb.

The fellow goes on:

“To one steeped in the gruesome weirdness of a master of the gentle art
of blood-curdling the stories are not too impressive, but he who picks
up the book fresh from a fairy tale is apt to become somewhat nervous
in the reading. The tales allow Miss Dawson to weave in some very
pretty verse.”

The implication that Miss Dawson’s tales are intended to be “gruesome,”
“blood-curdling,” and so forth, is a foolish implication. Their
supernaturalism is not of that kind. The blood that they could curdle
is diseased blood which it would be at once a kindly office and a high
delight to shed. And fancy this inexpressible creature calling Miss
Dawson’s verse “pretty”!—the _ballade_ of “The Sea of Sleep” “pretty”!
My compliments to him:

  Dull spirit, few among us be your days,
  The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;
  And God deny, your flesh when you unload,
  Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,
  With powers direr than your present sort:
  Able the wights you jump on to bewart.

The latest author of “uncanny” tales to suffer from the ready
reckoner’s short cut to the solution of the problem of literary merit,
the ever-serviceable comparison with Edgar Allan Poe, is Mr. W. C.
Morrow. Doubtless he had hoped that this cup might pass by him—had
implored the rosy goddess Psora, who enjoys the critic’s person and
inspires his pen, to go off duty, but it was not to be; that diligent
deity is never weary of ill doing and her devotees, pursuing the evil
tenor of their way, have sounded the Scotch fiddle to the customary
effect. Mr. Morrow’s admirable book, _The Ape, the Idiot and Other
People_, is gravely ascribed to the paternity of Poe, as was Miss
Dawson’s before it, and some of mine before that. And until Gabriel,
with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last
living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up,
every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same
sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps—the
book-butchers of the newspapers—criticism is merely a process of
marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature
of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the
old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write “gruesome
stories”?—they invoke Poe; essays?—they out with their Addison;
satirical verse?—they have at him with Pope—and so on, through the
entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name,
learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and
obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates,
who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the
slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking
of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write
is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model
the standard name dominating his chosen field—the impeccant hegemon of
the province.


                                  II

Mr. Hamlin Garland, writing with the corn-fed enthusiasm of the
prairies, “hails the dawn of a new era” in literature—an era which is
to be distinguished by dominance of the Western man. That a great new
literature is to “come out of the West” because of broad prairies and
wide rivers and big mountains and infrequent boundary lines—that is a
conviction dear indeed to the Western mind which has discovered that
marks can be made on paper with a pen. A few years ago the Eastern
mind was waiting wide-eyed to “hail the dawn” of a literature that
was to be “distinctively American,” for the Eastern mind in those
days claimed a share in the broad prairies, the wide rivers and the
big mountains, with all the competencies, suggestions, inspirations
and other appurtenances thereunto belonging—a heritage which now Mr.
Garland austerely denies to any one born and “raised” on the morning
side of the Alleghanies. The “distinctively American literature” has
not materialized, excepting in the works of Americans distinctively
illiterate; and there are no visible signs of a distinctively Western
one. Even the Californian sort, so long heralded by prophets blushing
with conscious modesty in the foretelling, seems loth to leave off its
damnable faces and begin. The best Californian, the best Western, the
best American books have the least of geographical “distinctiveness,”
and most closely conform to the universal and immutable laws of the
art, as known to Aristotle and Longinus.

The effect of physical-geographical environment on literary production
is mostly nil; racial and educational considerations only are of
controlling importance. Despite Madame de Staël’s engaging dictum
that “every Englishman is an island,” the natives of that scanty plot
have produced a literature which in breadth of thought and largeness
of method we sons of a continent, brothers to the broad prairies,
wide rivers and big mountains, have not matched and give no promise
of matching. It is all very fine to be a child o’ natur’ with a home
in the settin’ sun, but when the child o’ natur’ with a knack at
scribbling pays rent to Phœbus by renouncing the incomparable advantage
of strict subjection to literary law he pays too dearly.

Nothing new is to be learned in any of the great arts—the ancients
looted the whole field. Nor do first-rate minds seek anything new.
They are assured of primacy under the conditions of their art as they
find it—under any conditions. It is the lower order of intelligence
that is ingenious, inventive, alert for original methods and new
forms. Napoleon added nothing to the art of war, in either strategy or
tactics. Shakspeare tried no new meters, did nothing that had not been
done before—merely did better what had been done. In the Parthenon was
no new architectural device, and in the Sistine Madonna all the effects
were got by methods as familiar as speech. The only way in which it is
worth while to differ from others is in point of superior excellence.
Be “original,” ambitious Westerner—always as original as you please.
But know, or if you already know remember, that originality strikes
and dazzles only when displayed within the limiting lines of form.
Above all, remember that the most ineffective thing in literature is
that quality, whatever in any case it may be, which is best designated
in terms of geographical classification. The work of whose form and
methods one naturally thinks as—not “English”; that is a racial
word, but—“American” or “Australian” or (in this country) “Eastern,”
“Mid-Western,” “Southern” or “Californian” is worthless. The writer who
knows no better than to make or try to make his work “racy of the soil”
knows nothing of his art worth knowing.


                                  III

Charles A. Dana held that California could not rightly claim the
glory of such literature as she had, for none of her writers of
distinction—such distinction as they had—was born there. We were
austerely reminded that “even the sheen of gold is less attractive than
the lustre of intellectual genius.” “California!” cried this severe but
not uncompassionate critic—“California! how musical is the word. And
again we cry out, California! Give us the letters of high thought: give
us philosophy and romance and poetry and art. Give us the soul!”

How many men and women who scorn delights and live laborious days to
glorify our metropolis with “the letters of high thought” are on Fame’s
muster-roll as natives of Manhattan island? Doubtless the state of New
York, as also the city of that name, can make an honorable showing
in the matter of native authors, but it has certain considerable
advantages that California lacks. In the first place, there are many
more births in New York, supplying a strong numerical presumption that
more geniuses will turn up there. Second, it has (I hope) enjoyed that
advantage for many, many years; whereas California was “settled” (and
by the non-genius-bearing sex) a good deal later. In this competition
the native Californian author is handicapped by the onerous condition
that in order to have his nose counted he must have been born in the
pre-Woman period or acquired enough of reputation for the rumor of his
merit to have reached New York’s ears, and for the noise of it to have
roused her from the contemplation of herself, before he has arrived
at middle age. This is not an “impossible” condition; it is only an
exceedingly hard one. How hard it is a little reflection on facts
will show. The rule is, the world over, that the literary army of the
“metropolis” is recruited in the “provinces,” or, more accurately,
_from_ the provinces. The difference denoted by the prepositions is
important: for every provincial writer who, like Bret Harte, achieves
at home enough distinction to be sought out and lured to a “literary
metropolis,” ten unknown ones go there of their own motion, like
Rudyard Kipling, and become distinguished afterward. They wrote equally
well where they were, but they might have continued to write there
until dead of age, and but for some lucky accident or fortuitous
concurrence of favoring circumstances they would never have been heard
of in the “literary metropolis.”

We may call it so, but New York is not a literary metropolis, nor is
London, nor is Paris. In letters there is no metropolis. The literary
capital is not a mother-city, founding colonies; it is the creature of
its geographical environment, giving out nothing, taking in everything.
If not constantly fed with fresh brains from beyond and about, its
chance of primacy and domination would be merely proportional to its
population. This centripetal tendency—this converging movement of
provincial writers upon the literary capital, is itself the strongest
possible testimony to the disadvantages which they suffer at home; for
in nearly every instance it is made—commonly at a great sacrifice—in
pursuit of recognition. The motive may not be a very creditable one; I
think myself it is ridiculous, as is all ambition, not to excel, but
to be known to excel; but such is the motive. If the provincial writer
could as easily obtain recognition at home he would stay there.

For my part, I freely admit that “the Golden State can not ‘boast’
of any native literary celebrities of the first rank,” for I do not
consider the incident of a literary celebrity of the first rank having
been born in one place instead of another a thing to boast of. If
there is an idler and more barren work than the rating of writers
according to merit it is their classification according to birthplace.
A racial classification is interesting because it corresponds to
something in nature, but among authors of the same race—and that
race the restless Americans, who are about as likely to be born in a
railway car as anywhere, and whose first instinct is to get away from
home—this classification is without meaning. If it is ever otherwise
than capitally impudent in the people of a political or geographical
division to be proud of a great writer (as George the Third was of an
abundant harvest) it is least impudent in those of the one in which he
did his worthiest work, most so in those of the one in which he was
born.



                            STAGE ILLUSION


Such to-day is the condition of the drama that the “scenic artist”
and the carpenter are its hope and its pride. They are the props and
pillars of the theatre, without which the edifice would fall to pieces.
But there are “some of us fellows,” as a Bishop of Lincoln used to say
to his brother prelates, who consider scenery an impertinence and its
painter a creature for whose existence there is no warrant of art nor
justification of taste.

I am no _laudator temporis acti_, but I submit that in this matter
of the drama the wisdom of the centuries is better than the caprice
of the moment. For some thousands of years, dramatists, actors and
audiences got on very well without recourse to the mechanical devices
that we esteem necessary to the art of stage representation. Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Shakspeare—what did they know of scenery and
machinery? You may say that the Greeks knew little of painting, so
could have no scenery. They had something better—imagination. Why
did they not use pulleys, and trap-doors, and real water, and live
horses?—they had _them_; and Ben Jonson and Shakspeare could have had
painters enow, God knows. Why, in their time the stage was lighted with
naked and unashamed candles and strewn with rushes, and favored ones of
the audience—“gentlemen of wit and pleasure about town”—occupied seats
upon it! If the action was supposed to be taking place in a street
in Verona did not the play-bill so explain? A word to the wise was
sufficient: the gentlemen of wit and pleasure went to the play to watch
the actor’s face, observe his gestures, critically note his elocution.
They would have resented with their handy hangers an attempt to obtrude
upon their attention the triumphs of the “scenic artist,” the machinist
and the property-man. As for the “groundlings,” they were there by
sufferance only, and might comprehend or not, as it might or might not
please their Maker to work a miracle in their stupid nowls.

_Now_ it is all for the groundlings; the stage has no longer “patrons,”
and “His Majesty’s Players” are the servants of the masses, to whom
the author’s text must be presented with explanatory notes by those
learned commentators, Messrs. Daub and Toggle—whom may the good devil
besmear with yellows and make mad with a tin moon!

What! shall I go to the theatre to be pleased with colored canvas,
affrighted with a storm that is half dried peas and t’other half
sheet-iron? Shall I take any part of my evening’s pleasure from the
dirty hands of an untidy anarchist who shakes a blue rag to represent
the Atlantic Ocean, while another sandlot orator navigates a cloth-yard
three-decker across the middle distance? Am I to be interested in the
personal appearance of a centre-table and the adventures of half a
dozen chairs—albeit they are better than the one given me to sit on?

  Shall makers of fine furniture aspire
  To scorn my lower needs and feed my higher?
  And vile upholsterers be taught to slight
  My body’s comfort for my mind’s delight?

Where is the sense of all these devices for producing an “illusion?”
Illusion, indeed! When you look at art do you wish to persuade yourself
that it is only nature? Take the Laocoön—would it be pleasant or
instructive to forget, for even a moment, that it is a group of
inanimate figures, and think yourself gazing on a living man and two
living children in the folds of two living snakes? When you stand
before a “nativity” by some old master, do you fancy yourself a real
ass at a real manger? Deception is no part of art, for only in its
non-essentials is art a true copy of nature. If it is anything more,
why, then the Shah of Persia was a judicious critic. Shown a picture
of a donkey by Landseer and told that it was worth five hundred
pounds, he contemptuously replied that for five pounds he could buy
the donkey. The man who holds that art should be a certified copy of
nature, and produce an illusion in the mind, has no right to smile at
this anecdote. It is his business in this life not to laugh, but to be
laughed at.

Seeing that stage illusion is neither desirable nor attainable, the
determined efforts to achieve it that have been making during these
last few decades seem very melancholy indeed. It is as if a dog should
spin himself sick in pursuit of his tail, which he neither can catch
nor could profit by if he caught it. Failure displeases in proportion
to the effort, and it would be judicious to stop a little short of
real water, and live horses, and trains of cars that will work. Nay,
why should we have streets and drawing-rooms (with mantel-clocks and
coal scuttles complete) and castles with battlements? Or if the play
is so vilely constructed as to require them, why must the street
have numbered house-doors, the drawing-room an adjoining library and
conservatory, and the battlements a growth of ivy? Of course no sane
mind would justify poor Boucicault’s wall that sinks to represent the
ascent of the man “climbing it” by standing on the ground and working
his legs, but we are only a trifle less ridiculous when we have any
scenic effects at all. The difference is one of degree, and if we are
to have representations of inanimate objects it is hard to say at what
we should stick. Our intellectual gorge may now rise at the spectacle
of a battered and blood-stained “Nancy” dragging her wrecked carcass
along the stage to escape the club of a “Sykes,” for it is as new as
once were the horrible death-agonies constituting the charm of the
acting of a Croizette; but the line of distinction is arbitrary, and
no one can say how soon we shall expect to see the blood of “Cæsar”
spouting from his wound instead of being content with “Antony’s” rather
graphic description of it. It is of the nature of realism never to stop
till it gets to the bottom.

Inasmuch as the actor must wear something—a necessity from which the
actress is largely free—he may as well wear the costume appropriate to
his part. But this is about as far as art permits him to go in the way
of “illusion”; another step and he is on the “unsteadfast footing” of
popular caprice and vulgar fashion. Of course if the playwright has
chosen to make a window, a coach, a horse, church spire, or whale one
of his _dramatis personæ_ we must have it in some form, offensive as it
is; the mistake which was his in so constructing the play is ours when
we go to see it. In the old playbooks the “Scene—a Bridge in Venice,”
“Scene—a Cottage in the Black Forest,” “Scene—a Battle Field,” etc.,
were not intended as instructions to the manager, but to the spectator.
The author did not expect these things to be shown on the stage, but
imagined in the auditorium. They were mere hints and helps to the
imagination, which, as an artist, it was his business to stimulate
and guide, and the modern playwright, as a fool, decrees it his duty
to discourage and repress. The play should require as few accessories
as possible, and to those actually required the manager should confine
himself. We may grant Shakspeare his open grave in _Hamlet_, but the
impertinence of real earth in it we should resent; while the obtrusion
of adjacent tombs and headstones at large is a capital crime. If
we endure a play in which a man is pitched out of a window we must
perforce endure the window; but the cornice, curtains and tassels; the
three or four similar windows with nobody pitched out of them; the
ancestral portrait on the wall and the suit of armor in the niche; what
have these to do with the matter? We can see them anywhere at any time;
we wish to know how not to see them. They are of the vulgarities. They
distract attention from the actor, and under cover of the diversion he
plays badly. Is it any wonder that he does not care to compete with a
gilt cornice and a rep sofa?

On the Athenian stage, a faulty gesture, a sin in rhetoric, a false
quantity or accent—these were visited with the dire displeasure of
an audience in whom the art-sense was sweeter than honey and stronger
than a lion; an audience that went to the play to see the play, to
discriminate, compare, mark the conformity of individual practice to
universal principle: in a word, to criticise. They enjoyed that rarest
and ripest of all pleasures, the use of trained imagination. There was
the naked majesty of art, there the severe simplicity of taste. And
there came not the carpenter with his machines, the upholsterer with
his stuffs, nor the painter with blotches of impertinent color, crazing
the eye and grieving the heart.



                         THE MATTER OF MANNER


I have sometimes fancied that a musical instrument retains among its
capabilities and potentialities something of the character, some hint
of the soul, some waiting echo from the life of each who has played
upon it: that the violin which Paganini had touched was not altogether
the same afterward as before, nor had quite so fine a fibre after some
coarser spirit had stirred its strings. Our language is a less delicate
instrument: it is not susceptible to a debasing contagion; it receives
no permanent and essential impress but from the hand of skill. You may
fill it with false notes, and these will speak discordant when invoked
by a clumsy hand; but when the master plays they are all unheard—silent
in the quickened harmonies of masters who have played before.

My design is to show in the lucidest way that I can the supreme
importance of words, their domination of thought, their mastery of
character. Had the Scriptures been translated, as literally as now,
into the colloquial speech of the unlearned, and had the originals been
thereafter inaccessible, only direct interposition of the Divine Power
could have saved the whole edifice of Christianity from tumbling to
ruin.

Max Muller distilled the results of a lifetime of study into two lines:

    No Language without Reason.
    No Reason without Language.

The person with a copious and obedient vocabulary and the will and
power to apply it with precision thinks great thoughts. The mere glib
talker—who may have a meagre vocabulary and no sense of discrimination
in the use of words—is another kind of creature. A nation whose
language is strong and rich and flexible and sweet—such as English was
just before the devil invented dictionaries—has a noble literature
and, compared with contemporary nations barren in speech, a superior
morality. A word is a crystallized thought; good words are precious
possessions, which nevertheless, like gold, may be mischievously used.
The introduction of a bad word, its preservation, the customary misuse
of a good one—these are sins affecting the public welfare. The fight
against faulty diction is a fight against insurgent barbarism—a fight
for high thinking and right living—for art, science, power—in a word,
civilization. A motor without mechanism; an impulse without a medium
of transmission; a vitalizing thought with no means to impart it; a
fertile mind with a barren vocabulary—than these nothing could be more
impotent. Happily they are impossible. They are not even conceivable.

Conduct is of character, character is of thought, and thought is
unspoken speech. We think in words; we can not think without them.
Shallowness or obscurity of speech means shallowness or obscurity of
thought. Barring a physical infirmity, an erring tongue denotes an
erring brain. When I stumble in my speech I stumble in my thought.
Those who have naturally the richest and most obedient vocabulary
are also the wisest thinkers; there is little worth knowing but what
they have thought. The most brutish savage is he who is most meagrely
equipped with words; fill him with words to the top of his gift and
you would make him as wise as he is able to become.

The man who can neither write well nor talk well would have us believe
that, like the taciturn parrot of the anecdote, he is “a devil to
think.” It is not so. Though such a man had read the Alexandrian
library he would remain ignorant; though he had sat at the feet of
Plato he would be still unwise. The gift of expression is the measure
of mental capacity; its degree of cultivation is the exponent of
intellectual power. One may choose not to utter one’s mind—that is
another matter; but if he choose he can. He can utter it all. His mind,
not his heart; his thought, not his emotion. And if he do not sometimes
choose to utter he will eventually cease to think. A mind without
utterance is like a lake without an outlet: though fed with mountain
springs and unfailing rivers, its waters do not long keep sweet.

Human speech is an imperfect instrument—imperfect by reason of its
redundancy, imperfect by reason of its poverty. We have too many words
for our meaning, too many meanings for our words. The effect is so
confusing and embarrassing that the ability to express our thoughts
with force and accuracy is extremely rare. It is not a gift, but a
gift and an accomplishment. It comes not altogether by nature, but is
achieved by hard, technical study.

In illustration of the poverty of speech take the English word
“literature.” It means the art of writing and it means the things
written—preferably in the former sense by him who has made it a study,
almost universally in the latter by those who know nothing about it.
Indeed, the most of these are unaware that it has another meaning,
because unaware of the existence of the thing which in that sense it
means. Tell them that literature, like painting, sculpture, music and
architecture, is an art—the most difficult of arts—and you must expect
an emphatic dissent. The denial not infrequently comes from persons of
wide reading, even wide writing, for the popular writer commonly utters
his ideas as, if he pursued the vocation for which he is better fitted,
he would dump another kind of rubbish from another kind of cart—pull
out the tailboard and let it go. The immortals have a different method.

Among the minor trials of one who has a knowledge of the art of
literature is the book of one who has not. It is a light affliction,
for he need not read it. The worthy bungler’s conversation about
the books of others is a sharper disaster, for it can not always
be evaded and must be courteously endured; and, goodness gracious!
how comprehensively he does not know! How eagerly he points out the
bottomless abyss of his ignorance and leaps into it! The _censor
literarum_ is perhaps the most widely distributed species known to
zoology.

The ignorance of the reading public and the writing public concerning
literary art is the eighth wonder of the world. Even its rudiments
are to these two great classes a thing that is not. From neither the
talk of the one nor the writing of the other would a student from Mars
ever learn, for illustration, that a romance is not a novel; that
poetry is a thing apart from the metrical form in which it is most
acceptable; that an epigram is not a truth tersely stated—is, in fact,
not altogether true; that fable is neither story nor anecdote; that the
speech of an illiterate doing the best he knows how is another thing
than dialect; that prose has its prosody no less exacting than verse.
The ready-made critic and the ready-made writer are two of a kind and
each is good enough for the other. To both, writing is writing, and
that is all there is of it. If we had two words for the two things now
covered by the one word “literature” perhaps the benighted could be
taught to distinguish between, not only the art and the product, but,
eventually, the different kinds of the product itself. As it is, they
are in much the same state of darkness as that of the Southern young
woman before she went North and learned, to her astonishment, that the
term “damned Yankee” was two words—she had never heard either without
the other.

In literature, as in all art, manner is everything and matter nothing;
I mean that matter, however important, has nothing to do with the _art_
of literature; that is a thing apart. In literature it makes very
little difference what you say, but a great deal how you say it. It is
precisely this thing called style which determines and fixes the place
of any written discourse; the thoughts may be the most interesting, the
statements the most important, that it is possible to conceive; yet if
they be not cast in the literary mold, the world can not be persuaded
to accept the work as literature. What could be more important and
striking than the matter of Darwin’s books, or Spencer’s? Does anyone
think of Darwin and Spencer as men of letters? Their manner, too, is
admirable for its purpose—to convince. Conviction, though, is not a
literary purpose. What can depose Sterne from literature? Yet who says
less than Sterne, or says it better?

It is so in painting. One man makes a great painting of a sheepcote;
another, a bad one of Niagara. The difference is not in the subject—in
that the Niagara man has all the advantage; it is in the style.
Art—literary, graphic, or what you will—is not a matter of matter, but
a matter of manner. It is not the What but the How. The master enchants
when writing of a pebble on the beach; the bungler wearies us with a
storm at sea. Let the dullard look to his theme and thought; the artist
sets down what comes. He pickles it sweet with a salt savor of verbal
felicity, and it charms like Apollo’s lute.



                         ON READING NEW BOOKS


It is hereby confessed too—nay, affirmed—that this our time is as
likely to produce great literary work as any of the ages that have gone
before. There is no reason to suppose that the modern mind is any whit
inferior in creative power to the ancient, albeit the moderns have not,
as the ancients had, “the first rifling of the beauties of nature.” For
our images, our metaphors, our similes and what not we must go a bit
further afield than Homer had to go. We can no longer—at least we no
longer should, though many there be who do—say “as red as blood,” “as
white as snow,” and so forth. Our predecessors harvested that crop and
threshed it out before we had the bad luck to be born. But much that
was closed to them is open to us, for still creation widens to man’s
view.

No; the _laudatores temporis acti_ are not to be trusted when they
say that the days of great literature are past. At any time a supreme
genius may rise anywhere on the literary horizon and, flaming in the
sky, splendor the world with a new glory. But the readers of new books
need not put on colored spectacles to protect their eyes. It is not
they that will recognize him. They will not be able to distinguish
him from the little luminaries whose advent they are always “hailing”
as the dawn of a new and wonderful day. It is unlikely, indeed, that
he will be recognized at all in his own day for what he is. It may be
that when he “swims into our ken” we shall none of us eye the blue
vault and bless the useful light, but swear that it is a malign and
baleful beam. Nay, worse, he may never be recognized by posterity.
Great work in letters has no inherent quality, no innate vitality,
that will necessarily preserve it long enough to demand judgment from
those qualified by time to consider it without such distractions as
the circumstances and conditions under which it was produced. And only
so can a true judgment be given. It is likely that more great writers
have died and been forever forgotten than have had their fame bruited
about the world. Ah, well, they must take their chances. I, for my
part, am not going to read dozens of the very newest books annually
lest I overlook a genius now and then. Dozens are large numbers when it
is books that one is talking about. Probably not so many worth reading
were written in either half of the Nineteenth Century.

The reader of new books is in the position of one who, having at hand
a mine of precious metals, easy of working and by his utmost diligence
inexhaustible, suffers it to lie untouched and goes prospecting on the
chance of finding another as good. He may find one, though the odds
are a thousand to one that he will not. If he does, he will find also
that he did not need to be in a hurry about it. Every book that is
worth reading is founded on something permanent in human nature or the
constitution of things, and constructed on principles of art which are
themselves eternal. Whether it is read in one decade or another—even
in one century or another—is of no importance; its value and charm are
unchanging and unchangeable. Reverting to my simile of the mine, a good
book is located on the great mother-lode of human interest; whereas the
work that immediately prospers in the praise of the multitude commonly
taps some “pocket” in the country rock and the accidental deposit is
soon exhausted.

The world is full of great books in lettered languages. If any one
has lived long enough, and read with sufficient assiduity, to have
possessed his mind of all the literary treasures accessible to him; if
he has mastered all the tongues in which are any masterworks of genius
yet untranslated; if the ages have nothing more to offer him; if he
has availed himself of the utmost advantages that he can derive from
the infallible censorship of time and advice of the posterity which he
calls his ancestors—let him commit himself to the blind guidance of
chance, stand at the tail end of a modern press and devour as much of
its daily output as he can. That will, at least, enable him to shine
in a conversation; and the social _illuminati_ whose achievements in
that way are most admired will themselves assure you that such are the
purpose and advantage of “literary culture”. And of all drawing-room
authorities, he or she is most reverently esteemed who can most readily
and accurately say what dullard wrote the latest and stupidest novel,
but can not say why.



                    ALPHABÊTES AND BORDER RUFFIANS


                                   I

It is hoped that Divine Justice may find some suitable affliction
for the malefactors who invent variations upon the letters of the
alphabet of our fathers—our Roman fathers. Within the past thirty
years our current literature has become a spectacle for the gods.
The type-founder, worthy mechanic, has asserted himself with an
overshadowing individuality, defacing with his monstrous creations and
revivals every publication in the land. Everywhere secret, black and
midnight wags are diligently studying the alphabet to see how many of
the letters are susceptible to mutation into something new and strange.
Some of the letters are more tractable than others: the O, for example,
can be made as little as you please and set as far above the line as
desired, with or without a flyspeck in the center or a dash (straight
or curved) below. Why should one think that O looks better when thrown
out of relation to the other letters when Heaven has given him eyes to
see that it does not?

Then there is the M—the poor M, who for his distinction as the
biggest toad in the alphabetical puddle is subjected to so dreadful
though necessary indignity in typoscript—the wanton barbarity of his
treatment by the type-founders makes one blush for civilization, or
at least wish for it. There are two schools of M-sters; when their
warfare is accomplished we shall know whether that letter is to figure
henceforth as two sides of a triangle or three sides of a square. In
A the ruffians have an easy victim; they can put his cross-bar up or
down at will; it does not matter, so that it is put where it was not.
For it must be understood that all these alterations are made with no
thought of beauty: the sole purpose of the ruffians is to make the
letters, as many as possible of them, different from what they were
before. That is true generally, but not universally: in the titles of
books and weekly newspapers, and on the covers of magazines, there is
frequently an obvious revival, not merely of archaic forms, but of
crude and primitive printing, as if from wooden blocks. Doubtless it
is beautiful, but it does not look so. In our time the reversionaries
have so far prevailed against common sense that in several periodicals
the long-waisted s is restored, and we have a renewal of the scandalous
relations between the c and the t.

The most fantastic and grotesque of these reversions (happily it has
not yet affected the text of our daily reading) is the restoration of
the ancient form of U, which is now made a V again. This would seem
to be bad enough, but it appears that it has not sated the passion
for change; so the V also has again become a U! What advantage is
got by the transposition those who make it have not condescended to
explain. Altogether the unhappy man who conceives himself obliged to
read the literature of the day—especially the part that shouts and
screams in titles and catalogues, headlines, and so forth—may justly
claim remission of punishment in the next world, so poignant are his
sufferings in this.


                                  II

Coincidently in point of time with these indisposing pranks, came in,
and has remained in, a companion-fad of the artists who illustrate
newspapers, magazines and books. These probably well-meaning but most
undesirable persons, who could be spared by even the most unsparing
critic, are affected with a weakness for borders to pictures. By means
of borders—borders rectangular, borders triangular, borders circular,
borders omniform and nulliform they can put pictures into pictures,
like cards in a loose pack, stick pictures through pictures, and so
confuse, distract and bewilder the attention that it turns its back
upon the display, occupying itself with the noble simplicity and
naturalness of the wish that all artists were at the devil. Nor are
they satisfied with all that: they must make pictures of pictures by
showing an irrelevant background outside their insupportable borders;
by representing their pictures as depending from hooks; nailed upon the
walls; spitted on pins, and variously served right. And still they are
not happy: the picture must, upon occasion, transgress its border—a
mast, a steeple, or a tree thrust through and rejoicing in its escape;
an ocean spilling over and taking to its heels as hard as ever it can
hook it. The taste that accepts this fantastic nonsense is creature
to the taste that supplies it; in an age and country having any sense
of the seriousness of art the taste could not exist long enough to
outlast its victim’s examination on a charge of lunacy.

No picture should have a border; that has no use, no meaning, and
whatever beauty is given to it the picture pays for through the nose.
It is what may be called a contemporary survival: it stands for the
frame of a detached picture—a picture on a wall. The frame is necessary
for support and protection; but an illustration, like the female of the
period, needs neither protection nor support, and the border would give
none if it were needed. It is an impertinence without a mandate; its
existence is due to unceasing suggestions flowing from the frames into
heads where there is plenty of room.


                                  III

Apropos of illustrations and illustrators, I should like to ask what
is the merit or meaning of that peculiar interpretation of nature
which consists in representing men and women with white clothing
and black faces and hands. I do not say that it is not sufficiently
realistic—that it is too conventional; I only “want to know.” I
should like to know, too, if in illustrating, say, a football match
in Ujiji the gentlemen addicted to that method here would show the
players in black clothing, with white faces and hands? Or in default of
clothing would they be shown white all over? If anybody can endarken
my lightness on this subject I shall be glad to hear from him. I am
groping in a noonday of doubt and plunged in a gulf of white despair.

Possibly these pictures are called silhouettes—I have heard them called
so. Possibly if they were silhouettes they would be acceptable, for the
genius of a Kanewka may lift the spectator above such considerations
as right and left in the matter of legs and arms. But they are not
silhouettes; the faces and hands are in shadow, the clothing in light.
The figures are like Tennyson’s lotus eaters: “between the sun and
moon”; the former has power upon the skin only, the latter upon the
apparel. The spectator is supposed to be upon the same side as the
moon. That is where the artist is. He draws the figures, the moon draws
him, and I draw a veil over the affecting scene.



                           TO TRAIN A WRITER


There is a good deal of popular ignorance about writing; it is commonly
thought that good writing comes of a natural gift and that without
the gift the trick can not be turned. This is true of great writing,
but not of good. Any one with good natural intelligence and a fair
education can be taught to write well, as he can be taught to draw
well, or play billiards well, or shoot a rifle well, and so forth; but
to do any of these things greatly is another matter. If one can not do
great work it is worth while to do good work and think it great.

I have had some small experience in teaching English composition, and
some of my pupils are good enough to permit me to be rather proud of
them. Some I have been able only to encourage, and a few will recall my
efforts to profit them by dissuasion. I should not now think it worth
while to teach a pupil to write merely well, but given one capable of
writing greatly, and five years in which to train him, I should not
permit him to put pen to paper for at least two of them—except to make
notes. Those two years should be given to broadening and strengthening
his mind, teaching him how to think and giving him something to
think about—to sharpening his faculties of observation, dispelling
his illusions and destroying his ideals. That would hurt: he would
sometimes rebel, doubtless, and have to be subdued by a diet of bread
and water and a poem on the return of our heroes from Santiago.

If I caught him reading a newly published book, save by way of
penance, it would go hard with him. Of our modern education he should
have enough to read the ancients: Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius,
Seneca and that lot—custodians of most of what is worth knowing. He
might retain what he could of the higher mathematics if he had been
so prodigal of his time as to acquire any, and might learn enough of
science to make him prefer poetry; but to learn from Euclid that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, yet not to
learn from Epictetus how to be a worthy guest at the table of the gods,
would be accounted a breach of contract.

But chiefly this fortunate youth with the brilliant future should
learn to take comprehensive views, hold large convictions and make
wide generalizations. He should, for example, forget that he is an
American and remember that he is a Man. He should be neither Christian,
nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshiper. To local
standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the
virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general
expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of
cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose
itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life;
art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of
all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life
and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him
a continent should not seem wide, nor a century long. And it would be
needful that he know and have an ever present consciousness that this
is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented
with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with
illusions—frothing mad!

We learn in suffering what we teach in song—and prose. I should pray
that my young pupil would occasionally go wrong, experiencing the
educational advantages of remorse; that he would dally with some of the
more biting vices. I should be greatly obliged if Fortune would lay
upon him, now and then, a heavy affliction. A bereavement or two, for
example, would be welcome, although I should not care to have a hand
in it. He must have joy, too—O, a measureless exuberance of joy; and
hate, and fear, hope, despair and love—love inexhaustible, a permanent
provision. He must be a sinner and in turn a saint, a hero, a wretch.
Experiences and emotions—these are necessaries of the literary life. To
the great writer they are as indispensable as sun and air to the rose,
or good, fat, edible vapors to toads. When my pupil should have had two
years of this he would be permitted to try his ’prentice hand at a pig
story in words of one syllable. And I should think it very kind and
friendly if Mr. George Sylvester Vierick would consent to be the pig.

  1899.



                           AS TO CARTOONING


                                   I

I wish that the American artists whose lot is cast in the pleasant
domain of caricature would learn something of the charm of moderation
and the strength of restraint. Their “cartoons” yell; one looks at them
with one’s fingers in one’s ears.

Did you ever observe and consider the dragon in Chinese art? With what
an awful ferocity it is endowed by its creator—the expanded mouth with
its furniture of curling tongue and impossible teeth, its big, fiery
eyes, scaly body, huge claws and spiny back! All the horrible qualities
the artist knows he lavishes upon this pet of his imagination. The
result is an animal which one rather wishes to meet and would not
hesitate to cuff. Unrestricted exaggeration has defeated its own
purpose and made ludicrous what was meant to be terrible. That is, the
artist has lacked the strength of restraint. A true artist could so
represent the common domestic bear, or the snake of the field, as to
smite the spectator with a nameless dread. He could do so by merely
giving to the creature’s eye an expression of malevolence which would
need no assistance from claw, fang or posture.

The American newspaper cartoonist errs in an infantile way similar
to that of the Chinese; by intemperate exaggeration he fails of his
effect. His men are not men at all, so it is impossible either to
respect or detest them, or to feel toward them any sentiment whatever.
As well try to evoke a feeling for or against a wooden Indian, a
butcher’s-block, or a young lady’s favorite character in fiction. His
deformed and distorted creations are entirely outside the range of
human sympathy, antipathy, or interest. They are not even amusing. They
are disgusting and, as in the case of foul names, the object of the
disgust which they inspire is not the person vilified, but the person
vilifying.

Perhaps I am not the average reader, but it is a fact that I frequently
read an entire newspaper page of which one of these cartoons is the
most conspicuous object, without once glancing at the picture’s title
or observing what it is all about. I have the same unconscious
reluctance to see it that I have to see anything else offensive.

I once sat reading a Republican newspaper. The whole upper half of the
page consisted of a cartoon by a well-known artist. It represented
Mr. Bryan, the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, standing on
his head in a crowd (which I think he would do if it would make him
President, and I don’t know that it would not) but I did not then
observe it. The artist himself sat near by, narrowly watching me, which
I did observe. A little while after I had laid down the paper he said
carelessly: “O, by the way, what do you think of my cartoon of Bryan
with his heels in the air?” And—Heaven help me!—I replied that I had
been a week out of town and had not seen the newspapers!

A peculiarity of American caricature is that few of its “masters”
know how to draw. They are like our great “humorists,” who are nearly
all men of little education and meagre reading. As soon as they have
prospered, got a little polish and some knowledge of books, they cease
to be “humorists.”

One of the most popular of the “cartoonists” knows so little of anatomy
that in most of his work the human arm is a fourth too short, and
seems to be rapidly dwindling to a pimple; and so little of perspective
that in a certain cartoon one of his figures was leaning indolently
against a column about ten feet from where he stood.

A fashion has recently come in among the comic artists of getting great
fun out of the lower forms of life. They have discovered and developed
a mine of humor in the beasts and the birds, the reptiles, fishes
and insects. Some of the things they make them say and do are really
amusing. But here is where they all go wrong and spoil their work: they
put upon these creatures some article of human attire—boots, a coat or
a hat. They make them carry umbrellas and walking-sticks. They put a
lightning rod on a bird’s nest, a latch on a squirrel-hole in a tree,
and supply a beehive with a stovepipe. Why? They don’t know why; they
have a vague feeling that incongruity is witty, or that to outfit an
animal with human appurtenances brings it, somehow, closer to one’s
bosom and business. The effect is otherwise.

When you have drawn your cow with a skirt she has not become a woman,
and is no longer a cow. She is nothing that a sane taste can feel an
interest in. An animal, or any living thing, in its natural state—is
always interesting. Some animals we know to have the sense of humor and
all probably have language; so in making them do and say funny things,
even if their speech has to be translated into ours, there is nothing
unnatural, incongruous or offensive. But a cat in a shirtwaist, a
rabbit with a gun—ah, me!

Obviously it is futile to say anything to those “dragons of the prime”
who draw the combination map-and-picture—the map whereon cities are
represented by clusters of buildings, each cluster extending half way
to the next. It would be useless to protest that these horrible things
are neither useful as maps nor pleasing as pictures. They are—well,
to put it quite plainly, they sicken. Sometimes the savages who draw
them sketch-in a regiment or so of soldiers—this in “war-maps” of
course—whose height is about five miles each, except that of the
commander, which is ten. And if there is a bit of sea the villain
who draws it will show us a ship two hundred miles long, commonly
sailing up hill or down. It is useless to remonstrate against this
kind of thing. The men guilty of it are little further advanced
intellectually than the worthy cave-dweller who has left us his
masterpieces scratched on rocks and the shoulder blades of victims of
his appetite—the illustrious inventor of the six-legged mammoth and the
feathered pig.


                                  II

When in the course of human events I shall have been duly instated as
head of the art department of an American newspaper, a decent respect
for the principles of my trade will compel me to convene my cartoonists
and utter the hortatory remarks here following:

“Gentlemen, you will be pleased to understand some of the limitations
of your art, for therein lies the secret of efficiency. To know and
respect one’s limitations, not seeking to transcend them, but ever
to occupy the entire area of activity which they bound—that is to
accomplish all that it is given to man to do. Your limitations are of
two kinds: those inconsiderable ones imposed by nature, and the less
negligible ones for which you will have to thank the tyrant that has
the honor to address you.

“Your first and highest duty, of course, is to afflict the Eminent
Unworthy. To the service of that high purpose I invite you with
effusion, but shall limit you to a single method—ridicule. You may
not do more than make them absurd. Happily that is the sharpest
affliction that Heaven has given them the sensibility to feel. When one
is conscious of being ridiculous one experiences an incomparable and
immedicable woe. Ridicule is the capital punishment of the unwritten
law.

“I shall not raise the question of your natural ability to make an
offender hateful, but only say that it is not permitted to you to do
so in this paper. The reason should be obvious: you can not make him
hateful without making a hateful picture, and a paper with hateful
pictures is a hateful paper. Some of you, I am desolated to point out,
have at times sinned so grievously as to make the victim—or attempt
to make him—not only hateful but offensive, not only offensive but
loathsome. Result: hateful, offensive, loathsome cartoons, imparting
their unpleasant character to the paper containing them; for the
contents of a paper are the paper.

“And, after all, this folly fails of its purpose—does not make its
subject offensive. An eminently unworthy person—a political ‘boss,’
a ‘king of finance,’ or a ‘gray wolf of the Senate’—is a man of
normal appearance; his face, his figure, his postures, are those of
the ordinary human being. In the attempt to make him offensive the
caricaturist’s art of exaggeration is carried to such an extreme as
to remove the victim from the domain of human interest. The loathing
inspired by the impossible creation is not transferred to the person
so candidly misrepresented; the picture is made offensive, but its
subject is untouched. As well try to hate a faulty triangle, a house
upside down, a vacuum, or an abracadabra. Let there be surcease of so
mischievous work; it is not desired that this paper shall be prosperous
in spite of its artists, but partly because of them.

“True, to make a man ridiculous you must make a ridiculous picture,
but a ridiculous picture is not displeasing. If well done, with only
the needful, that is to say artistic, exaggeration, it is pleasing. We
like to laugh, but we do not like—pardon me—to retch. The only person
pleased by an offensive cartoon is its author; the only person pained
by a ridiculous one is its victim.”

  1900.



                             THE S. P. W.


Will not some Christian gentleman of leisure have the benevolence to
organize The Society for the Protection of Writers? Its work will be
mainly educational; not much permanent good can be done, I fear, by
assassination, though as an auxiliary means, that may be worthy of
consideration. The public must be led to understand, each individual in
his own way, that some part of a writer’s time belongs to himself and
has a certain value to him. If the experience of other writers equally
ill known is the same as mine the sum of our wrongs is something
solemn. Everybody, it would seem, feels at liberty to request a writer
to do whatever the wild and wanton requester may wish to have done—to
criticise (commend) a manuscript; send his photograph, or a copy of his
latest book; write poetry in an album forwarded for the purpose and
already well filled with unearthly sentiments by demons of the pit;
set down a few rules for writing well, and so forth. It is God’s truth
that compliance with one-half of the “requests” made of me would leave
me no time for my meals, and no meals for my time.

Of course I speak of strangers—persons without the shadow of a claim
to my time and attention, and with very little to those of their
heavenly Father. Indeed, they belong, as a rule, to a class that is
more profited by escaping divine attention than by courting it: nothing
should so fill them with consternation as a glance from the All-seeing
Eye—though some of the finer and freer spirits of their bright band
would think nothing of inviting the Recording Angel to forsake his
accounts and scratch an appropriate sentiment on “the enclosed
headstone.”

When Mr. Rudyard Kipling once visited Montreal he gave orders at his
hotel that he was not to be disturbed—whereby many worthy persons who
called to “pay their respects” were sadly disappointed. One “prominent
merchant,” a “great admirer,” took the trouble to introduce himself,
and had the infelicitous fate to be informed by Mr. Kipling that he
did not wish any new acquaintances—and sorrow perched upon that
man’s prominent soul. To a club of “literary” folk and “artists” who
“tendered him a reception” he did not deign a reply; and those whose
hope construed his silence as assent were made acquainted with the
taste of their own teeth. In short, Mr. Kipling seems to have acted in
Montreal very much like a modest gentleman desiring to be let alone and
having a gentleman’s fine scorn of vulgarity and intrusion.

When, I wonder, will Americans—Canadian Americans and United States
Americans—learn that their admiration of a man’s work in letters or
art gives them no right to occupy his time and lengthen the always
intolerably long muster-roll of his acquaintance? One would think that
so wholesome a lesson in manners as Dickens gave us during his first
visit, and later in the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, would
suffice, and that for lack of students he would have no successor in
the Chair of Deportment. But sycophancy, like hope, springs eternal in
the human breast, and, crushed to earth, impudence like truth, will
rise again, inviting a fresh humiliation. Well, as the homely proverb
hath it, there is no great loss without some small gain—albeit the
same usually accrues to the author of the loss. Montreal’s Pen and
Pencil Club having passed through the fire and been purified of its own
respect, is now, by that privation and the affining stress of a common
sorrow, fitted to affiliate with the Bohemian Club of San Francisco,
which also knows the lift of the Kipling superior lip, and how he
kipples.

Mr. Kipling’s explanation that he did not desire any new acquaintances
goes pretty nearly to the root of the matter. What man of sense
does?—unless he is so ghastly unfortunate as to need them in his
business. A man of brains has commonly a better use for his head than
to make it serve as a rogues’ gallery for an interminable succession
of mental portraits, each of which he must be prepared to outfit with
its appropriate name on demand. One can not, of course, and none but
a fool would wish to, go through life without now and again making
an acquaintance, even a friendship, as circumstances, civility and
character may determine. Even chance may without absolutely uniform
disaster play a part in such matters, though, as a rule, persons in
whose lives accidental meetings entail lasting social relations are
not particularly agreeable to meet. Your man of sense cares to know
those whom he daily meets under such circumstances as would make it
awkward if he did not know them; and he is accessible to all good
souls whose wish to know him is supplemented by the frankness to ask
an introduction and the civility to obtain his assent. It is thus that
he will himself approach those whom he wishes to know, and in some
cases those whom he merely suspects of the wish to know him. As to
that invention of the devil, the purposeless and meaningless “chance
introduction,” it is the hatefulest thing in all the wild welter of
social irritants. As a claim to acquaintance it has about the same
validity as had, in the case of Kipling, the fact that Montreal’s
“prominent merchant” was a “great admirer.”

If a man, like a red worm, could be multiplied by section he might
perhaps undertake to know all whom the irritating freedom of American
manners permits to be introduced to him, and, if he is a distinguished
writer, all who “greatly admire” him. At least if they were properly
brigaded he might undertake to commit to his multiplied memory the
names or numerals of the several brigades. Even then it should be
understood that failure through preoccupation with his own affairs
should not be counted against him as proof of pride and an evil
disposition. Some allowance should be made, too, for the probability
that a man of letters may be unfitted for prodigious feats of
recollection by the necessity of preserving some part of his time for
use in—well, for example, in letters. As to “receptions,” “banquets,”
and so forth, “tendered” him, and “calls” “paid” him by strangers
not of his profession, unless he is a literary impostor he will not
accept the hospitality, nor, unless he is a social coward, submit to
the intrusion. He knows that beneath these dreary and dispiriting
“attentions” are motives transcending in ugliness a tangle of snakes
under a warm rock.

There are other reasons why men of letters are not usually hot to make
acquaintances. A good writer is a man of thought, for good writing,
whatever else it may be, is, first of all, clear thinking. However
much or little of his actual opinions he may choose to put into his
work, he necessarily, as a man of thought, has convictions not commonly
entertained by “persons whom one meets”—when one must. He is likely to
be a dissenter from the established order of things—to hold in scant
esteem the institutions, faiths, laws, customs, habits, morals and
manners that are the natural outgrowth and expression of our barbarous
race; the enactments of God’s governing majority, the rogues and fools.
To utter his views in conversation with Philistines and Prudes is to
smite them sick with dismay and fill them topful of resentment and
antagonism; to incite a contention in which the appurtenant stalled ox
itself is imperiled in the bones of it. Yet in making the acquaintance
of even a fairly educated person not a vulgarian and having no outward
and visible signs of an inner disgrace the chances are ten to one that
you are meeting a Philistine and prude by whom natural conduct and
rational convictions are accounted immoral, and with whom conversation
outside the worn ways of commonplace and platitude is impossible. If
it is a woman she will probably insult you, all unconsciously, in a
thousand and fifty ways by savage scruples inherited from a long line
of pithecan ancestresses eared to hear in the rustle of every leaf the
tonguefall of the arboreal Mrs. Grundy. If it is a man there should be
no needless delay in insulting _him_.

Another imminent peril to him who travels the hard road of letters lies
in the mad desire and iron resolution of his new acquaintances to talk
about his work, with, of course, imperfect knowledge, understanding
and discretion. This if he will not permit he is accounted proud; if
he will, vain. Poor Hawthorne’s experience with the worthy person
who thought it the proper thing to make a graceful reference to his
book, “The Red Letter A,” is typical and the record of that dreadful
encounter comes home to every author’s bosom and business with a
peculiar personal interest.



                     PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY AUTHORS


If by good or much writing a modest old man have the misfortune to
incur the curiosity of the public regarding his personal appearance,
how shall he gratify it—and gratified it will somehow be—with the least
distress to himself? Every public writer is familiar with the demand,
from editor or publisher, “Please send photograph.” Of course he may
easily decline, but also, alas! editor or publisher may easily decline
the work for embellishment or advertisement of which the photograph
was sought. So what can the poor man do? And what photograph shall he
send—that of yesteryear, or that of a decade or two ago? Concerning
this singularly solemn matter I venture to quote from a letter of one
who conducts an editorium:

“One sees the printed counterfeit of a dashing young chap whom all know
as the distinguished author of ‘The Bean Pot,’ which, it is true,
appeared twenty years ago. But the portrait is the familiar one always
used by publishers to herald later books by the same author. One day
the author himself calls. You have always thought of him as having a
smooth, high brow topped with a fine cluster of coal-black curls, and
the devil in his eyes. When this wrinkled, bald, and squeaky old man
tells you that he is the author of ‘The Bean Pot’ you suffer a shock.
All your self-restraint is invoked to inhibit contumelious word and
inhospitable act.”

True, O king, but there is more to the matter. Every writer that
is fore and fit cherishes a natural expectation of being known to
posterity. If that hope is fulfilled he will be known to posterity by
his last portrait. Who knows Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes or
Whitman as other than a venerable ruin? Who has in mind a middle-aged
Hugo, or a young Goethe? It is with an effort that we grasp the fact
that all these excellent gentlemen of letters were not born old. They
were merely indiscreet; they sat for their portraits when they could no
longer stand. By the happy mischance of early death, Byron, Shelley,
Keats and Poe escaped the caricaturing of the years, and can snap
their finger-bones at Age, the merciless cartoonist.

The portrait of twenty years ago no more faultily represents the old
man as he is than that of yesterday represents him as he was. Either is
false to some period of his life, and he may reasonably enough prefer
that posterity shall know how he looked in his prime, rather than that
his contemporaries shall know how he looked in his decay. It may be
that it was in his prime that he did the characteristic work that begot
the desire to know him.

With what portrait, then, shall one well stricken in years meet the
contemporary demand? Perhaps it is best, and not unfair, to supply
it with one made in one’s prime, conscientiously and conspicuously
inscribed with its date—and that is what I have usually done myself.
But I grieve to observe that the date is, as a rule, ingeniously
effaced in the reproduction. But what does posterity find that is
peculiarly pleasing in the portrait of a patient in the last stage of
his fatal disorder?



                             WIT AND HUMOR


If without the faculty of observation one could acquire a thorough
knowledge of literature, the _art_ of literature, one would be
astonished to learn “by report divine” how few professional writers can
distinguish between one kind of writing and another. The difference
between description and narration, that between a thought and a
feeling, between poetry and verse, and so forth—all this is commonly
imperfectly understood, even by most of those who work fairly well by
intuition.

The ignorance of this sort that is most general is that of the
distinction between wit and humor, albeit a thousand times expounded
by impartial observers having neither. Now, it will be found that, as
a rule, a shoemaker knows calfskin from sole-leather and a black-smith
can tell you wherein forging a clevis differs from shoeing a horse. He
will tell you that it is his business to know such things, so he knows
them. Equally and manifestly it is a writer’s business to know the
difference between one kind of writing and another kind, but to writers
generally that advantage seems to be denied: they deny it to themselves.

I was once asked by a rather famous author why we laugh at wit. I
replied: “We don’t—at least those of us who understand it do not.” Wit
may make us smile, or make us wince, but laughter—that is the cheaper
price that we pay for an inferior entertainment, namely, humor. There
are persons who will laugh at anything at which they think they are
expected to laugh. Having been taught that anything funny is witty,
these benighted persons naturally think that anything witty is funny.

Who but a clown would laugh at the maxims of Rochefoucauld, which
are as witty as anything written? Take, for example, this hackneyed
epigram: “There is something in the misfortunes of our friends which
we find not entirely displeasing”—I translate from memory. It is an
indictment of the whole human race; not altogether true and therefore
not altogether dull, with just enough of audacity to startle and just
enough of paradox to charm, profoundly wise, as bleak as steel— a
piece of ideal wit, as admirable as a well cut grave or the headsman’s
precision of stroke, and about as funny.

Take Rabelais’ saying that an empty stomach has no ears. How pitilessly
it displays the primitive beast alurk in us all and moved to activity
by our elemental disorders, such as the daily stress of hunger! Who
could laugh at the horrible disclosure, yet who forbear to smile
approval of the deftness with which the animal is unjungled?

In a matter of this kind it is easier to illustrate than to define.
Humor (which is not inconsistent with pathos, so nearly allied are
laughter and tears) is Charles Dickens; wit is Alexander Pope. Humor
is Dogberry; wit is Mercutio. Humor is “Artemus Ward,” “John Phoenix,”
“Josh Billings,” “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Bill” Nye,
“Mark Twain”—their name is legion; for wit we must brave the perils
of the deep: it is “made in France” and hardly bears transportation.
Nearly all Americans are humorous; if any are born witty, Heaven help
them to emigrate! You shall not meet an American and talk with him two
minutes but he will say something humorous; in ten days he will say
nothing witty; and if he did, your own, O most witty of all possible
readers, would be the only ear that would give it recognition. Humor
is tolerant, tender; its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon—and
turns the weapon in the wound. Humor is a sweet wine, wit a dry; we
know which is preferred by the connoisseur. They may be mixed, forming
an acceptable blend. Even Dickens could on rare occasions blend them,
as when he says of some solemn ass that his ears have reached a rumor.

My conviction is that while wit is a universal tongue (which few,
however, can speak) humor is everywhere a _patois_ not “understanded
of the people” over the province border. The best part of it—its
“essential spirit and uncarnate self,” is indigenous, and will not
flourish in a foreign soil. The humor of one race is in some degree
unintelligible to another race, and even in transit between two
branches of the same race loses something of its flavor. To the
American mind, for example, nothing can be more dreary and dejecting
than an English comic paper; yet there is no reason to doubt that
_Punch_ and _Judy_ and the rest of them have done much to dispel the
gloom of the Englishman’s brumous environment and make him realize his
relationship to Man.

It may be urged that the great English humorists are as much read in
this country as in their own; that Dickens, for example, has long
“ruled as his demesne” the country which had the unhappiness to kindle
the fires of contempt in him and Rudyard Kipling; that “the excellent
Mr. Twain” has a large following beyond the Atlantic. This is true
enough, but I am convinced that while the American enjoys his Dickens
with sincerity, the gladness of his soul is a tempered emotion compared
with that which riots in the immortal part of John Bull when that
singular instrument feels the touch of the same master. That a jest of
Mark Twain ever got itself all inside the four corners of an English
understanding is a proposition not lightly to be accepted without
hearing counsel.

  1903.



                        WORD CHANGES AND SLANG


That respectable words lose caste, becoming the yellow dogs and
very lepers of language, is a familiar fact hospitable to abundant
illustration. One of these words has just fallen from my pen; fifty
or a hundred years from now it will be impossible, probably, for
any writer having a decent regard to the value of words to use the
word “respectable” of anything truly meriting respect. For the past
half-century it has been taking on a new and opprobrious character.
Already the type of the “respectable” man, for example, is the
prosperous, wool-witted Philistine, who complacently interlocks his fat
fingers under the overhang of his stomach, and surveying the world from
the eminence of his own esteem, tries vainly to imagine what it would
be without him.

The word “respectable” is indubitably doomed: etymology can not save
it, any more than it could save the word “miscreant,” which means by
derivation, as at one time it meant actually, infidel, unbeliever.
In its present abasement we may hear a faint, far whisper of the old,
old days of religious intolerance. It stands in modern speech a verbal
monument to the _odium theologicum_ reposing beneath in the sure and
certain hope of a blessed resurrection.

A half-century ago the word “awful” was plumped into the mire of
slang, where it has weltered ever since, without actual immersion, but
apparently with no hope of extrication. The writer who would use it
to-day in a serious sense has need to be well assured of his hold upon
the reader’s mood. It may perchance whisk that person away from the
sublime to the ridiculous, with the neat-handed nimbleness of Satan
snatching a soul from the straight and narrow way, to send it spinning
aslant into the red-and-black billows of everlasting damnation!

There are transformations of a contrary sort—promotions and elevations
of words, as from slang to poetry. Between the extremes of speech which
are the extremes of thought, for speech is thought—between the upper
and the lower deep, the heaven and the earth, is a Jacob’s-ladder which
these winged messengers of mind ascend and descend.

Grave advocacy of slang is not lacking: Professor Manley, of Harvard,
is afield in defence of it. Some slang, he justly says, is “strong and
poetical.” It is “strong” because graphic and vivid, “poetical” because
metaphorical; for the life and soul of poetry is metaphor.

Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have
been better told this way:

  The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the
  glad hand.

Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature
might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity
of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that
is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than
avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are
slang.

Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase “bats in his
belfry,” and would indubitably substitute it for “possessed of a
devil,” the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don’t think the good
man meant to be irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised
Edition.

Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a
publisher of “rare and curious books,” put out a slang dictionary.
Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus
Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an
authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my
little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick
one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and
suffer) as “slang.” Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the
_Century Dictionary_ thus: “The cant words or jargon used by thieves,
peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally.”

To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is
no longer the _argot_ of criminals and semi-criminals, “whom one
does not meet,” and whose distance—when they keep it—lends a certain
enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less
worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present
generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority
already quoted: “Colloquial words and phrases which have originated
in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or,
belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given
them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings,
and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant.”

It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can
choose to utter itself in that kind of speech, yet speech of that
kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use.
Among large classes of our countrymen, it is held in so high esteem
that whole books of it are put upon the market with profit to author
and publisher. One of the most successful of these, reprinted from
many of our leading newspapers, is called, I think, _Fables in
Slang_—containing, by the way, nothing that resembles a fable. This
unspeakable stuff made its author rich, and naturally he “syndicated”
a second series of the same. Another was entitled _Love Sonnets of a
Hoodlum_, and contained not a line of clean English. And it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that in this country the writing of humorous and
satirical verse is a lost art; slang has taken the place of wit; the
jest that smacks not of the slum finds no prosperity in any ear.

Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its
essential vice is its hideous lack of originality; for until a word
or phrase is common property it is not slang. Wherein, then, is the
sense or humor of repeating it? The dullest dunce in the world may have
an alert and obedient memory for current locutions. For skill in the
use of slang no other mental equipment is required. However apt and
picturesque a particular expression may be, the wit of it is his only
who invented and first used it: in all others its use is forbidden
by the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” A self-respecting writer
would no more parrot a felicitous saying of unknown origin and popular
currency than he would plagiarize a lively sentiment from Catullus or
an epigram from Pope.



                     THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS


A famous author says that there is some kind of immoral emanation from
the horse, and that it affects the character of every one who has
much to do with the animal. I suppose it is something like that which
suspires from the earth that is thrown out in digging a canal. Perhaps
it is possible to construct a short and shallow waterway without
stirring up enough of this badness to corrupt “all those in authority”
along the line of it, but if the enterprise is of magnitude, like the
Suez or the Panama project, results most disastrous to the morals of
all engaged in the work, excepting those who do it, will certainly
ensue, as we may soon have the happiness to observe.

A similar phenomenon is seen in the case of Shakspeare, whose
resemblance to a horse and a canal has not, I flatter myself, been
heretofore pointed out. The subtle suspiration from the work of the
great dramatist, however, attacks, not the morals, but the intellect.
It does not prostrate the sense of right and wrong, except in so far as
this is dependent on mental health; it simply lays waste the judgment
by dispersing the faculties, as the shadow of a hawk squanders a flock
of feeding pigeons. Some time we shall perhaps have an English-speaking
critic who will be immune to Shakspearitis, but as yet Heaven has not
seen fit to “raise him up.” And when we have him his inaccessibility to
the infection will do him no good, for we shall indubitably put him to
death.

The temptation to these reflections is supplied by looking into Mr.
Arlo Bates’s book, _Talks on Writing English_, where I find this
passage quoted from Jeffrey:

  “Everything in him (Shakspeare) is in unmeasured abundance and
  unequaled perfection—but everything so balanced and kept in
  subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of
  another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images and
  descriptions are given with such brevity and introduced with
  such skill as merely to adorn without loading the sense they
  accompany.... All his excellences, like those of Nature herself,
  are thrown out together; and, instead of interfering with, support
  and recommend each other.”

This is so fine as to be mostly false. It is true that Shakspeare
throws out his excellences in unmeasured abundance and all together;
and nothing else in this passage is true. His poetical conceptions,
images and descriptions are not “given” at all; they are “turned
loose.” They came from his brain like a swarm of bees. They race out,
as shouting children from a country school. They distract, stun,
confuse. So disorderly an imagination has never itself been imagined.
Shakspeare had no sense of proportion, no care for the strength of
restraint, no art of saying just enough, no art of any kind. He flung
about him his enormous and incalculable wealth of jewels with the
prodigal profusion of a drunken youth mad with the lust of spending.
Only the magnificence and value of the jewels could blind us to the
barbarian method of distribution. They dazzle the mind and confound
all the criteria of the judgment. Small wonder that the incomparable
Voltaire, French, artistic in every fiber and trained in the severe
dignities of Grecian art, called this lawless and irresponsible
spendthrift a drunken savage.

Of no cultivated Frenchman is the judgment on Shakspeare much milder;
the man’s “art,” his “precision,” his “perfection”— these are
creations of our Teutonic imaginations, heritages of the time when in
the rush-strewn baronial hall our ancestors surfeited themselves on
oxen roasted whole and drank to insensibility out of wooden flagons
holding a gallon each.

In literature, as in all else—in work, in love, in trade, in every
kind of action or acquisition the Germanic nations are gluttons and
drunkards. We want everything, as we want our food and drink, in savage
profusion. And, by the same token, we rule the world.

  1903.



                          ENGLAND’S LAUREATE


Doubtless there are competent critics of poetry in this country, but
it is Mr. Alfred Austin’s luck not to have drawn their attention. Mr.
Austin is not a great poet, but he is a poet. The head and front of his
offending seems to be that he is a lesser poet than his predecessor—his
immediate predecessor—for his austerest critic will hardly affirm his
inferiority to the illustrious Nahum Tate. Nor is Mr. Austin the equal
by much of Mr. Swinburne, who as Poet Laureate was impossible—or at
least highly improbable. If he had been offered the honor Mr. Swinburne
would very likely have knocked off the Prime Minister’s hat and
jumped upon it. He is of a singularly facetious turn of mind, is Mr.
Swinburne, and has to be approached with an orange in each hand.

Below Swinburne the differences in mental stature among British poets
are inconsiderable; none is much taller than another, though Henley
only could have written the great lines beginning,

    Out of the dark that covers me,
      Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
    I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul—

and he is not likely to do anything like that again; on that proposition

    You your existence might put to the hazard and turn of a wager.

I wonder how many of the merry gentlemen who find a pleasure in making
mouths at Mr. Austin for what he does and doesn’t do have ever read, or
reading, have understood, his sonnet on


                           LOVE’S BLINDNESS.

    Now do I know that Love is blind, for I
      Can see no beauty on this beauteous earth,
      No life, no light, no hopefulness, no mirth,
    Pleasure nor purpose, when thou art not nigh.
    Thy absence exiles sunshine from the sky,
      Seres Spring’s maturity, checks Summer’s birth,
    Leaves linnet’s pipe as sad as plover’s cry,
      And makes me in abundance find but dearth.
    But when thy feet flutter the dark, and thou
      With orient eyes dawnest on my distress,
    Suddenly sings a bird on every bough,
      The heavens expand, the earth grows less and less,
    The ground is buoyant as the ether now,
      And all looks lovely in thy loveliness.

The influence of Shakspeare is altogether too apparent in this, and it
has as many faults as merits; but it is admirable work, nevertheless.
To a poet only come such conceptions as “orient eyes” and feet that
“flutter the dark.”

Here is another sonnet in which the thought, quite as natural, is less
obvious. In some of his best work Mr. Austin runs rather to love (a
great fault, madam) and this is called


                            LOVE’S WISDOM.

    Now on the summit of Love’s topmost peak
      Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
      And better death than we from high to low
    Should dwindle, and decline from strong to weak.
    We have found all, there is no more to seek;
      All we have proved, no more is there to know;
    And Time can only tutor us to eke
      Out rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow.
    We cannot keep at such a height as this;
      For even straining souls like ours inhale
    But once in life so rarefied a bliss.
      What if we lingered till love’s breath should fail!
    Heaven of my earth! one more celestial kiss,
      Then down by separate pathways to the vale.

Will the merry Pikes of the Lower Mississippi littoral and the
gamboling whale-backers of the Duluth hinterland be pleased to say what
is laughable in all this?

It is not to be denied that Mr. Austin has written a good deal of
“mighty poor stuff,” but I humbly submit that a writer is not to be
judged by his poorest work, but by his best,—as an athlete is rated,
not by the least weight that he has lifted, but by the greatest—not by
his nearest cast of the discus, but by his farthest. Surely a poet,
as well as a race-horse, is entitled to the benefit of his “record
performance.”

  1903.



                      HALL CAINE ON HALL CAINING


Mr. Hall Caine once took the trouble to explain that he put in three
years of hard work on his novel, _The Christian_, rewriting it many
times and submitting the several and various parts of the work to
experts. One kind of expert he failed to consult—a person having
some knowledge of the English language. Amongst other insupportable
characteristics the very first sentence in the book contains twelve
prepositions and several clashing relatives and concludes with a
sequence of four dactyls! The first sentence is as far as I have gone
into the book, of which I know only that the manuscript was sold for a
considerable fortune and that by many thousands of my fellow-creatures
it is regarded as a distinctly immortaler work than the immortalest
work of the week immediately preceding the date of its publication. Of
Mr. Caine himself I know a little more: for example, that if he were
cast away on an island never before seen by a white man, in a few
months every native would have a brand-new novel and Mr. Caine all the
cowry-shells in the island.

Following a well-established precedent, he was good enough also
to impart the secret of his success as a writer of “best-selling”
books—novels, of course. The secret is genius. That seems simple enough
and easy enough, but I submit that it was known before. Every author
of a popular novel has been entirely conscious of his genius and the
reviewers have known it as well as he. Nevertheless, it is always
pleasing to find a workman who not only does not quarrel with his
tools, but exhibits them with pride and affection, for we know then
that he is a good workman, or—which means much the same thing—gets a
good price for his product. Mr. Caine gets as good a price as any and
is therefore as fit as any to expound his methods to the curious.

For it should be said that Mr. Caine does not hold that genius—even
such genius as his—will produce so great work as his without some
assistance from industry; one must take the trouble to write or dictate
the great thoughts that genius inspires. One can not do this without
some degree of application to the homely task. Indeed, Mr. Caine
explains that he writes his novels twice before he permits us to read
them once. One is glad to know that; it shows that, like the country
editor, whose burning office attracted a large and intelligent class of
spectators, he “strives to please.” He took fourteen months to write
_The Eternal City_. That was most commendable, for with him time is
money, but his patient diligence was equaled by that of a man that I
know, who took fourteen months to read it.

Not only does Mr. Caine work slowly and surely; he advises lesser
mortals to do so. “Write only when in the humor,” he says. This is
good advice to any man, of whatever degree of genius, who is ambitious
to turn out a “best seller,” but better advice would be: Don’t write
at all. There are less fame in that, less profit and less taking of
one’s self seriously; but there must be a feeling of greater security
regarding the next world; for the author of a “best seller” is so
conspicuous a figure in this world that he may be very sure that God
sees him.

“Some people,” says Mr. Caine, meaning some persons, doubtless—he
writes in Bestsellerese—“say that they can work best when they hurry
most, but it is not the case with me, and I feel that inspiration does
not come to the hurried mind so readily as it does when one is able to
ponder deeply and shape one’s thoughts into some truly perfected form.”

That is an impressive picture. One can almost see Mr. Caine, sitting
at his table, head in hand, pondering profoundly on his inspiration
and shaping his thoughts into that truly perfected form demanded by
his exacting market. This really great man, with chestnuts in his
lap, arointing the designing witch of spontaneity who would abstract
them, is a spectacle that will linger long in his own memory. It is
one of the most pleasing revelations of self that can be found in the
literature of how to do it. Probably it will have the distinction of
surviving all Mr. Caine’s other work by as much as six months. If done
into bronze by a competent sculptor it may outlast even Mr. Caine
himself, delighting and instructing an entire generation of Indiana
novelists, the best in the world. Of course it is “on the cards” that
he who has given us this solemn picture of himself in the veritable
act of literary parturition may “whack up” something even better. He
is not so very old, and in the years remaining to him (may they be
many and prosperous) he may produce something so incomparably popular
that even the greatest of his previous work will be, in the luminous
French of John Phoenix, “_frappé parfaitment froid!_” Indeed, Mr.
Caine himself discerns that possibility very clearly. He says: “I do
not believe I have yet produced my best work”—best selling work—“by
any means.” It is to be hoped that he has not: yet it is also to be
regretted that he has had the cruelty to add a new terror to death
by saying so. To one engaged in dying, the thought of what he may be
missing by leaving this vale of tears before Mr. Caine has written his
_Eternalest City_ must generate the wrench and stress of an added pang.
It would have been kinder to make that forecast to his publisher only.
Even _in articulo mortis_ (if he have the bad luck to die first) that
gentleman’s tantalizing vision of an unattainable earthly joy will come
with enough of healing in its wings partly to salve the smart: coupled
with the thought of what he will miss will come the consciousness of
what he will not have to pay for it.

  1905.



                         VISIONS OF THE NIGHT


I hold the belief that the Gift of Dreams is a valuable literary
endowment—that if by some art not now understood the elusive fancies
that it supplies could be caught and fixed and made to serve we should
have a literature “exceeding fair.” In captivity and domestication
the gift could doubtless be wonderfully improved, as animals bred to
service acquire new capacities and powers. By taming our dreams we
shall double our working hours and our most fruitful labor will be done
in sleep. Even as matters are, Dreamland is a tributary province, as
witness “Kubla Khan.”

What is a dream? A loose and lawless collocation of memories—a
disorderly succession of matters once present in the waking
consciousness. It is a resurrection of the dead, pell-mell—ancient and
modern, the just and the unjust—springing from their cracked tombs,
each “in his habit as he lived,” pressing forward confusedly to have
an audience of the Master of the Revel, and snatching one another’s
garments as they run. Master? No; he has abdicated his authority and
they have their will of him; his own is dead and does not rise with
the rest. His judgment, too, is gone, and with it the capacity to
be surprised. Pained he may be and pleased, terrified and charmed,
but wonder he can not feel. The monstrous, the preposterous, the
unnatural—these all are simple, right and reasonable. The ludicrous
does not amuse, nor the impossible amaze. The dreamer is your only true
poet; he is “of imagination all compact.”

Imagination is merely memory. Try to imagine something that you have
never observed, experienced, heard of or read about. Try to conceive an
animal, for example, without body, head, limbs or tail—a house without
walls or roof. But, when awake, having assistance of will and judgment,
we can somewhat control and direct; we can pick and choose from
memory’s store, taking that which serves, excluding, though sometimes
with difficulty, what is not to the purpose; asleep, our fancies
“inherit us.” They come so grouped, so blended and compounded the one
with another, so wrought of one another’s elements, that the whole
seems new; but the old familiar units of conception are there, and none
beside. Waking or sleeping, we get from imagination nothing new but new
adjustments: “the stuff that dreams are made on” has been gathered by
the physical senses and stored in memory, as squirrels hoard nuts. But
one, at least, of the senses contributes nothing to the fabric of the
dream: no one ever dreamed an odor. Sight, hearing, feeling, possibly
taste, are all workers, making provision for our nightly entertainment;
but Sleep is without a nose. It surprises that those keen observers,
the ancient poets, did not so describe the drowsy god, and that their
obedient servants, the ancient sculptors, did not so represent him.
Perhaps these latter worthies, working for posterity, reasoned that
time and mischance would inevitably revise their work in this regard,
conforming it to the facts of nature.

Who can so relate a dream that it shall seem one? No poet has so light
a touch. As well try to write the music of an Æolian harp. There is a
familiar species of the genus Bore (_Penetrator intolerabilis_) who
having read a story—perhaps by some master of style—is at the pains
elaborately to expound its plot for your edification and delight; then
thinks, good soul, that now you need not read it. “Under substantially
similar circumstances and conditions” (as the interstate commerce law
hath it) I should not be guilty of the like offence; but I purpose
herein to set forth the plots of certain dreams of my own, the
“circumstances and conditions” being, as I conceive, dissimilar in
this, that the dreams themselves are not accessible to the reader. In
endeavoring to make record of their poorer part I do not indulge the
hope of a higher success. I have no salt to put upon the tail of a
dream’s elusive spirit.

I was walking at dusk through a great forest of unfamiliar trees.
Whence and whither I did not know. I had a sense of the vast extent
of the wood, a consciousness that I was the only living thing in it.
I was obsessed by some awful spell in expiation of a forgotten crime
committed, as I vaguely surmised, against the sunrise. Mechanically
and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a
narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came
at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path,
and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a
considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in
the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the
center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with
blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All round
the tank, between it and the enclosing forest—a space of perhaps ten
feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble—were dead bodies
of men—a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number
had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly
they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only
recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The
bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank,
radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the
heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its
throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this
unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offence, and did
not affect me; but there was something that filled me with apprehension
and terror—a monstrous pulsation, beating with a slow, inevitable
recurrence. I do not know which of the senses it addressed, or if
it made its way to the consciousness through some avenue unknown to
science and experience. The pitiless regularity of this vast rhythm was
maddening. I was conscious that it pervaded the entire forest, and was
a manifestation of some gigantic and implacable malevolence.

Of this dream I have no further recollection. Probably, overcome by a
terror which doubtless had its origin in the discomfort of an impeded
circulation, I cried out and was awakened by the sound of my own voice.

The dream whose skeleton I shall now present occurred in my early
youth. I could not have been more than sixteen. I am considerably more
now, yet I recall the incidents as vividly as when the vision was
“of an hour’s age” and I lay cowering beneath the bed-covering and
trembling with terror from the memory.

I was alone on a boundless level in the night—in my bad dreams I am
always alone and it is usually night. No trees were anywhere in sight,
no habitations of men, no streams nor hills. The earth seemed to be
covered with a short, coarse vegetation that was black and stubbly, as
if the plain had been swept by fire. My way was broken here and there
as I went forward with I know not what purpose by small pools of water
occupying shallow depressions, as if the fire had been succeeded by
rain. These pools were on every side, and kept vanishing and appearing
again, as heavy dark clouds drove athwart those parts of the sky which
they reflected, and passing on disclosed again the steely glitter of
the stars, in whose cold light the waters shone with a black luster.
My course lay toward the west, where low along the horizon burned a
crimson light beneath long strips of cloud, giving that effect of
measureless distance that I have since learned to look for in Doré’s
pictures, where every touch of his hand has laid a portent and a curse.
As I moved I saw outlined against this uncanny background a silhouette
of battlements and towers which, expanding with every mile of my
journey, grew at last to an unthinkable height and breadth, till the
building subtended a wide angle of vision, yet seemed no nearer than
before. Heartless and hopeless I struggled on over the blasted and
forbidding plain, and still the mighty structure grew until I could
no longer compass it with a look, and its towers shut out the stars
directly overhead; then I passed in at an open portal, between columns
of cyclopean masonry whose single stones were larger than my father’s
house.

Within all was vacancy; everything was coated with the dust of
desertion. A dim light—the lawless light of dreams, sufficient unto
itself—enabled me to pass from corridor to corridor, and from room
to room, every door yielding to my hand. In the rooms it was a long
walk from wall to wall; of no corridor did I ever reach an end. My
footfalls gave out that strange, hollow sound that is never heard but
in abandoned dwellings and tenanted tombs. For hours I wandered in this
awful solitude, conscious of a seeking purpose, yet knowing not what
I sought. At last, in what I conceived to be an extreme angle of the
building, I entered a room of the ordinary dimensions, having a single
window. Through this I saw the same crimson light still lying along the
horizon in the measureless reaches of the west, like a visible doom,
and knew it for the lingering fire of eternity. Looking upon the red
menace of its sullen and sinister glare, there came to me the dreadful
truth which years later as an extravagant fancy I endeavored to
express in verse:

    Man is long ages dead in every zone,
    The angels all are gone to graves unknown;
      The devils, too, are cold enough at last,
    And God lies dead before the great white throne!

The light was powerless to dispel the obscurity of the room, and it
was some time before I discovered in the farthest angle the outlines
of a bed, and approached it with a prescience of ill. I felt that
here somehow the bad business of my adventure was to end with some
horrible climax, yet could not resist the spell that urged me to the
fulfilment. Upon the bed, partly clothed, lay the dead body of a
human being. It lay upon its back, the arms straight along the sides.
By bending over it, which I did with loathing but no fear, I could
see that it was dreadfully decomposed. The ribs protruded from the
leathern flesh; through the skin of the sunken belly could be seen the
protuberances of the spine. The face was black and shriveled and the
lips, drawn away from the yellow teeth, cursed it with a ghastly grin.
A fulness under the closed lids seemed to indicate that the eyes had
survived the general wreck; and this was true, for as I bent above
them they slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil, steady
regard. Imagine my horror how you can—no words of mine can assist the
conception; the eyes were my own! That vestigial fragment of a vanished
race—that unspeakable thing which neither time nor eternity had wholly
effaced—that hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient
after death of God and the angels, was I!

There are dreams that repeat themselves. Of this class is one of my
own,[1] which seems sufficiently singular to justify its narration,
though truly I fear the reader will think the realms of sleep are
anything but a happy hunting-ground for my night-wandering soul. This
is not true; the greater number of my incursions into dreamland,
and I suppose those of most others, are attended with the happiest
results. My imagination returns to the body like a bee to the hive,
loaded with spoil which, reason assisting, is transmuted to honey
and stored away in the cells of memory to be a joy forever. But the
dream which I am about to relate has a double character; it is
strangely dreadful in the experience, but the horror it inspires is so
ludicrously disproportionate to the one incident producing it, that in
retrospection the fantasy amuses.

I am passing through an open glade in a thinly wooded country. Through
the belt of scattered trees that bound the irregular space there are
glimpses of cultivated fields and the homes of strange intelligences.
It must be near daybreak, for the moon, nearly at full, is low in the
west, showing blood-red through the mists with which the landscape is
fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy with dew, and
the whole scene is that of a morning in early summer, glimmering in
the unfamiliar light of a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse,
visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head as I am
about to pass, regards me motionless for a moment, then walks toward
me. It is milk-white, mild of mien and amiable in look. I say to
myself: “This horse is a gentle soul,” and pause to caress it. It keeps
its eyes fixed upon my own, approaches and speaks to me in a human
voice, with human words. This does not surprise, but terrifies, and
instantly I return to this our world.

The horse always speaks my own tongue, but I never know what it says. I
suppose I vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing
what it has in mind, leaving it, no doubt, as greatly terrified by my
sudden disappearance as I by its manner of accosting me. I would give
value to know the purport of its communication.

Perhaps some morning I shall understand—and return no more to this our
world.


[1] At my suggestion the late Flora Macdonald Shearer put this drama
into sonnet form in her book of poems, _The Legend of Aulus_.



                             THE REVIEWER



                         EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS


In Edwin Markham’s book, _The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems_,
many of the “other poems” are excellent, some are great. If asked
to name the most poetic—not, if you please, the “loftiest” or most
“purposeful”—I think I should choose “The Wharf of Dreams.” I venture
to quote it:

    Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep;
      Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
      Flashes a signal fire across the night;
    Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
    Their way without a star upon the deep;
      And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
      Come cries of incommunicable news,
    While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap—
    Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
    Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
    Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
      Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
      Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
    And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land.

Really, one does not every year meet with a finer blending of
imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger
on two better lines in recent work than these:

    And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
    Come cries of incommunicable news.

The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical
thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and
indocible to the meaning of it.

Mr. Markham has said of Poetry—and said greatly:

    She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,
      And sees too deep for laughter;
    Her touch is a vibration and a light
      From worlds before and after.

But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of
music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of
winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise
of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she
“speaks a various language.” Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he
seemed to be, with interpreting her fluting and warbling and “sweet
jargoning,” learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones
of the temple like the bass of a great organ.

In his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” Keats has supplied the greatest—almost
the only truly great instance of a genuine poetic inspiration derived
from art instead of nature. In his poems on pictures Mr. Markham shows
an increasingly desperate determination to achieve success, coupled
with a lessening ability to merit it. It is all very melancholy, the
perversion of this man’s high powers to the service of a foolish dream
by artificial and impossible means. Each effort is more ineffectual
than the one that went before. Unless he can be persuaded to desist—to
cease interpreting art and again interpret nature, and turn also from
the murmurs of “Labor” to the music of the spheres—the “surge and
thunder” of the universe—the end of his good literary repute is in
sight. He knows—does he know?—the bitter truth which he might have
learned otherwise than by experience: that the plaudits of “industrial
discontent,” even when strengthened by scholars’ commendations of a few
great lines in the poem that evoked it, are not fame. He should know,
and if he live long will know, that when one begins to be a “labor
leader” one ceases to be a poet.

In saying to Mr. Markham, “Thou ailest here and here,” Mrs. Atherton
has shown herself better at diagnosis than he is himself in telling
us what is the matter with the rich. “Why,” she asks him, “waste a
beautiful gift in groveling for popularity with the mob?... Striving to
please the common mind has a fatal commonizing effect on the writing
faculty.” It is even so—nothing truer could be said, and Mr. Markham
is the best proof of its truth. His early work, when he was known to
only a small circle of admirers, was so good that I predicted for
him the foremost place among contemporaneous American poets. He sang
because he “could not choose but sing,” and his singing grew greater
and greater. Every year he took wider outlooks from “the peaks of
song”—had already got well above the fools’ paradise of flowers and
song-birds and bees and women and had invaded the “thrilling region”
of the cliff, the eagle and the cloud, whence one looks down upon man
and out upon the world. Then he had the mischance to publish “The Man
with the Hoe,” a poem with some noble lines, but an ignoble poem. In
the first place, it is, in structure, stiff, inelastic, monotonous. One
line is very like another. The cæsural pauses fall almost uniformly in
the same places; the full stops always at the finals. Comparison of the
versification with Milton’s blank will reveal the difference of method
in all its significance. It is a difference analogous to that between
painting on ivory and painting on canvas—between the dead, flat tints
of the one and the lively, changing ones due to inequalities of surface
in the other. If it seem a little exacting to compare Mr. Markham’s
blank with that of the only poet who has ever mastered that medium in
English, I can only say that the noble simplicity and elevation of Mr.
Markham’s work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any
standard lower than the highest that we have.

My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought
that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry
conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the
most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated
composition has the right to be called great if the message that it
delivers is neither true nor just. All poets, even the little ones,
are feelers, for poetry is emotional; but all the great poets are
thinkers as well. Their sympathies are as broad as the race, but they
do not echo the peasant’s philosophies of the workshop and the field.
In Mr. Markham’s poem the thought is that of the labor union—even to
the workworn threat of rising against the wicked well-to-do and taking
it out of their hides.

    Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
    A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
    Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
    Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
    Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
    Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

One is somehow reminded by these lines of Coleridge’s questions in the
Chamouni hymn, and one is tempted to answer them the same way: God.
“The Man with the Hoe” is not a product of the “masters, lords and
rulers in all lands”: they are not, and no class of men is, accountable
for him, his limitations and his woes, which are not of those “that
kings or laws can cause or cure.” The “masters, lords and rulers” are
as helpless “in the fell clutch of circumstance” as he—which Mr.
Markham would be speedily made to understand if appointed Dictator. The
notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the
great is “natural,” and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a
literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish. It will not
carry a poem of whatever excellence through two generations. That a man
of Mr. Markham’s splendid endowments should be chained to the body of
this literary death is no less than a public calamity.

For his better work in poetry Mr. Markham merits all the praise that
he has received for “The Man with the Hoe,” and more. It is not likely
that he is now under any illusion in the matter. He probably knows the
real nature of his sudden flare of “popularity”; knows that to-morrow
it will be “one with Nineveh and Tyre”; knows that its only service
to him is to arrest attention of competent critics and scholars who
would otherwise have overlooked him for a time. The “plaudits of the
multitude” can not long be held by the poet, and are not worth holding.
The multitude knows nothing of poetry and does not read it. The
multitude will applaud you to-day, calumniate you to-morrow and thwack
you athwart the mazzard the day after. He who builds upon the sea-sand
of its favor holds possession by a precarious tenure; the wind veers
and the wave

    Lolls out his large tongue—
      Licks the whole labor flat.

If the great have left the humble so wise that the philosophies of the
factory and the plow-tail are true; if the sentiments and the taste
of the mob are so just and elevated that its judgment of poetry is
infallible and its approval a precious possession; if “the masses” have
more than “a thin veneering of civilization,” and are not in peace
as fickle as the weather and in anger as cruel as the sea; if these
victims of an absolutely universal oppression “in _all_ lands” are
deep, discriminating, artistic, liberal, magnanimous—in brief, wise
and good—it is difficult to see what they have to complain about. Mr.
Markham, at least, is forbidden to weep for them, for he is a lover
of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. These taught, and taught
truly—one from the throne of an empire, one writing at a gold table,
and one in the intervals of service as a slave—the supreme value of
wisdom and goodness, the vanity of power and wealth, the triviality
of privation, discomfort and pain. Mr. Markham is a disciple of Jesus
Christ, who from the waysides and the fields taught that poverty is
not only a duty, but indispensable to salvation. So my _argumentum ad
hominem_ runs thus: The objects of our poet’s fierce invective and
awful threats have suffered his _protégés_ to remain rather better off
than they are themselves—have appropriated and monopolized only what
is not worth having. In view of this mitigating circumstance I feel
justified in demanding in their behalf a lighter sentence. Let the
portentous effigy of the French Revolution be forbidden to make faces
at them.

I know of few literary phenomena more grotesque than some of those
growing out of “The Man with the Hoe”—that sudden popularity being
itself a thing which “goes neare to be fonny.” Mr. Markham, whom for
many years those of us who modestly think ourselves _illuminati_
considered a great poet whose greatness full surely was a-ripening,
wrote many things far and away superior to “The Man,” but these
brought him recognition from the judicious only, with which we
would all have sworn that he was content. All at once he published a
poem which, despite some of its splendid lines, is neither true in
sentiment nor admirable in form—which is, in fact, addressed to peasant
understandings and soured hearts. Instantly follow a blaze and thunder
of notoriety, seen and heard over the entire continent; and even the
coasts of Europe are “telling of the sound.” Straightway before the
astonished vision of his friends the author stands transfigured! The
charming poet has become a demagogue, a “labor leader” spreading that
gospel of hate known as “industrial brotherhood,” a “walking delegate”
diligently inciting a strike against God and clamoring for repeal
of the laws of nature. Saddest of all, we find him conscientiously
promoting his own vogue. He personally appears at meetings of cranks
and incapables convened to shriek against the creed of law and
order; speaks at meetings of sycophants eager to shine by his light;
introduces lecturers to meetings of ninnies and femininnies convened to
glorify themselves. When he is not waving the red flag of discontent
and beating the big drum of revolution I presume he is resting—perched,
St.-Simeon-Styliteswise, atop a lofty capital I, erected in the market
place, diligently and rapturously contemplating his new identity. All
of which is very sad to those of us who find it difficult to unlove him.

The trouble with Mr. Markham is that he has formed the habit of
thinking of mankind as divided on the property line—as comprising only
two classes, the rich and the poor. When a man has acquired that habit
he is lost to sense and righteousness. Assassins sometimes reform,
and with increasing education thieves renounce the error of theft
to embrace the evangel of embezzlement; but a demagogue never gets
again into shape unless he becomes wealthy. I hope Mr. Markham’s fame
will so promote his pecuniary interest that it will convert him from
the conviction that his birth was significantly coincident in point
of time with the Second Advent. Only one thing is more disagreeable
than a man with a mission, namely a woman with a mission, and the
superior objectionableness of the latter is largely due to her trick of
inspiring the former.

Mr. Markham seems now to look upon himself as the savior of society;
to believe with entire sincerity that in his light and leading mankind
can be guided out of the wilderness of Self into the promised land
of Altruria; that he can alter the immemorial conditions of human
existence; that a new Heaven and a new Earth can be created by the
power of his song. Most melancholy of all, the song has lost its power
and its charm. Since he became the Laureate of Demagogy he has written
little that is poetry: in the smug prosperity that he reviles in
others, his great gift “shrinks to its second cause and is no more.”
That in the great white light of inevitable disillusion he will recover
and repossess it, giving us again the flowers and fruits of a noble
imagination in which the dream of an impossible and discreditable
hegemony has no part, I should be sorry to disbelieve.

  1899.



                         “THE KREUTZER SONATA”


                                   I

Nothing in this book directly discloses the author’s views of the
marriage relation. The horrible story of Posdnyschew’s matrimonial
experience—an experience which, barring its tragic finale, he affirms
not to be an individual but a general one—is related by himself. There
is no more in it to show directly what Tolstoi thinks of the matters in
hand than there is in a play to show what the playwright thought. We
are always citing the authority of Shakspeare by quotations from his
plays—in which every sentiment is obviously conceived with a view to
its fitness to the character of the imaginary person who utters it, and
supplies no clew to the author’s convictions.

In _The Kreutzer Sonata_, however, the case is somewhat different.
Whereas Shakspeare had in view an artistic (and commercial) result,
Tolstoi’s intention is clearly moral: his aim is not entertainment,
but instruction. To that end he foregoes the advantage of those
literary effects which he so well knows how to produce, confining his
exceptional powers to bald narrative, overlaid with disquisitions
deriving their only vitality from the moral purpose everywhere visible.

A man marries a woman. They quarrel of course; their life is of
course wretched beyond the power of words to express. Jealousy
naturally ensuing, the man murders the woman. That is the “plot,”
and it is without embellishment. Its amplification is accomplished
by “preaching”; its episodes are sermons on subjects not closely
related to the main current of thought. Clearly, the aim of a book so
constructed, even by a skilful literary artist, is not an artistic aim.
Tolstoi desires it to be thought that he entertains the convictions
uttered by the lips of Posdnyschew. He has, indeed, distinctly avowed
them elsewhere than in this book. Like other convictions, they must
stand or fall according to the stability of their foundation upon the
rock of truth; but the fact that they are held by a man of so gigantic
powers as Tolstoi gives them an interest and importance which the
world, strange to say, has been quick to recognize.

Some of these convictions are peculiarly Tolstoi’s own; others he
holds in common with all men and women gifted with that rarest of
intellectual equipments, the faculty of observation, and blessed with
opportunity for its use. Anybody can see, but observation is another
thing. It is something more than discernment, yet may be something
less than accurate understanding of the thing discerned. Such as it
is, Tolstoi has it in the highest degree. Nothing escapes him: his
penetration is astonishing: he searches the very soul of things,
making record of his discoveries with a pitiless frankness which to
feebler understandings is brutal and terrifying. To him nothing is a
mere phenomenon; everything is a phenomenon _plus_ a meaning connected
with a group of meanings. The meanings he may, and in my poor judgment
commonly does, misread, but the phenomenon, the naked fact, he will
see. Nothing can hide it from him nor make it appear to him better
than it is. It is this terrible power of discernment, with this
unsparing illumination compelling the reluctant attention of others,
which environs him with animosities and implacable resentments. His
is the Mont Blanc of minds; about the base of his conspicuous, cold
intelligence the Arve and Arvieron of ignorance and optimism rave
ceaselessly. It is of the nature of a dunce to confound exposure with
complicity. Point out to him the hatefulness of that which he has been
accustomed to admire, and nothing shall thenceforward convince him
that you have not had a guilty hand in making it hateful. Tolstoi,
in intellect a giant and in heart a child, a man of blameless life,
and spotless character, devout, righteous, spectacularly humble and
aggressively humane, has had the distinction to be the most widely
and sincerely detested man of two continents. He has had the courage
to utter a truth of so supreme importance that one-half the civilized
world has for centuries been engaged in a successful conspiracy to
conceal it from the other half—the truth that the modern experiment of
monogamic marriage by the dominant tribes of Europe and America is a
dismal failure. He is not the first by many who has testified to that
effect, but he is the first in our time whose testimony has arrested so
wide and general attention—a result that is to be attributed partly to
his tremendous reputation and partly to his method of giving witness.
He does not in this book deal in argument, is no controversialist. He
says the thing that is in him to say and we can take it or leave it.

_The Kreutzer Sonata_ is not an obscene nor even an indelicate
book: the mind that finds it so is an indelicate, an obscene mind.
It is not, according to our popular notions, “a book for young
girls.” Nevertheless, it is most desirable that young girls should
know—preferably through their parents who can speak with authority of
experience—the truth which it enforces: namely, that marriage, like
wealth, offers no hope of lasting happiness. Despite the implication
that “they lived happily ever after,” it is not for nothing that the
conventional love story ends with the chime of wedding bells. As the
Genius vanished when Mirza asked him what lay under the cloud beyond
the rock of adamant, so the story teller prudently forestalls further
investigation by taking himself off. He has an innate consciousness
that the course of true love whose troubled current he has been tracing
begins at marriage to assume something of the character of a raging
torrent.

Tolstoi strikes hard: not one man nor woman a year married but
must wince beneath his blows. They are all members of a dishonest
conspiracy. They conceal their wounds and swear that all is right
and well with them. They give their Hell a good character, but in
their secret souls they chafe and groan under the weight and heat
of their chains. They come out from among their corruption and dead
men’s bones only to give the sepulchre another coating of whitewash
and call attention to its manifold advantages as a dwelling. They are
like the members of some “ancient and honorable order,” who gravely
repeat to others falsehoods by which they were themselves cheated into
membership. The minatory oath alone is lacking, its binding restraint
supplied by the cowardice that dares not brave the resentment of
co-conspirators and the fury of their dupes.

No human institution is perfect, nor nearly perfect. None comes within
a world’s width of accomplishing the purpose for which it was devised,
and all in time become so perverted as to serve a contrary one. But of
all institutions, marriage as we have it here, and as they evidently
have it in Russia, most lamentably falls short of its design. Nay, it
is the one of them which is become most monstrously wrenched awry to
the service of evil. To have observed this—to have had the intrepidity
to affirm it in a world infested with fools and malevolents who can
not understand how anything can be known except by the feeble and
misleading light of personal experience—that is much. It marks Tolstoi
in a signal way as one eminent above the cloud-region, with a mental
and spiritual outlook unaffected by the ground-reek of darkened counsel
and invulnerable to the slings and arrows of defamation. Nevertheless,
while admiring his superb courage and attesting the clarity of his
vision, I think he imperfectly discerns the underlying causes of the
phenomena that he reports.

Schopenhauer explains the shamefacedness of lovers, their tendency to
withdraw into nooks and corners to do their wooing, by the circumstance
that they plan a crime—they conspire to bring a human soul into a world
of woe. Tolstoi takes something of the same ground as to the nature
of their offence. Marriage he thinks a sin, and being a religionist
regards the resulting and inevitable wretchedness as its appointed
punishment.

“Little did I think of her physical and intellectual life,” says
Posdnyschew, in explanation of conjugal antagonism. “I could not
understand whence sprang our mutual hostility, but how clearly I
see now! This hostility was nothing but the protest of human nature
against the beast that threatened to devour it. I could not understand
this hatred. And how could it have been different? This hostility was
nothing else than the mutual hatred of two accessories in a crime—that
of instigation, that of accomplishment.”

Marriage being a sin, it follows that celibacy is a virtue and a duty.
Tolstoi has the courage of his convictions in this as in other things.
He is too sharp not to see where this leads him and too honest to stop
short of its logical conclusion. Here he is truly magnificent! He
perceives that his ideal, if attained, would be annihilation of the
race. That, as he has elsewhere in effect pointed out, is no affair
of his. He is not concerned for the perpetuity of the race, but for
its happiness through freedom from the lusts of the flesh. What is it
to him if the god whom, oddly enough, he worships has done his work
so badly that his creatures can not be at the same time chaste, happy
and alive? Every one to his business—God as creator and, if he please,
preserver; Tolstoi as reformer.

For his views on the duty of celibacy, it is only fair to say, Tolstoi
goes directly to the teaching of Jesus Christ, with what accuracy of
interpretation, not being skilled in theology I am unwilling to say.

From his scorn of physicians it may be inferred that our author is
imperfectly learned in their useful art, and therefore unfamiliar with
whatever physiological side the question of celibacy may have. It is
perhaps sufficient to say that in the present state of our knowledge
the advantages of a life ordered after the Tolstoian philosophy seem
rather spiritual than physical. Doubtless “they didn’t know everything
down in Judee,” but St. Paul appears to have had a glimmering sense of
this fact, if it is a fact.

To attribute the miseries which are inseparable from marriage as the
modern Caucasian has the heroism to maintain it to any single and
simple cause is most unphilosophical; our civilization is altogether
too complex to admit of any such cheap and easy method. Doubtless there
are many factors in the problem; a few, however, seem sufficiently
obvious to any mind which, having an historical outlook wider than its
immediate environment in time and space, with

                          extensive view
    Surveys mankind from China to Peru.

The monogamous marriage ignores, for example, the truth that Man is
a polygamous animal. Of all the men and women who have been born
into this world, only one in many has ever even so much as heard of
any other system than polygamy. To suppose that within a few brief
centuries monogamy has been by law and by talking so firmly established
as effectually to have stayed the momentum of the original instinct
is to hold that the day of miracles is not only not past, but has
really only recently arrived. It implies, too, and entails, a blank
blindness to the most patent facts of easy observation. With admirable
gravity the modern Caucasian has legislated himself into theoretical
monogamy, but he has, as yet, not effected a repeal of the laws of
nature, and has in truth shown very little disposition to disregard
them and observe his own. The men of our time and race are in heart and
life about as polygamous as their good ancestors were before them, and
everybody knows it who knows anything worth knowing. But not she to
whom the knowledge would have the greatest practical value; the person
whom all the powers of modern society seem in league to cheat; the
young girl.

Another cause of the wretchedness of the married state—but of this
Tolstoi seems inadequately conscious—is that marriage confers rights
deemed incalculably precious which there is no means whatever of
confirming and enforcing. The consciousness that these rights are held
by the precarious tenure of a “vow” which never had, to one of the
parties, much more than a ceremonial significance, and a good faith
liable, in the other, to suspension by resentment and the vicissitudes
of vanity and caprice; the knowledge that these rights are exposed to
secret invasion invincible to the most searching inquiry; the savage
superstition that their invasion “dishonors” the one to whom it is most
hateful, and who of all persons in the world is least an accomplice—all
this begets an apprehension which grows to distrust, and from distrust
to madness. The apprehension is natural because reasonable: its
successive stages of development are what you will, but the culmination
is disaster and the wreck of peace.

Of the sombre phenomena of the marriage relation observable by men like
Tolstoi, with eyes in their heads, brains behind the eyes and not too
much scruple in selecting points of view outside the obscurity and
confusion of a personal experience, a hundred additional explanations
might be adduced, all more valid, in my judgment, than that to which he
pins his too ready faith; but those noted seem sufficient. With regard
to any matter touching less nearly the unreasoning sensibilities of the
human heart, they would, I think, be deemed more than sufficient.

What, then—rejecting Tolstoi’s prescription—is the remedy? In view of
the failure of our experiment should we revert to first principles,
adopting polygamy with such modifications as would better adapt it to
the altered situation? Ought we to try free love, requiring the state
to keep off its clumsy hands and let men and women as individuals
manage this affair, as they do their religions, their friendships and
their diet?

For my part I know of no remedy, nor do I believe that one can be
formulated. It is of the nature of the more gigantic evils to be
irremediable—a truth against which poor humanity instinctively revolts,
entailing the additional afflictions of augmented nonsense and wasted
endeavor. Nevertheless something may be done in mitigation. The
marriage relation that we have we shall probably continue to have,
and its Dead Sea fruits will grow no riper and sweeter with time. But
the lie that describes them as luscious and satisfying is needless.
Let the young be taught, not celibacy, but fortitude. Point out to
them the exact nature of the fool’s paradise into which they will
pretty certainly enter and perhaps ought to enter. Teach them that the
purpose of marriage is whatever the teacher may conceive it to be, but
_not_ happiness. Mercifully reduce the terrible disproportion between
expectation and result. In so far as _The Kreutzer Sonata_ accomplishes
this end, in so far as it teaches this lesson, it is a good book.


                                  II

Tolstoi is a literary giant. He has a “giant’s strength,” and has
unfortunately learned to “use it like a giant”—which, I take it,
means not necessarily with conscious cruelty, but with stupidity.
Excepting when he confines himself to pure romance, and to creation
of works which, after the manner of Dr. Holmes, may be described as
medicated fable—the man seems to write with the very faintest possible
consciousness of anything good or even passably decent, in human
nature. His characters are moved by motives which are redeemed from
monstrous baseness only by being pettily base. In _War and Peace_, for
example,—a book so crowded with characters, historical and imaginary,
that the author himself can not carry them in his memory without
dropping them all along his trail—there is but one person who is not
either a small rascal or a great fool or both. Such a discreditable
multitude of unpleasant persons no one but their maker—in whose image
they are not made—ever collected between the covers of a single book.
From Napoleon down to the ultimate mujik they go through life with
heads full of confusion, hearts distended with selfishness and mouths
running over with lies. If Tolstoi wrote as a satirist, with obvious
cynicism, all this would be easily enough understood; but nothing,
evidently, is further from his intention; he is essentially a preacher
and honestly believes that his powerful caricatures are portraits from
life; or rather—for that we may admit—that the total impression derived
from a comprehensive view of them is a true picture of human character,
charged in its every shadow (there are no lights) with instruction
and edification. I can not say how it goes with others, but all that
is left to me by this hideous “march past” of detestables; this
sombre tableau of the intellectually dead; this fortuitous concourse
of a random rascalry unlawfully begotten of an exuberant fancy and a
pitiless observation—“all of it all” that remains with me is a taste in
the mouth which I can only describe as pallid.

In his personal character Tolstoi seems to be the only living
Christian, in the sense in which Christ was a Christian—whatever credit
may inhere in that—of whom we have any account; but in judging his
books we have nothing to do with that. He has a superb imagination
and must be master of a matchless style, for we get glimpses of it,
even through the translations of men who are probably familiar enough
with Russian and certainly altogether too familiar with English. The
trouble with him is, as Mr. Matthew Arnold said of Byron, he doesn’t
know enough. He sees everything, but he has not freed his mind from the
captivating absurdity, so dominant in the last generation, that human
events occur without human agency, individual will counting for no more
in the ordering of affairs than does a floating chip in determining
the course of the river. The commander of an army is commanded by
his men. Napoleon was pushed by his soldiers hither and thither all
over Europe; they by some blind, occult impulse which Tolstoi can
not understand. He goes so far as to affirm that an army takes one
route instead of another by silent consent and understanding among
its widely separated fractions; infantinely unaware that not one of
them could move a mile without a dozen sets of detailed instructions
to commanders, quartermasters, chiefs of ordnance, commissaries of
subsistence, engineers and so forth. Tolstoi has entered the camp of
History with a flag of truce and been blindfolded at the outpost.

When Tolstoi trusts to his imagination and doesn’t need to know
anything, he is inaccessible to censure. _The Cossacks_, one of his
earlier works, is a prodigiously clever novel. About a half of the
book, as I remember it, concerns itself with the killing of a single
Circassian by a single Cossack. The shadow of that event is over it
all, ominous, portentous; and I know of nothing finer nor more dramatic
in its way than the narrative of the death of the dead man’s avengers,
knee to knee among the rain-pools of the steppe, chanting through
their beards their last fierce defiance. What to this was the slaughter
at Austerlitz, the conflagration at Moscow, flinging its black shadows
over half a world, if we have not Hugo’s eyes to see them through? Only
the gods look large upon Olympus.

But do me the favor to compare Tolstoi at his worst with other popular
writers at their best. It is eagle and hens. It is sun and tallow
candles. From the heights where he sits conspicuous, they are visible
as black beetles. Nay, they are slugs; their brilliant work is a shine
of slime which dulls behind them even as they creep. When one of these
godlets dies the first man to pass his grave will say: “Why has he no
monument?”—the second: “What! a monument?”—the third: “Who the devil
was he?”

  1890.



                          EMMA FRANCES DAWSON


In nearly all of Miss Dawson’s work that I have seen is an elusive
something defying analysis, even description—something that is not in
the words. I do not know how she gets it where it is; I never could
either surprise her secret by swift strokes of attention, come upon
it by patient still-hunting, nor in any way get at the trick of it.
I can name it only in metaphor as a light behind the words; a light
like that of Poe’s “red litten eves”; a light such as falls at sunset
upon desolate marshes, tingeing the plumage of the tall heron and
prophesying the joyless laugh of the loon. That selfsame light shines
somewhere through and under Doré’s long parallel cloud-bands along his
horizons, and I have seen it, with an added bleakness, backgrounding
the tall rood in the Lone Mountain cemetery of San Francisco. I dare
say it is all very easy—to Miss Dawson: she simply writes and some
“remote, unfriended, melancholy” ancestor stands by to “do the rest.”

The publication of Miss Dawson’s _An Itinerant House and Other Stories_
is an event, doubtless, which does not seem at present—at least not
to that cave-bat, “the general reader”—to cut much of a figure, but I
shall miss my guess if it do not hold attention when Father Time has
much that the world admires snugly tucked away in his wallet—“alms
for oblivion.” This is a guess only: I am not a believer in the
doctrine that good literary work has some inherent quality compelling
recognition and conferring vitality. Good literary work, like anything
else, endures if the conditions favor, perishes if they do not; so my
guess, upon examination, dwindles to a hope compounded of rather more
desire than expectation.

Miss Dawson’s book is not to be judged as other books. It will help
the reader to a just appreciation of this wonderful woman’s work
in letters if he understand beforehand that the world she sees is
not the world we see; that her men and women are as unearthly as
their environment, making no demands whatever on our sympathies, our
affections, our admiration. Indeed, she cares nothing for them herself,
putting an end to their strange, unhuman existence when done with them
as indifferently as a tired player removes the chessmen from board to
box. This, for example, is how she disposes of a few that have become
superfluous:

“Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted Cape Cod woman, a scold
and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and
unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year Anson was found
dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a
suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes and the rest were scattered
on the four winds.”

But when Miss Dawson’s narrative flows with a loitering current you may
commonly hear the sound of slow music and get glimpses of a darkened
stage.

These stories have all a good deal of the supernatural and very little
of the natural. The lover of “realism” (who is sometimes pleased
to call himself a “veritist”) may with great profit diligently let
them alone; as may also the mere idler, who reads with a delinquent
advertence, to pass the time. Miss Dawson is too true an artist to
write for a slack attention: every page of her book is rich with
significances underlying the narrative like gold in the bed of a
stream. And this is especially true of the poems.

Those poems, by the way—how came they there? Why is there a poet in
every story, whose verses have nothing to do with the action of the
piece, though always in harmony with its spirit? I think I know the
secret of this irrelevant feature of the work, and a pathetic one it
is: Miss Dawson puts her poetry into her prose because she can not get
it published otherwise—the more shame to our schools and public. Not
all her verse is as good as the prose that carries it. Some of it is
ungrammatical, and two whole pages of one piece have only the finals
“ain” and “aining”—an insupportable performance. Much of it lacks
ease, fluency; but all is worth reading and reading again; and in the
“Ballade of the Sea of Sleep” are an elevation and largeness that no
living poet has excelled.

The scene of all Miss Dawson’s stories is San Francisco—her San
Francisco—San Francisco as she sees it from her eyrie atop of “Russian
Hill.” To her it is a dream city—a city of wraiths and things forbidden
to the senses—of half-heard whispers from tombs of men long dead and
damned—of winds that sing dirges, clouds that are signs and portents,
fogs peopled with fantastic existences pranking like mad, as is the
habit of all sea-folk on shore leave—a city where it is never morning,
where the birds never sing, where children are unknown, and where at
night the street-lights at the summits of the hills “flare as if out of
the sky,” signaling mysterious messages from another world. In short,
this sister to Hugo has breathed into the gross material San Francisco
so strange a soul that to him who has read her book the name of the
town must henceforth have a meaning that never before attached to any
word of human speech. Wherefore I say of this book that it is a work
of supreme genius; and I try to have faith to believe that whatever
else may befall it, while the language in which it is written remains
intelligible to men it will not fail to challenge the attention and
engage the interest of the judicious.

To those who have feared the effect upon Miss Dawson’s powers of
time, sorrow, privation and hope deferred, it is a joy to note that
her latest and longest story, “A Gracious Visitation”—the one written
especially for this volume, the others being from twenty to thirty
years old—is the best. It is indeed a marvelous creation, and I know of
nothing in literature having a sufficient resemblance to it to serve
as a basis of comparison. In point of mere originality, I should say
it is unsurpassed and unsurpassable; the ability to figure to oneself
a story more novel and striking would, in a writer, imply the ability
to write one—which I think the most capable writer would be slowest to
claim. The best of the other stories is by no means the one that gives
its title to the book. I shall not undertake to say which is best, but
shall conclude by quoting the “envoy” of “The Ballade of the Sea of
Sleep”;

    Archangels, princes, thrones, dominions, powers,
    Which of you dwarf the centuries to hours,
      Or swell the moments into æons’ sweep?
    Is it the Prince of Darkness, then, who cowers
      Below the dream-waves of the Sea of Sleep?

  1897.



                          MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF


Upon the cover of the English translation of this young artist’s
journal is displayed Gladstone’s judgment that it is “a book without a
parallel.” That is not very high praise, certainly; it may be said of
many books which the judicious would “willingly let die”; and in this
case the judicious will hope that a parallel work may be long denied to
the taste that craves it. The book from cover to cover is distinctly
unwholesome. It has the merit of candor; its frankness is appalling.
Yet one can not help suspecting the quality of that frankness. Did
this young girl, who began at twelve, and for a dozen years—almost
to the day of her death—poured into her journal her heterogenous and
undigested thoughts, fancies and feelings with a view to publication
and a hope of fame as a result of it—did she after all make as honest
a record as she doubtless supposed herself to be doing? It will hardly
seem so to one who has written much for publication.

Such a one may justly enough distrust, although he can not altogether
reject, the evidences of the text, which are necessarily studied and
interpreted in the light of the text itself; but knowing something
of the conditions of literary composition he will be slow to believe
that the young diarist could at the same time remember and forget that
she was writing to be read. Nor will it seem to him that his doubt if
she put down all that came into her head is too hardy an assumption
of knowledge of how Russian young women think and feel. Something
doubtless must be allowed for individual character and disposition
in this case as in another, but then, too, one must be permitted to
remember that even a Russian young woman of more or less consuming
self-consciousness and sex-consciousness is merely human, belonging
to the race which daily thanks its Maker for not putting windows in
breasts. Even a Russian maiden with a private method of estimating
her intellectual importance who should write _all_ her thoughts would
probably be invited to stay her steps toward the Temple of Fame long
enough to make acquaintance of the police.

But if the diarist has not written down all her thoughts and
feelings, how can the reader be quite sure that she has accurately
reported those of them that she professes to give?—how that they are
not afterthoughts, some of them, at least, evolved in the process of
revision for the press? I do not know if upon this point there is any
other than internal evidence and the probabilities; my reading in the
somewhat raw and raucous literature of the subject has not been quite
exhaustive. The internal evidence and the probabilities point pretty
plainly to revision of the text, for which the reader might have been
more grateful if it had been more thoroughly made. Much of the book, in
truth, might advantageously have been revised out of existence—much of
what is left, I mean.

Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1860 and died of consumption in 1884.
She was given a good education and knew some of the advantages of
travel. Having a love of art—which she mistook for ability to produce
works of art—she became a painter and by dint of study under the
spur of vanity performed some fairly creditable work which, while
the fashion of reading her journal was “on,” commanded fair prices
and brought gladness and sunshine into the homes of good Americans
of long purses and short schooling. She was perhaps rather more than
less successful in painting than in expounding the excellences of the
paintings of others. In such criticism as she gives us in her journal
one does not detect any understanding. “This is not art; it is Nature
herself”; “the face is real; it is flesh and blood”—such judgments
as these are sprinkled all through the book, recalling the dear old
familiar jargon of the “dramatic critics” of the newspapers; “Jonesmith
was no longer himself but Hamlet”; “Brown-Robinson completely
identified himself with his rôle, and it was Julius Cæsar himself that
we saw before our eyes.” The crudest and most meaningless form of art
criticism is to declare the representation the thing represented, and
poor Marie Bashkirtseff seldom goes further in accounting for her
adoration of the works of such masters as Bastien-Lepage, Corot and
Duran.

There must have been something engaging in the girl, for she seems
to have acquired the friendship of such men, and to have retained
it. Her account of those last days when she and Bastien-Lepage—each
with a leg in the grave, like a caught fox dragging its trap—caused
themselves to be brought together to compare the ravages of their
disorders in silence is pathetic with the pathos of the morgue. One
would rather have been spared it. It leaves a bad taste in the memory
and fitly concludes a book which is morbid, hysterical and unpleasant
beyond anything of its kind in literature—“a book without a parallel.”
It enforces and illustrates a useful truth: that when suffering from
internal disorders one can not afford to turn oneself inside out as an
exercise in literary calisthenics.

  1887.



                          A POET AND HIS POEM

         (_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, September, 1907_)


Whatever length of days may be accorded to this magazine, it is not
likely to do anything more notable in literature that it accomplishes
in this issue by publication of Mr. George Sterling’s poem, “A Wine of
Wizardry.” Doubtless the full significance of this event will not be
immediately apprehended by more than a select few, for understanding of
poetry has at no time been a very general endowment of our countrymen.
After a not inconsiderable acquaintance with American men of letters
and men of affairs I find myself unable to name a dozen of whom I
should be willing to affirm their possession of this precious gift—for
a gift it indubitably is; and of these not all would, in my judgment,
be able to discern the light of genius in a poem not authenticated by
a name already famous, or credentialed by a general assent. It is not
commonly permitted to even the luckiest of poets to “set the Thames on
fire” with his first match; and I venture to add that the Hudson is
less combustible than the Thames. Anybody can see, or can think that
he sees, what has been pointed out, but original discovery is another
matter. Carlyle, indeed, has noted that the first impression of a work
of genius is disagreeable—which is unfortunate for its author if he is
unknown, for upon editors and publishers a first impression is usually
all that he is permitted to make.

From the discouraging operation of these uncongenial conditions Mr.
Sterling is not exempt, as the biography of this poem would show; yet
Mr. Sterling is not altogether unknown. His book, _The Testimony of
the Suns, and Other Poems_, published in 1903, brought him recognition
in the literary Nazareth beyond the Rocky Mountains, whose passes are
so vigilantly guarded by cismontane criticism. Indeed, some sense of
the might and majesty of the book’s title poem succeeded in crossing
the dead-line while watch-worn sentinels slept “at their insuperable
posts.” Of that work I have the temerity to think that in both subject
and art it nicks the rock as high as anything of the generation of
Tennyson, and a good deal higher than anything of the generation of
Kipling; and this despite its absolute destitution of what contemporary
taste insists on having—the “human interest.” Naturally, a dramatist
of the heavens, who takes the suns for his characters, the deeps of
space for his stage, and eternity for his “historic period,” does not
“look into his heart and write” emotionally; but there is room in
literature for more than emotion. In the “other poems” of the book
the lower need is supplied without extravagance and with no admixture
of sentimentality. But what we are here concerned with is “A Wine of
Wizardry.”

In this remarkable poem the author proves his allegiance to the
fundamental faith of the greatest of those “who claim the holy Muse as
mate”—a faith which he has himself “confessed” thus:

    Remiss the ministry they bear
      Who serve her with divided heart;
      She stands reluctant to impart
    Her strength to purpose, end, or care.

Here, as in all his work, we shall look in vain for the “practical,”
the “helpful.” The verses serve no cause, tell no story, point no
moral. Their author has no “purpose, end, or care” other than the
writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of
a skylark—it is merely poetry. No one knows what poetry is, but to
the enlightened few who know what is poetry it is a rare and deep
delight to find it in the form of virgin gold. “Gold,” says the miner
“vext with odious subtlety” of the mineralogist with his theories of
deposit—“gold is where you find it.” It is no less precious whether
you have crushed it from the rock, or washed it from the gravel, but
some of us care to be spared the labor of reduction, or sluicing. Mr.
Sterling’s reader needs no outfit of mill and pan.

I am not of those who deem it a service to letters to “encourage”
mediocrity—that is one of the many ways to starve genius. From the
amiable judgment of the “friendly critic” with his heart in his
head, otherwise unoccupied, and the _laudator literarum_ who finds
every month, or every week—according to his employment by magazine
or newspaper—more great books than I have had the luck to find in a
half-century, I dissent. My notion is that an age which produces a
half-dozen good writers and twenty books worth reading is a memorable
age. I think, too, that contemporary criticism is of small service,
and popular acclaim of none at all, in enabling us to know who are
the good authors and which the good books. Naturally, then, I am not
overtrustful of my own judgment, nor hot in hope of its acceptance.
Yet I steadfastly believe and hardily affirm that George Sterling is a
very great poet—incomparably the greatest that we have on this side of
the Atlantic. And of this particular poem I hold that not in a lifetime
has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much
poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as
any of the “ardent gems” that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all
the imagination of “Comus” and all the fancy of “The Faerie Queene.”
If Leigh Hunt should return to earth to part and catalogue these two
precious qualities he would find them in so confusing abundance and
so inextricably interlaced that he would fly in despair from the
impossible task.

Great lines are not all that go to the making of great poetry, but a
poem with many great lines is a great poem, even if it have—as usually
it has, and as “A Wine of Wizardry” has not—prosaic lines as well. To
quote all the striking passages in Mr. Sterling’s poem would be to
quote most of the poem, but I will ask the reader’s attention to some
of the most graphic and memorable.

    A cowled magician peering on the damned
    Thro’ vials wherein a splendid poison burns.

    ’Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned,
    Undominated firmament.

It is not for me to say what may be meant here by “undominated,” any
more than to explain what Shakspeare meant by

    To lie in cold _obstruction_ and to rot.

A poet makes his own words and his own definitions: it is for the rest
of us to accept them and see to it that there is no interference by
that feeble folk, the lexicographers.

      a dell where some mad girl hath flung
    A bracelet that the painted lizards fear—
    Red pyres of muffled light!

    Dull fires of dusty jewels that have bound
    The brows of naked Ashtaroth.

          she marks the seaward flight
    Of homing dragons dark upon the West.

    Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire
    To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire.

    Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom,
    Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame.

                                silent ghouls,
    Whose king hath digged a sombre carcanet
    And necklaces with fevered opals set.

    Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light
    Dip to the ocean’s phosphorescent caves.

What other words could so vividly describe gleams of fire on a troubled
sea? Who but a masterful poet could describe them at all?

    There priestesses in purple robes hold each
    A sultry garnet to the sea-linkt sun,
    Or, just before the colored morning shakes
    A splendor on the ruby-sanded beach,
    Cry unto Betelgeuze a mystic word.

Faith! I would give value to know that word!

    Where icy philters brim with scarlet foam.

        Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
    Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed.

    A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse,
    Beside a caldron vext with harlots’ blood,
    The stars of that red Sign which spells her doom.

                                          halls
    In which dead Merlin’s prowling ape hath spilt
    A vial squat whose scarlet venom crawls
    To ciphers bright and terrible.

        ere the tomb-thrown echoings have ceased,
    The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
    Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.

Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the
spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand
it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was
in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the
imagination to Coleridge’s

    A savage place! as holy and enchanted
    As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon lover,

or Keats’s

        magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn—

passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human
thought.

One of a poet’s most authenticating credentials may be found in his
epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from
which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician,
are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is
worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with
novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt,
spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like
the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than
ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold
iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider
a few of Mr. Sterling’s epithets, besides those in the lines already
quoted:

“Purpled” realm; “striving” billows; “wattled” monsters; “timid”
sapphires of the snow; “lit” wastes; a “stainèd” twilight of the
South; “tiny” twilight in the jacinth, and “wintry” orb of the
moonstone; “winy” agate and “banded” onyx; “lustrous” rivers;
“glowering” pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.

Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made
poet?—to the “poet of the day”—poet by resolution of a “committee
on literary exercises”? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his
pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave
confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve
felicities like these!



                         THE CONTROVERSIALIST



                   AN INSURRECTION OF THE PEASANTRY

         (_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, December, 1907_)


When a man of genius who is not famous writes a notable poem he must
expect one or two of three things: indifference, indignation, ridicule.
In commending Mr. George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” published in
the September number of this magazine, I had this reception of his work
in confident expectation and should have mistrusted my judgment if it
had not followed. The promptitude of the chorus of denunciation and
scorn has attested the superb character of the poet’s work and is most
gratifying.

The reason for the inevitable note of dissent is not far to seek; it
inheres in the constitution of the human mind, which is instinctively
hostile to what is “out of the common”—and a work of genius is
pretty sure to be that. It is by utterance of uncommon thoughts,
opinions, sentiments and fancies that genius is known. All distinction
is difference, unconformity. He who is as others are—whose mental
processes and manner of expression follow the familiar order—is
readily acceptable because easily intelligible to those whose narrow
intelligence, barren imagination, and meager vocabulary he shares.
“Why, that is great!” says that complacent dullard, “the average man,”
smiling approval. “I have thought that a hundred times myself!”—thereby
providing abundant evidence that it is not great, nor of any value
whatever. To “the average man” what is new is inconceivable, and what
he does not understand affronts him. And he is the first arbiter in
letters and art. In this “fierce democracie” he dominates literature
with a fat and heavy hand—a hand that is not always unfamiliar with the
critic’s pen.

In returning here to the subject of Mr. Sterling’s poem I have no
intention of expounding and explaining it to persons who know nothing
of poetry and are inaccessible to instruction. Those who, in the
amusing controversy which I unwittingly set raging round Mr. Sterling’s
name, have spoken for them are in equal mental darkness and somewhat
thicker moral, as it is my humble hope to show.

When the cause to be served is ignorance, the means of service is
invariably misrepresentation. The champion of offended Dulness
falsifies in statement and cheats in argument, for he serves a client
without a conscience. A knowledge of right and wrong is not acquired
to-day, as in the time of Adam and Eve, by eating an apple; and it is
attained by only the highest intelligences.

But before undertaking the task of pointing out the moral unworth of my
honorable opponents, it seems worth while to explain that the proponent
of the controversy has had the misfortune to misunderstand the question
at issue. He has repeatedly fallen into the error of affirming, with
all the emphasis of shouting capitals, that “Ambrose Bierce says it [“A
Wine of Wizardry”] is the greatest poem ever written in America,” and
at least once has declared that I pronounced it “the only great poem
ever written in America.” If the dispute had been prolonged I shudder
to think that his disobedient understanding might have misled him to
say that I swore it was the only great poem ever written, in all the
world.

To those who know me it is hardly needful, I hope, to explain that
I said none of the words so generously put into my mouth, for it is
obvious that I have not seen, and could not have seen, all the poems
that have been written in America. To have pronounced such a judgment
without all the evidence would have been to resemble my opponents—which
God forbid! In point of fact, I do not consider the poem the greatest
ever written in America; Mr. Sterling himself, for example, has written
a greater. Exposed to so hardy and impenitent misrepresentation I
feel a need of the consolations of religion: I should like positively
to know where my critics are going to when they die. From my present
faltering faith in their future I derive an imperfect comfort.

Naturally, not all protagonists of the commonplace who have uttered
their minds about this matter are entitled to notice. The Baseball
Reporter who, says Mr. Brisbane, “like Mr. Sterling, is a poet,” the
Sweet Singer of Slang, the Simian Lexicographer of Misinformation,
and the Queen of Platitudinaria who has renounced the sin-and-sugar
of youth for the milk-and-morality of age must try to forgive me if I
leave them grinning through their respective horse-collars to a not
unkind inattention.

But Deacon Harvey is a person of note and consequence. On a question
of poetry, I am told, he controls nearly the entire Methodist vote.
Moreover, he has a notable knack at mastery of the English language,
which he handles with no small part of the ease and grace that may have
distinguished the impenitent thief carrying his cross up the slope of
Calvary. Let the following noble sentences attest the quality of his
performance when he is at his best:

  A natural hesitation to undertake analysis of the unanalyzable,
  criticism of the uncriticizable, or, if we may go so far, mention
  of the unmentionable, yields to your own shrewd forging of the
  links of circumstance into a chain of duty. That the greatest poem
  ever written on this hemisphere, having forced its way out of a
  comfortable lodgment in the brain of an unknown author, should be
  discovered and heralded by a connoisseur whose pre-eminence is
  yet to be established, is perhaps in itself not surprising, and
  yet we must admit that the mere rarity of such a happening would
  ordinarily preclude the necessity, which otherwise might exist, of
  searching inquiry as to the attributed transcendentalism of merit.

Surely a man who habitually writes such prose as that must be a
good judge of poetry or he would not be a good judge of anything in
literature. And what does this Prince Paramount of grace and clarity
find to condemn in poor Mr. Sterling’s poem? Listen with at least one
ear each:

  We are willing to admit at the outset that in the whole range
  of American, or, for that matter, English, poetry there is no
  example of a poem crowded with such startling imagery, ambitiously
  marshaled in lines of such lurid impressiveness, all of which at
  once arrest attention and would bewilder the esthetic sensibility
  of a Titan. The poem is made up of an unbroken series of
  sententious and striking passages, any one of which would have
  distinguished a whole canto of Dante or Keats, neither of whom
  would have ventured within that limit to use more than one—such was
  their niggardly economy.

Here is something “rich and strange” in criticism. Heretofore it has
been thought that “wealth of imagery” was about the highest quality
that poetry could have, but it seems not; that somewhat tiresome phrase
is to be used henceforth to signify condemnation. Of the poem that
we wish to commend we must say that it has an admirable poverty of
imagination. Deacon Harvey’s notion that poets like Dante and Keats
deliberately refrained from using more than one “sententious and
striking passage” to the canto “goes neare to be fonny.” They used as
many as occurred to them; no poet uses fewer than he can. If he has
only one to a canto, that is not economy; it is indigence.

I observe that even so good a poet and so appreciative a reader of
Mr. Sterling as Miss Ina Coolbrith has fallen into the same error as
Deacon Harvey. Of “the many pictures presented in that wondrous ‘Wine
of Wizardry,’” this accomplished woman says: “I think it is a ‘poem’—a
great poem—but one which, in my humble estimate, might have been
made even greater could its creator have permitted himself to drop a
little of what some may deem a weakening superfluity of imagery and
word-painting.”

If one is to make “pictures” in poetry one must do so by word-painting.
(I admit the hatefulness of the term “word-painting,” through overuse
of the name in praise of the prose that the thing defaces, but it seems
that we must use it here.) Only in narrative and didactic poetry,
and these are the lowest forms, can there be too much of imagery and
word-painting; in a poem essentially graphic, like the one under
consideration, they are the strength and soul of the work. “A Wine
of Wizardry” is, and was intended to be, a series, a succession, of
unrelated pictures, colored (mostly red, naturally) by what gave them
birth and being—the reflection of a sunset in a cup of ruddy wine. To
talk of too much imagery in a work of that kind is to be like Deacon
Harvey.

Imagery, that is to say, imagination, is not only the life and soul
of poetry; it is the poetry. That is what Poe had in mind doubtless,
when he contended that there could be no such thing as a long poem. He
had observed that what are called long poems consist of brief poetical
passages connected by long passages of metrical prose—_recitativo_—of
oases of green in deserts of gray. The highest flights of imagination
have always been observed to be the briefest. George Sterling has
created a new standard, another criterion. In “A Wine of Wizardry,” as
in his longer and greater poem, “The Testimony of the Suns,” there is
no _recitativo_. His imagination flies with a tireless wing. It never
comes to earth for a new spring into the sky, but like the eagle and
the albatross, sustains itself as long as he chooses that it shall.
His passages of poetry are connected by passages of poetry. In all
his work you will find no line of prose. Poets of the present and the
future may well “view with alarm” as Statesman Harvey would say—the
work that Sterling has cut out for them, the pace that he has set.
Poetry must henceforth be not only qualitative but quantitative: it
must be _all_ poetry. If wise, the critic will note the new criterion
that this bold challenge to the centuries has made mandatory. The “long
poem” has been shown to be possible; let us see if it become customary.

In affirming Mr. Sterling’s primacy among living American poets I have
no apology to offer to the many unfortunates who have written to me in
the spirit of the man who once said of another: “What! that fellow a
great man? Why, he was born right in my town!” It is humbly submitted,
however, that unless the supply of great men is exhausted they must be
born somewhere, and the fact that they are seen “close to” by their
neighbors does not supply a reasonable presumption against their
greatness. Shakspeare himself was once a local and contemporary poet,
and even Homer is known to have been born in “seven Grecian cities”
through which he “begged his bread.” Is Deacon Harvey altogether sure
that he is immune to the popular inability to understand that the time
and place of a poet’s nativity are not decisive as to his rating? He
may find a difficulty in believing that a singer of supreme excellence
was born right in _his_ country and period, but in the words that I
have quoted from him he has himself testified to the fact. To be able
to write “an unbroken series of sententious and striking passages”;
to crowd a poem, as no other in the whole range of our literature has
done, with “startling imagery” “in lines of impressiveness,” lurid or
not; to “arrest attention”; to “bewilder the Titans,” Deacon Harvey
at their head—that is about as much as the most ambitious poet could
wish to accomplish at one sitting. The ordinary harpist harping on his
Harpers’ would be a long time in doing so much. How any commentator,
having in those words conceded my entire claim, could afterward have
the hardihood to say, “The poem has no merit,” transcends the limits
of human comprehension and passes into the dark domain of literary
criticism.

Nine in ten of the poem’s critics complain of the fantastic, grotesque,
or ghastly nature of its fancies. What would these good persons
have on the subject of wizardry?—sweet and sunny pictures of rural
life?—love scenes in urban drawing-rooms?—beautiful sentiments
appropriate to young ladies’ albums?—high moral philosophy with an
“appeal” to what is “likest God within the soul”? Deacon Harvey (O, I
cannot get away from Deacon Harvey: he fascinates me!) would have “an
interpretation of vital truth.” I do not know what that is, but we have
his word for it that nothing else is poetry. And no less a personage
than Mrs. Gertrude Atherton demands, instead of wizardry, an epic of
prehistoric California, or an account of the great fire, preferably
in prose, for, “this is not an age of poetry, anyway.” Alas, poor
Sterling!—damned alike for what he wrote and what he didn’t write.
Truly, there are persons whom one may not hope to please.

It should in fairness be said that Mrs. Atherton confesses herself no
critic of poetry—the only person, apparently, who is not—but pronounces
Mr. Sterling a “recluse” who “needs to see more and read less.” From a
pretty long acquaintance with him I should say that this middle-aged
man o’ the world is as little “reclusive” as any one that I know, and
has seen rather more of life than is good for him. And I doubt if
he would greatly gain in mental stature by unreading Mrs. Atherton’s
excellent novels.

Sterling’s critics are not the only persons who seem a bit blinded
by the light of his genius: Mr. Joaquin Miller, a born poet and as
great-hearted a man as ever lived, is not quite able to “place” him.
He says that this “titanic, magnificent” poem is “classic” “in the
Homeric, the Miltonic sense.” “A Wine of Wizardry” is not “classic” in
the sense in which scholars use that word. It is all color and fire and
movement, with nothing of the cold simplicity and repose of the Grecian
ideal. Nor is it Homeric, nor in the Miltonic vein. It is in no vein
but the author’s own; in the entire work is only one line suggesting
the manner of another poet—the last in this passage:

    Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed
    In chains so heated at their master’s fire
    That one new-damned had thought their bright attire
    Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance
    So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.

That line, the least admirable in the poem, is purely Byronic. Possibly
Mr. Miller meant that Sterling’s work is like Homer’s and Milton’s,
not in manner, but in excellence; and it is.

Mr. Sterling’s critics may at least claim credit for candor. For cause
of action, as the lawyers say, they aver his use of strange, unfamiliar
words. Now this is a charge that any man should be ashamed to make;
first, because it is untrue; second, because it is a confession of
ignorance. There are not a half-dozen words in the poem that are not in
common use by good authors, and none that any man should not blush to
say that he does not understand. The objection amounts to this: that
the poet did not write down to the objector’s educational level—did not
adapt his work to “the meanest capacity.” Under what obligation was he
to do so? There are men whose vocabulary does not exceed a few hundreds
of words; they know not the meaning of the others because they have
not the thoughts that the others express. Shall these Toms, Dicks and
Harrys of the slums and cornfields set up their meager acquirements
as metes and bounds beyond which a writer shall not go? Let them stay
upon their reservations. There are poets enough, great poets, too, whom
they can partly understand; that is, they can understand the simple
language, the rhymes, the meter—everything but the poetry. There
are orders of poetry, as there are orders of architecture. Because a
Grecian temple is beautiful shall there be no Gothic cathedrals? By the
way, it is not without significance that Gothic architecture was first
so called in derision, the Goths having no architecture. It was named
by the Deacon Harveys of the period.

The passage that has provoked this class of critics to the most
shameless feats of self-exposure is this:

    Infernal rubrics, sung to Satan’s might,
    Or chanted to the Dragon in his gyre.

Upon this they have expended all the powers of ridicule belonging to
those who respect nothing because they know nothing. A person of light
and leading in their bright band[2] says of it:

“We confess that we had never before heard of a ‘gyre.’ Looking it up
in the dictionary, we find that it means a gyration, or a whirling
round. Rubrics chanted to a dragon while he was whirling ought to be
worth hearing.”

Now, whose fault is it that this distinguished journalist had never
heard of a gyre? Certainly not the poet’s. And whose that in very
sensibly looking it up he suffered himself to be so misled by the
lexicographer as to think it a gyration, a whirling round? Gyre means,
not a gyration, but the path of a gyration, an orbit. And has the poor
man no knowledge of a dragon in the heavens?—the constellation Draco,
to which, as to other stars, the magicians of old chanted incantations?
A peasant is not to be censured for his ignorance, but when he glories
in it and draws its limit as a dead line for his betters he is the
least pleasing of all the beasts of the field.

An amusing instance of the commonplace mind’s inability to understand
anything having a touch of imagination is found in a criticism of the
now famous lines:

    The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
    Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.

“Somehow,” says the critic, who, naturally, is a book-reviewer, “one
does not associate blue eyes with a vampire.” Of course it did not
occur to him that this was doubtless the very reason why the author
chose the epithet—if he thought of anybody’s conception but his own.
“Blue-eyed” connotes beauty and gentleness; the picture is that of
a lovely, fair-haired woman with the telltale blood about her lips.
Nothing could be less horrible; nothing more terrible. As vampires do
not really exist, everyone is at liberty, I take it, to conceive them
under what outward and visible aspect he will; but this gentleman,
having standardized the vampire, naturally resents any departure from
the type—his type. I fancy he requires goggle-eyes, emitting flame and
perhaps smoke, a mouth well garnished with tusks—long claws, and all
the other appurtenances that make the conventional Chinese dragon so
awful that one naturally wishes to meet it and kick it.

Between my mind and the minds of those whom Mr. Sterling’s daring
incursions into the realm of the unreal do not affect with a keen
artistic delight there is nothing in common—except a part of my
vocabulary. I cannot hope to convince nor persuade them. Nevertheless,
it is no trouble to point out that their loud pretense of being
“shocked” by some of his fancies is a singularly foolish one. We
are not shocked by the tragic, the terrible, even the ghastly, in
literature and art. We do not flee from the theater when a tragedy is
enacting—the murder of Duncan and the sleeping grooms—the stabbing and
poisoning in “Hamlet.” We listen without discomposure to the beating
to death of Nancy Sykes behind the scenes. The Ancient Mariner’s dead
comrades rise and pull at the ropes without disturbing the reader;
even the “slimy things” “crawl with legs upon a slimy sea” and we do
not pitch the book into the fire. Dante’s underworld, with all its
ingenious horrors, page after page of them, are accounted pretty good
reading—at least Dante is accounted a pretty good poet. No one stands
forth to affirm his distress when Homer’s hero declares that

    Swarms of specters rose from deepest hell
    With bloodless visage and with hideous yell.
    They scream, they shriek; sad groans and dismal sounds
    Stun my scared ears and pierce Hell’s utmost bounds.

Literature is full of pictures of the terrible, the awful, the ghastly,
if you please; hardly a great author but has given them to us in prose
or verse. They shock nobody, for they produce no illusion, not even on
the stage, or the canvases of Vereshchagin. If they did they would be
without artistic value.

But it is the fashion to pretend to be horrified—when the terrible
thing is new and by an unfamiliar hand. The Philistine who accepts
without question the horrors of Dante’s Hell professes himself greatly
agitated when Sterling’s

    Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
    Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed.

In point of fact, the poor Philistine himself yawns as he reads
about it; he is not shocked at all. It is comprehensible how there
may be such a thing as a mollycoddle, but how one can pretend to
be a mollycoddle when one is not—that must be accepted as the most
surprising hypocrisy that we have the happiness to know about.

Having affirmed the greatness of Mr. Sterling, I am austerely reminded
by a half hundred commentators, some of whom profess admiration for “A
Wine of Wizardry,” that a single poem, of whatever excellence, does
not establish the claim. Like nearly all the others, these gentlemen
write without accuracy, from a general impression. They overlook the
circumstance that I pointed out a book by Sterling, published several
years ago, entitled _The Testimony of the Suns, and Other Poems_.
What, then, becomes of the “single poem” sneer? To its performers
nothing that they have not seen exists.

That book is dedicated to me—a fact that has been eagerly seized
upon by still another class of critics to “explain” my good opinion
of its author; for nothing is so welcome to our literary hill-tribes
as a chance to cheat by ascription of a foul motive. But it happens,
unhappily for the prosperity of their hope, that the dedication was
made in gratitude for my having already set the crown of praise upon
its author’s head. I will quote the first lines of the dedication, not
only in proof of this, but to show the noble seriousness and sincerity
with which a great poet regards his ministry at the altar of his art:

    Ah! glad to thy decree I bow,
      From whose unquestioned hand did fall,
      Beyond a lesser to recall,
    The solemn laurels on my brow.

    I tremble with the splendid weight.
      To my unworth ’tis given to know
      How dread the charge I undergo
    Who claim the holy Muse as mate.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Sterling’s reverent attitude toward his art
has suffered no abatement from his having been thrown to the swine for
allegiance to an alien faith hateful to his countrymen.


[2] Mr. Arthur Brisbane.



                        MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS


I have not the happiness to know if Mr. George Bernard Shaw has ever
written as good a play as “As You Like It.” He says he has, and
certainly he ought to be able to remember what plays he has written. I
don’t know that blank verse is, as Mr. Shaw declares, “a thing that you
could teach a cat if it had an ear.” My notion is that blank verse—good
blank verse—is the most difficult of all metrical forms, and that
among English poets Milton alone has mastered it. I don’t know that
Mr. Shaw is right in his sweeping condemnation of the blank verse of
that indubitable “master of tremendous prose,” Shakspeare. As a critic,
Mr. Shaw ought to know that Shakspeare wrote very little blank verse,
technically and properly so called, his plays being, naturally, mostly
in what the prosodian knows, and what as a playwright Mr. Shaw might be
expected to know, as dramatic blank, a very different thing.

    But this I know, and know full well—

that in ridiculing the blind, unreasoning adoration of Shakspeare as an
infallible and impeccable god in whose greater glory all _dii minores_
must hide their diminished heads and pale their uneffectual fires, Mr.
Shaw does well and merits sympathetic attention. Without going so far
as Voltaire, one may venture without irreverence to hold an opinion
of one’s own as to the great Englishman’s barbarous exuberance of
metaphor, pure and mixed, his poverty of invention in the matter of
plots, his love of punning, his tireless pursuit of a quibble to the
ultimate ramifications of its burrow, and a score of other faults which
in others his thick-and-thin protagonists freely condemn. Many of these
sins against art were doubtless the offspring of a giant indolence, and
sole desire to draw the rabble of the streets into his theater. For
literature he cared nothing, of literary ambition knew nothing—just
made plays, played them and flung away the manuscript. Even the sonnets
were left unsigned—which is fortunate, for his unearthly signature
would have misled the compiler.

Whatever may be the other qualities of “As You Like It,” Mr. Shaw will
perhaps admit that in point of mere decency it is pretty fair, which is
more than any but a Shakspearolater will say of “Romeo and Juliet,”
for example. Not greatly caring for the theater, I am not familiar
with “acting versions,” but this play as it came from the hand of its
author is, in a moral sense, detestable. All its men are blackguards,
all its women worse, and worst of all is Juliet herself, who makes no
secret of the nature of her passion for Romeo, but discloses it with
all the candor of a moral idiot insensible to the distinction between
propensity and sentiment. Her frankness is no less than hideous. Yet
one may read page after page by reputable authors in praise of her as
one of the sweetest of Shakspeare’s fascinating heroines. Babes are
named for her and drawing-room walls adorned with ideal portraits of
her, engraved from paintings of great artists. One has only to read
Taine’s description of an Elizabethan theater audience to understand
why dramatists of those “spacious times” did not need seriously to
concern themselves with morality; but that Shakspeare’s wit, pathos and
poetry can make such characters as those of this drama acceptable to
modern playgoers and readers is the highest possible attestation of the
man’s consummate genius.



                              A DEAD LION


                                   I

In the history of religious controversy it has sometimes occurred that
a fool has risen and shouted out views so typical and representative as
to justify a particular attention denied to his less absurd partisans.
That was the situation relative to the logomachy that raged over the
ashes of the late Col. Robert Ingersoll. Through the ramp and roar
of the churches, the thunder of the theological captains and the
shouting, rose the penetrating treble of a person so artlessly pious,
so devoid of knowledge and innocent of sense, that his every utterance
credentialed him as a child of candor, and arrested attention like
the wanton shrilling of a noontide locust cutting through the cackle
of a hundred hens. That he happened to be an editorial writer was
irrelevant, for it was impossible to suspect so ingenuous a soul of
designs upon what may be called the Christian vote; he simply poured
out his heart with the unpremeditated sincerity of a wild ass uttering
its view of the Scheme of Things. I take it the man was providentially
“raised up”, and spoke by inspiration of the Spirit of Religion.

“Robert G. Ingersoll,” says this son of nature, “was not a _great_
atheist, nor a _great_ agnostic. Dissimilar though they are, he aspired
in his published lectures and addresses to both distinctions.”

As it is no distinction to be either atheist or agnostic, this must
mean that Col. Ingersoll “aspired” to be a great atheist and a great
agnostic. Where is the evidence? May not a man state his religious
or irreligious views with the same presumption of modesty and mere
sincerity that attaches to other intellectual action? Because one
publicly affirms the inveracity of Moses must one be charged with
ambition, that meanest of all motives? By denying the sufficiency of
the evidences of immortality is one self-convicted of a desire to be
accounted great?

Col. Ingersoll said the thing that he had to say, as I am saying
this—as a clergyman preaches his sermon, as an historian writes his
romance: partly for the exceeding great reward of expression, partly,
it may be, for the lesser profit of payment. We all move along lines
of least resistance; because a few of us find that this leads up to the
temple of fame it does not follow that all are seeking that edifice
with a conscious effort to achieve distinction. If any Americans have
appraised at its true and contemptible value the applause of the people
Robert Ingersoll did. If there has been but one such American he was
the man.

Now listen to what further this ineffable dolt had to say of him:

  His irreverence, however, his theory of deistical brutality, was
  a mere phantasy, unsustained by scholarship or by reason, and
  contradicted by every element of his personal character. His love
  for his wife and his children, his tenderness towards relatives and
  friends, would have been spurious and repulsive if in his heart he
  had not accepted what in speech he derided and contemned.

Here’s richness indeed! Whatever may be said by scholarship and reason
of a “theory of deistical brutality”, I do not think—I really have
not the civility to admit—that it is contradicted by a blameless
life. If it were really true that the god of the Christians is not a
particularly “nice” god the love of a man for wife and child would not
necessarily and because of that be spurious and repulsive. Indeed,
in a world governed by such a god, and subject therefore to all the
evils and perils of the divine caprice and malevolence, such affection
would be even more useful and commendable than it is in this actual
world of peace, happiness and security. As the stars burn brightest in
a moonless night, so in the gloom of a wrath-ruled universe all human
affections and virtues would have an added worth and tenderness. In
order that life might be splendored with so noble and heroic sentiments
as grow in the shadow of disaster and are nourished by the sense of
a universal peril and sorrow, one could almost wish that some malign
deity, omnipotent and therefore able to accomplish his purposes without
sin and suffering for his children, had resisted the temptation to do
so and had made this a Vale of Tears.

  The Nineteenth Century has produced great agnostics. Strauss the
  German and Renan the Frenchman were specimens of this particular
  cult. But Robert G. Ingersoll belonged to a lower range of
  scholarship and of thought. He had never studied the great German
  and French critics of the Bible. His “Mistakes of Moses” were
  pervaded by misapprehensions of the text of the Pentateuch.

It is indubitably true that Ingersoll was inferior in scholarship to
Strauss and Renan, and in that and genius to the incomparable Voltaire;
but these deficiencies were not disabilities in the work that he
undertook. He knew his limitations and did not transgress them. He was
not self-tempted into barren fields of scholastic controversy where
common sense is sacrificed to “odious subtlety”. In the work that he
chose he had no use for the dry-as-dust erudition of the modern German
school of Biblical criticism—learned, ingenious, profound, admirable
and futile. He was accomplished in neither Hebrew nor Greek. Aramaic
was to him an unknown tongue, and I dare say that if asked he would
have replied that Jesus Christ, being a Jew, spoke Hebrew. The “text
of the Pentateuch” was not “misapprehended” by him; he simply let it
alone. What he criticised in “The Mistakes of Moses” is the English
version. If that is not a true translation let those concerned to
maintain its immunity from criticism amend it. They are not permitted
to hold that it is good enough for belief and acceptance, but not
good enough to justify an inexpert dissent. Ingersoll’s limitations
were the source of his power; at least they confined him to methods
that are “understanded of the people”; and to be comprehended by the
greatest number of men should be the wish of him who tries to destroy
what he thinks a popular delusion. By the way, I observe everywhere
the immemorial dog’s-eared complaint that he could “tear down” (we
Americans always prefer to say this when we mean pull down) but could
not “build up.” I am not aware that he ever tried to “build up.”
Believing that no religion was needful, he would have thought his work
perfect if all religions had been effaced. The clamor of weak minds for
something to replace the errors of which they may be deprived is one
that the true iconoclast disregards. What he most endeavors to destroy
is not idols, but idolatry. If in the place of the image that he breaks
he set up another he would be like a physician who having cured his
patient of a cramp should inoculate him with an itch. It is only just
to say that the devout journalist whose holy utterance I am afflicting
myself with the unhappiness of criticising nowhere makes the hoary
accusation that Ingersoll could “tear down” but not “build up.” He must
have overlooked it.

What Ingersoll attacked was the Bible as we have it—the English
Bible—not the Bible as it may, can, must, might, would or should be in
Hebrew and Greek. He had no controversy with scholars—not only knew
himself unable to meet them on their own ground (where is plenty of
room for their lonely feet) but was not at all concerned with their
faiths and convictions, nor with the bases of them. Hoping to remove or
weaken a few popular errors, he naturally examined the book in which he
believed them to be found—the book which has the assent and acceptance
of those who hold them and derive them from it. He did not go behind
the record as it reads—nobody does excepting its advocates when it
has been successfully impugned. What has influenced (mischievously,
Ingersoll believed) the thought and character of the Anglo-Saxon race
is not the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Testament, but the English
Bible. The fidelity of that to its originals, its self-sufficiency and
independence of such evidences as only scholarship can bring to its
exposition, these, as Aristotle would say, are matters for separate
consideration. If God has really chosen to give his law to his children
in tongues that only an infinitesimal fraction of them can hope to
understand—has thrown it down amongst them for ignorant translators to
misread, interested priesthoods to falsify and hardy and imaginative
commentators to make ridiculous—has made no provision against all this
debauching of the text and the spirit of it, this must be because he
preferred it so; for whatever occurs must occur because the Omniscience
and Omnipotence permitting it wishes it to occur. Such are not the
methods of our human legislators, who take the utmost care that the
laws be unambiguous, printed in the language of those who are required
to obey them and accessible to them in the original text. I’m not
saying that this is the better and more sensible way; I only say that
if the former is God’s way the fact relieves us all of any obligation
to “restore” the text before discussing it and to illuminate its
obscurities with the side-lights of erudition. Ingersoll had all the
scholarship needful to his work: he knew the meaning of English words.

Says the complacent simpleton again:

  It was idle for a man to deny the existence of God who confessed
  and proclaimed the principle of fraternity.... The hard conception
  of annihilation had no place in sentences that were infused with
  the heat of immortality.

As logic, this has all the charm inhering in the syllogism, All cows
are quadrupeds; this is a quadruped; therefore, this is a cow. The
author of that first sentence would express his thought, naturally,
something like this: All men are brothers; God is their only father;
therefore, there is a God. The other sentence is devoid of meaning, and
is quoted only to show the view that this literary lunatic is pleased
to think that he entertains of annihilation. It is to him a “hard
conception”; that is to say, the state of unconsciousness which he
voluntarily and even eagerly embraces every night of his life, and in
which he remained without discomfort for countless centuries before his
birth, is a most undesirable state. It is, indeed, so very unwelcome
that it shall not come to him—he’ll not have it so. Out of nothingness
he came, but into nothingness he will not return—he’ll die first! Life
is a new and delightful toy and, faith! he means to keep it. If you’d
ask him he would say that his immortality is proved by his yearning for
it; but men of sense know that we yearn, not for what we have, but for
what we have not, and most strongly for what we have not the shadow of
a chance to get.


                                  II

Mr. Harry Thurston Peck is different: he is a scholar, a professor of
Latin in a leading college, an incisive if not very profound thinker,
and a charming writer. He is a capable editor, too, and has conducted
one of our foremost literary magazines, in which, as compelled by the
nature of the business, he has commonly concerned himself mightily
with the little men capering nimbly between yesterday the begetter and
to-morrow the destroyer. Sometimes a larger figure strides into the
field of his attention, but not for long, nor with any very notable
accretion of clarity in the view. The lenses are not adjusted for large
objects, which accordingly seem out of focus and give no true image.
So the observer turns gladly to his ephemera, and we who read him are
the gainers by his loyalty to his habit and to his public who fixed it
upon him. But he so far transcended his limitations as to review in
the late Col. Ingersoll’s the work of a pretty large man. The result
is, to many of Prof. Peck’s admirers, of whom I am one, profoundly
disappointing. In both spirit and method it suggests the question, Of
what real use are the natural gifts, the acquirements and opportunities
that do so little for the understanding? Surely one must sometimes
dissent from the generally accepted appraisement of “the things we
learn in college,” when one observes a man like Prof. Peck (a collegian
down to the bone tips) feeling and thinking after the fashion of a
circuit-riding preacher in Southwestern Missouri. Let us examine some
of his utterances about the great agnostic. Speaking of the purity of
his personal character, this critic says:

  No one has questioned this; and even had it been so questioned
  the fact could not be pertinent to our discussion. Indeed, it is
  not easy to perceive just why his private virtues have been so
  breathlessly brought forward and detailed with so much strenuous
  insistence; for surely husbands who are faithful, fathers who are
  loving, and friends who are generous and sympathetic are not so
  rare in this our world as to make of them phenomena to be noted in
  the annals of the age.

It seems to me entirely obvious why Ingersoll’s friends and supporters
have persisted in putting testimony on these matters into the forefront
of the discussion; and entirely relevant such testimony is. Churchmen
and religionists in all ages and countries have affirmed the necessary
and conspicuous immorality of the irreligious. No notable unbeliever
has been safe from the slanders of the pulpit and the church press. And
in this country to-day ninety-nine of every one hundred “professing
Christians” hold that public and personal morality has no other basis
than the Bible. In this they are both foolish and wise: foolish because
it is so evidently untrue, and wise because to concede its untruth
would be to abandon the defense of religion as a moral force. If men
can be good without religion, and scorning religion, then it is not
religion that makes men good; and if religion does not do this it is
of no practical value and one may as well be without it as with it,
so far as concerns one’s relations with one’s fellow men. We are told
that Christianity is something more than a body of doctrine, that it
is a system of ethics, having a divine origin; that it has a close and
warm relation to conduct, generating elevated sentiments and urging to
a noble and unselfish life. If in support of that view it is relevant
to point to the blameless lives of its “Founder” and his followers it
is equally relevant in contradiction to point to the blameless lives
of its opponents. If Prof. Peck finds it “not easy to perceive” this
he might profitably make some experiments in perception on a big, red
Pennsylvanian barn.

Prof. Peck tries to be fair; he concedes the honesty of Ingersoll’s
belief and acknowledges that

  It is entitled to the same respect that we accord to the unshaken
  faith of other men. Indeed, for the purpose of the moment we
  may even go still further and assume that he was right; that
  Christianity is in truth a superstition and its history a fable;
  that it has no hold on reason; and that the book from which
  it draws in part its teaching and its inspiration is only an
  inconsistent chronicle of old-world myths. Let us assume all this
  and let us still inquire what final judgment should be passed
  upon the man who held these views and strove so hard to make them
  universal.

Prof. Peck is not called upon to make any such concessions and
assumptions. As counsel for the defense, I am as willing to make
admissions as he, and “for the sake of argument,” as the meaningless
saying goes, to confess that the religion attacked by my client is
indubitably true. His justification depends in no degree upon the
accuracy of his judgment, but upon his honest confidence in it; and
that is unquestioned; that is no assumption; it is not conceded but
affirmed. If he believed that in these matters he was right and a
certain small minority of mankind, including a considerable majority
of his living countrymen, wrong it was merely his duty as a gentleman
to speak his views and to strive, as occasion offered or opportunity
served, to “make them universal.” In our personal affairs there is
such a thing as righteous suppression of the truth—even such another
thing as commendable falsehood. In certain circumstances avowal of
convictions is as baleful and mischievous as in other circumstances
dissimulation is. But in all the large matters of the mind—in
philosophy, religion, science, art and the like, a lesser service to
the race than utterance of the truth as he thinks he sees it, leaving
the result to whatever powers may be, a man has no right to be content
with having performed, for it is only so that truth is established. It
was only so that Prof. Peck’s religion was enthroned upon the ruins of
others—among them one so beautiful that after centuries of effacement
its myths and memories stir with a wonderful power the hearts of
scholars and artists of the later and conquering faith. Of that
religion it might once have been said in deprecation of St. Paul, as,
in deprecation of Ingersoll, Prof. Peck now says of religion in general:

  Its roots strike down into the very depths of human consciousness.
  They touch the heart, the sympathies and the emotions. They lay
  strong hold on life itself, and they are the chords to which all
  being can be made to vibrate with a passionate intensity which
  nothing else could call to life.

I have said that Prof. Peck tries to be fair; if he had altogether
succeeded he would have pointed out, not only that Ingersoll sincerely
believed the Christian religion false, but that he believed it
mischievous, and that he was persuaded that its devotees would be
better off with no religion than with any. Had Prof. Peck done that
he could have spared himself the trouble of writing, and many of
his admirers the pain of reading, his variants of the ancient and
discreditable indictment of the wicked incapable who can “tear down,”
but not “build up.” Agnosticism may be more than a mere negation.
It may be, as in Ingersoll it was, a passionate devotion to Truth,
a consecration of self to her service. Of such a one as he it is
incredibly false to say that he can only “destroy” and “has naught to
give.” As well and as truthfully could that be said of one who knocks
away the chains of a slave and goes his way, imposing no others. One
may err in doing so. There are as many breeds of men as of dogs and
horses; and as a cur can not be taught to retrieve nor herd sheep,
nor a roadster to hunt, so there are human tribes unfit for liberty.
One’s zeal in liberation may be greater than one’s wisdom, but faith
in all mankind is at least an honorable error, even when manifested by
hammering at the shackles of the mind. What Ingersoll thought he had
to “give” was Freedom—and that, I take it, is quite as positive and
real as bondage. The reproach of “tearing down” without “building up”
is valid against nobody but an idolatrous iconoclast. Ingersoll was
different.

Prof. Peck has a deal to say against Ingersoll’s methods; he does not
think them sufficiently serious, not to say reverent. This objection
may be met as Voltaire met it—by authorizing his critic to disregard
the wit and answer the argument. But Prof. Peck will not admit that
Ingersoll was witty. He sees nothing in his sallies but “buffoonery,”
a word meaning wit directed against one’s self or something that one
respects. This amazing judgment from the mouth of one so witty himself
could, but for one thing, be interpreted no otherwise than as evidence
that he has not read the works that he condemns. That one thing is
religious bigotry which, abundantly manifest everywhere in the article
under review, is nowhere so conspicuous as in the intemperate, not
to say low, language in which the charge of “buffoonery” is made.
Who that has an open mind would think that it was written of Robert
Ingersoll that he “burst into the sacred silence of their devotion with
the raucous bellowing of an itinerant stump-speaker and the clowning
of a vulgar mountebank”? To those who really know the character of
Robert Ingersoll’s wit—keen, bright and clean as an Arab’s scimetar;
to those who know the clear and penetrating mental insight of which
such wit is the expression and the proof; to those who know how much
of gold and how little of mud clung to the pebbles that he slung at
the Goliaths of authority and superstition; to those who have noted
the astonishing richness of his work in elevated sentiments fitly
expressed, his opulence of memorable aphorism and his fertility of
felicitous phrase—to these it will not seem credible that such a man
can be compared to one who, knowing the infidelity of a friend’s wife,
would “slap his friend upon the back and tell the story with a snicker,
in the coarsest language of the brothel, interspersed with Rabelaisian
jokes.” It is of the nature of wit mercifully to veil its splendors
from the eyes of its victim. The taken thief sees in his captor an
unheroic figure. The prisoner at the bar is not a good judge of the
prosecution. But it is difficult distinctly to conceive a scholar,
a wit, a critic, an accomplished editor of a literary magazine,
committing himself to such judgments as these upon work accessible to
examination and familiar to memory. To paraphrase Pope,

    Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
    Who would not weep if Harry Peck were he?

Another “point” that Prof. Peck is not ashamed to make is that
Ingersoll lectured on religion for money—“in the character of a
paid public entertainer, for his own personal profit.” And in what
character, pray, does anybody lecture where there is a charge for
admittance? In what character have some of the world’s greatest
authors, scientists, artists and masters of crafts generally lectured
when engaged to do so by “lyceums,” “bureaus,” or individual
“managers”? In what character does Prof. Peck conduct his valuable and
entertaining magazine for instruction and amusement of those willing to
pay for it? In what character, indeed, does the Defender of the Faith
put upon the market his austere sense of Ingersoll’s cupidity?

Obviously the agnostic’s offence was not lecturing for pay. It was not
lecturing on religion. It was not sarcasm. It was that, lecturing for
pay on religion, his sarcasm took a direction disagreeable to Prof.
Peck, instead of disagreeable to Prof. Peck’s opponents. As a ridiculer
of infidels and agnostics Ingersoll might have made a great fame and
not one of his present critics would have tried to dim its lustre with
a breath, nor “with polluted finger tarnish it.”

Religions are human institutions; at least those so hold who belong to
none of “the two-and-seventy jarring sects.” Religious faiths, like
political and social, are entitled to no immunity from examination and
criticism; all the methods and weapons that are legitimate against
other institutions and beliefs are legitimate against them. Their
devotees have not the right to shield themselves behind some imaginary
special privilege, to exact an exceptional exemption. A religion of
divine origin would have a right to such exemption; its devotees might
with some reason assist God to punish the crime of _lèse majesté_; but
the divinity of the religion’s origin is the very point in dispute,
and in holding that it shall be settled his way as an assurance of
peace its protagonist is guilty of a hardy and impenitent impudence.
Blasphemy has been defined as speaking disrespectfully of _my_ phemy;
one does not observe among the followers of one faith any disposition
to accord immunity from ridicule to the followers of another faith. The
devoutest Christian can throw mud at Buddha without affecting his own
good standing with the brethren; and if Mahomet were hanged in effigy
from the cross of St. Paul’s, Protestant Christianity would condemn the
act merely as desecration of a sacred edifice.

Here is one more quotation from Prof. Peck, the concluding passage of
his paper:

  Robert Ingersoll is dead. Death came to him with swiftness and
  without a warning. Whether he was even conscious of his end no
  man can say. It may be that before the spark grew quite extinct
  there was for him a moment of perception—that one appalling moment
  when, within a space of time too brief for human contemplation,
  the affrighted mind, as it reels upon the brink, flashes its vivid
  thought through all the years of its existence and perceives the
  final meaning of them all. If such a moment came to him, and as
  the light of day grew dim before his dying eyes his mind looked
  backward through the past, there can have been small consolation in
  the thought, that in all the utterances of his public teaching, and
  in all the phrases of his fervid eloquence, there was nothing that
  could help to make the life of a man on earth more noble, or more
  spiritual, or more truly worth living.

This of a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight!—who
stood, as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty,
for honor, for good will toward men, for truth as it was given to him
to see it, for love!—who by personal example taught patience under
falsehood and silence under vilification!—who when slandered in debate
answered not back, but addressed himself to the argument!—whose entire
life was an inspiration to high thought and noble deed, and whose
errors, if errors they are, the world can not afford to lose for the
light and reason that are in them!

The passage quoted is not without eloquence and that literary
distinction which its author gives to so much of what he writes. Withal
it is infinitely discreditable. There is in it a distinct undertone
of malice—of the same spirit which, among bigots of less civility and
franker speech, affirms of an irreligious person’s sudden death that
it was “a judgment of Heaven,” and which gloats upon the possibility
that he suffered the pangs of a penitence that came, thank God! too
late to command salvation. It is in the same spirit that conceived
and keeps in currency the ten-thousand-times-disproved tales of the
deathbed remorse of Thomas Paine, Voltaire and all the great infidels.
Indubitably posterity will enjoy the advantage of believing the same
thing of Ingersoll; and I can not help thinking that in suggesting
his remorse as only a possibility, instead of relating it as a fact
attested by piteous appeals for divine mercy, Prof. Peck has committed
a sin of omission for which on his own deathbed he will himself suffer
the keenest regret.

  1899.



                            THE SHORT STORY


“The short story is always distinctly a sketch. It can not express what
is the one greatest thing in all literature—intercommunion of human
characters, their juxtapositions, their contrasts.... It is not a high
form of art, and its present extreme popularity bespeaks decadence far
more than advance.”

So said Edgar Fawcett, an author of no small note and consequence in
his day. The one-greatest-things-in-all-literature are as plentiful
and obvious, apparently, as the sole causes of the decline of the
Roman power, yet new ones being continually discovered, it is a fair
presumption that the supply is inexhaustible; and Fawcett, an ingenious
man, could hardly have failed to find one and catalogue it. The one
that he would discover was pretty sure to be as good as another and to
abound in his own work—and Fawcett did not write short stories, but
exceedingly long ones. So “the intercommunion of human characters,”
and so forth, stands. Nevertheless, one fairly great thing in all
literature is the power to interest the reader. Perhaps the author
having the other thing can afford to forego that one, but its presence
is observable, somehow, in much of the work that is devoid of that
polyonymous element noted by Messrs. Fawcett, Thomas, Richard and
Henry. Having that fact in mind, and the added fact that in his own
admirable sonnets (for example) the intercommunion is an absent factor,
I am disposed to think that Edgar was facetious.

The short story, quoth’a, “is not a high form of art”; and inferably
the long story—the novel—is. Let us see about that. As all the arts
are essentially one, addressing the same sensibilities, quickening the
same emotions and subject to the same law and limitations of human
attention, it may be helpful to consider some of the arts other than
literary and see what we can educe from the comparison. It will be
admitted, I hope, that even in its exterior aspect St. Peter’s Church
is a work of high art. But is Rome a work of high art? Was it ever,
or could it by rebuilding be made such? Certainly not, and the reason
is that it can not all take attention at once. We may know that the
several parts are coördinated and interrelated, but we do not discern
and feel the coördination and interrelation. An opera, or an oratorio,
that can be heard at a sitting may be artistic, but if in the manner
of a Chinese play it were extended through the evenings of a week or a
month what would it be? The only way to get unity of impression from a
novel is to shut it up and look at the covers.

Not only is the novel, for the reason given, and for others, a faulty
form of art, but because of its faultiness it has no permanent place
in literature. In England it flourished less than a century and a
half, beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, since whose
death no novels, probably, have been written that are worth attention;
though as to this, one can not positively say, for of the incalculable
multitude written only a few have been read by competent judges, and of
these judges few indeed have uttered judgment that is of record. Novels
are still produced in suspicious abundance and read with fatal acclaim
but the novel of to-day has no art broader and better than that of
its individual sentences—the art of style. That would serve if it had
style.

Among the other reasons why the novel is both inartistic and
impermanent is this—it is mere reporting. True, the reporter creates
his plot, incidents and characters, but that itself is a fault, putting
the work on a plane distinctly inferior to that of history. Attention
is not long engaged by what could, but did not, occur to individuals;
and it is a canon of the trade that nothing is to go into the novel
that might not have occurred. “Probability”—which is but another name
for the commonplace—is its keynote. When that is transgressed, as in
the fiction of Scott and the greater fiction of Hugo, the work is
romance, another and superior thing, addressed to higher faculties with
a more imperious insistence. The singular inability to distinguish
between the novel and the romance is one of criticism’s capital
ineptitudes. It is like that of a naturalist who should make a single
species of the squirrels and the larks. Equally with the novel, the
short story may drag at each remove a lengthening chain of probability,
but there are fewer removes. The short story does not, at least, cloy
attention, confuse with overlaid impressions and efface its own effect.

Great work has been done in novels. That is only to say that great
writers have written them. But great writers may err in their choice
of literary media, or may choose them wilfully for something else than
their artistic possibilities. It may occur that an author of genius is
more concerned for gain than excellence—for the nimble popularity that
comes of following a literary fashion than for the sacred credentials
to a slow renown. The acclamation of the multitude may be sweet in his
ear, the clink of coins, heard in its pauses, grateful to his purse. To
their gift of genius the gods add no security against its misdirection.
I wish they did. I wish they would enjoin its diffusion in the novel,
as for so many centuries they did by forbidding the novel to be. And
what more than they gave might we not have had from Virgil, Dante,
Tasso, Camoëns and Milton if they had not found the epic poem ready to
their misguided hands? May there be in Elysium no beds of asphodel and
moly for its hardy inventor, whether he was Homer or “another man of
the same name.”

The art of writing short stories for the magazines of the period
can not be acquired. Success depends upon a kind of inability that
must be “born into” one—it does not come at call. The torch must be
passed down the line by the thumbless hands of an illustrious line of
prognathous ancestors unacquainted with fire. For the torch has neither
light nor heat—is, in truth, fireproof. It radiates darkness and all
shadows fall toward it. The magazine story must relate nothing: like
Dr. Hern’s “holes” in the luminiferous ether, it is something in which
nothing can occur. True, if the thing is written in a “dialect” so
abominable that no one of sense will read, or so unintelligible that
none who reads will understand, it may relate something that only the
writer’s kindred spirits care to know; but if told in any human tongue
action and incident are fatal to it. It must provoke neither thought
nor emotion; it must only stir up from the shallows of its readers’
understandings the sediment which they are pleased to call sentiment,
murking all their mental pool and effacing the reflected images of
their natural environment.

The master of this school of literature is Mr. Howells. Destitute of
that supreme and almost sufficient literary endowment, imagination,
he does, not what he would, but what he can—takes notes with his eyes
and ears and “writes them up” as does any other reporter. He can
tell nothing but something like what he has seen or heard, and in his
personal progress through the rectangular streets and between the trim
hedges of Philistia, with the lettered old maids of his acquaintance
curtseying from the doorways, he has seen and heard nothing worth
telling. Yet tell it he must and, having told, defend. For years he
conducted a department of criticism with a purpose single to expounding
the after-thought theories and principles which are the offspring of
his own limitations.

Illustrations of these theories and principles he interpreted with
tireless insistence as proofs that the art of fiction is to-day a finer
art than that known to our benighted fathers. What did Scott, what
did even Thackeray know of the subtle psychology of the dear old New
England maidens?

I want to be fair: Mr. Howells has considerable abilities. He is
insufferable only in fiction and when, in criticism, he is making
fiction’s laws with one eye upon his paper and the other upon a
catalogue of his own novels. When not carrying that heavy load,
himself, he has a manly enough mental stride. He is not upon very
intimate terms with the English language, but on many subjects, and
when you least expect it of him, he thinks with such precision as
momentarily to subdue a disobedient vocabulary and keep out the wrong
word. Now and then he catches an accidental glimpse of his subject
in a side-light and tells with capital vivacity what it is not. The
one thing that he never sees is the question that he has raised by
inadvertence, deciding it by implication against his convictions. If
Mr. Howells had never written fiction his criticism of novels would
entertain, but the imagination which can conceive him as writing a good
story under any circumstances would be a precious literary possession,
enabling its owner to write a better one.

In point of fiction, all the magazines are as like as one vacuum to
another, and every month they are the same as they were the month
before, excepting that in their holiday numbers at the last of the year
their vacuity is a trifle intensified by that essence of all dulness,
the “Christmas story.” To so infamous a stupidity has popular fiction
fallen—to so low a taste is it addressed, that I verily believe it is
read by those who write it!

As certain editors of newspapers appear to think that a trivial
incident has investiture of dignity and importance by being
telegraphed across the continent, so these story-writers of the
Reporter School hold that what is not interesting in life becomes
interesting in letters—the acts, thoughts, feelings of commonplace
people, the lives and loves of noodles, nobodies, ignoramuses and
millionaires; of the village vulgarian, the rural maiden whose
spiritual grace is not incompatible with the habit of falling over
her own feet, the somnolent nigger, the clay-eating “Cracker” of
the North Carolinian hills, the society person and the inhabitant
of south-western Missouri. Even when the writers commit infractions
of their own literary Decalogue by making their creations and
creationesses do something picturesque, or say something worth while,
they becloud the miracle with such a multitude of insupportable
descriptive details that the reader, like a tourist visiting an
artificial waterfall at a New England summer place of last resort,
pays through the nose at every step of his way to the Eighth Wonder.
Are we given dialogue? It is not enough to report what was said, but
the record must be authenticated by enumeration of the inanimate
objects—commonly articles of furniture—which were privileged to be
present at the conversation. And each dialogian must make certain
or uncertain movements of the limbs or eyes before and after saying
his say. All this in such prodigal excess of the slender allusions
required, when required at all, for _vraisemblance_ as abundantly to
prove its insertion for its own sake. Yet the inanimate surroundings
are precisely like those whose presence bores us our whole lives
through, and the movements are those which every human being makes
every moment in which he has the misfortune to be awake. One would
suppose that to these gentry and ladry everything in the world except
what is really remarkable is “rich and strange.” They only think
themselves able to make it so by the sea-change that it will suffer by
being thrown into the duck-pond of an artificial imagination and thrown
out again.

Amongst the laws which Cato Howells has given his little senate, and
which his little senators would impose upon the rest of us, is an
inhibitory statute against a breach of this “probability”—and to them
nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man’s
most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men
and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and
women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is
consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions. It is
known to them that “truth is stranger than fiction,” but not that this
has any practical meaning or value in letters. It is to him of widest
knowledge, of deepest feeling, of sharpest observation and insight,
that life is most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with spirits
of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves that yawn in pathways
leading to the light, with existences not of earth, both malign and
benign—ministers of grace and ministers of doom. The truest eye is that
which discerns the shadow and the portent, the dead hands reaching, the
light that is the heart of the darkness, the sky “with dreadful faces
thronged and fiery arms.” The truest ear is that which hears

    Celestial voices to the midnight air,
    Sole, or responsive each to the other’s note,
    Singing—

not “their great Creator,” but not a negro melody, either; no, nor the
latest favorite of the drawing-room. In short, he to whom life is not
picturesque, enchanting, astonishing, terrible, is denied the gift
and faculty divine, and being no poet can write no prose. He can tell
nothing because he knows nothing. He has not a speaking acquaintance
with Nature (by which he means, in a vague general way, the vegetable
kingdom) and can no more find

    Her secret meaning in her deeds

than he can discern and expound the immutable law underlying
coincidence.

Let us suppose that I have written a novel—which God forbid that I
should do. In the last chapter my assistant hero learns that the
hero-in-chief has supplanted him in the affections of the shero. He
roams aimless about the streets of the sleeping city and follows his
toes into a silent public square. There after appropriate mental
agonies he resolves in the nobility of his soul to remove himself
forever from a world where his presence can not fail to be disagreeable
to the lady’s conscience. He flings up his hands in mad disquietude
and rushes down to the bay, where there is water enough to drown all
such as he. Does he throw himself in? Not he—no, indeed. He finds a tug
lying there with steam up and, going aboard, descends to the fire-hold.
Opening one of the iron doors of the furnace, which discloses an
aperture just wide enough to admit him, he wriggles in upon the
glowing coals and there, with never a cry, dies a cherry-red death of
unquestionable ingenuity. With that the story ends and the critics
begin.

It is easy to imagine what they say: “This is too much”; “it insults
the reader’s intelligence”; “it is hardly more shocking for its
atrocity than disgusting for its cold-blooded and unnatural defiance of
probability”; “art should have some traceable relation to the facts of
human experience.”

Well, that is exactly what occurred once in the stoke-hold of a
tug lying at a wharf in San Francisco. _Only_ the man had not been
disappointed in love, nor disappointed at all. He was a cheerful sort
of person, indubitably sane, ceremoniously civil and considerate enough
(evidence of a good heart) to spare whom it might concern any written
explanation defining his deed as “a rash act.”

Probability? Nothing is so improbable as what is true. It is the
unexpected that occurs; but that is not saying enough; it is also
the unlikely—one might almost say the impossible. John, for example,
meets and marries Jane. John was born in Bombay of poor but detestable
parents; Jane, the daughter of a gorgeous hidalgo, on a ship bound
from Vladivostok to Buenos Ayres. Will some gentleman who has written
a realistic novel in which something so nearly out of the common as
a wedding was permitted to occur have the goodness to figure out
what, at their birth, were the chances that John would meet and marry
Jane? Not one in a thousand—not one in a million—not one in a million
million! Considered from a view-point a little anterior in time, it
was almost infinitely unlikely that any event which has occurred would
occur—any event worth telling in a story. Everything being so unearthly
improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the
audacity to relate anything at all. And right heartily do I wish they
had not.

Fiction has nothing to say to probability; the capable writer
gives it not a moment’s attention, except to make what is related
_seem_ probable in the reading—_seem_ true. Suppose he relates the
impossible; what then? Why, he has but passed over the line into the
realm of romance, the kingdom of Scott, Defoe, Hawthorne, Beckford and
the authors of the _Arabian Nights_—the land of the poets, the home
of all that is good and lasting in the literature of the imagination.
Do these little fellows, the so-called realists, ever think of the
goodly company which they deny themselves by confining themselves to
their clumsy feet and pursuing their stupid noses through the barren
hitherland, while just beyond the Delectable Mountains lies in light
the Valley of Dreams, with its tall immortals, poppy-crowned? Why, the
society of the historians alone would be a distinction and a glory!

  1897.



                            WHO ARE GREAT?


The question having been asked whether Abraham Lincoln was the greatest
man this country ever produced, a contemporary writer signifies his own
view of the matter thus:

“Abraham Lincoln was a great man, but I am inclined to believe that
history will reckon George Washington a greater.”

But that is an appeal to an incompetent arbiter. History has always
elevated to primacy in greatness that kind of men—men of action,
statesmen and soldiers. In my judgment neither of the men mentioned is
entitled to the distinction. I should say that the greatest American
that we know about, if not George Sterling, was Edgar Allan Poe. I
should say that the greatest man is the man capable of doing the most
exalted, the most lasting and most beneficial intellectual work—and the
highest, ripest, richest fruit of the human intellect is indubitably
great poetry. The great poet is the king of men; compared with him, any
other man is a peasant; compared with his, any other man’s work is a
joke. What is it likely that remote ages will think of the comparative
greatness of Shakspeare and the most eminent of all Britain’s warriors
or statesmen? Nothing, for knowledge of the latter’s work will have
perished. Who was the greatest of Grecians before Homer? Because you
are unable to mention offhand the names of illustrious conquerors or
empire-builders of the period do you suppose there were none? Their
work has perished, that is all—as will perish the work of Washington
and Lincoln. But the _Iliad_ is with us.

Their work has perished and our knowledge of it. Why? Because no
greater man made a record of it. If Homer had celebrated their deeds
instead of those of his dubious Agamemnon and impossible Achilles, we
should know about them—all that he chose to tell. For a comparison
between their greatness and his the data would be supplied by himself.
Men of action owe their fame to men of thought. The glory of the ruler,
the conqueror or the statesman belongs to the historian or the poet
who made it. He can make it big or little, at his pleasure; he upon
whom it is bestowed is as powerless in the matter as is any bystander.
If there were no writers how would you know that there was a Washington
or a Lincoln? How would you know that there is a Joseph Choate, who
was American Ambassador to Great Britain, or a Nelson Miles, sometime
Commander of our army? Suppose the writers of this country had in 1896
agreed never again to mention the name of William J. Bryan; where would
have been his greatness?

Great writers make great men or unmake them—or can if they like. They
kindle a glory where they please, or quench it where it has begun to
shine. History’s final judgment of Washington and Lincoln will depend
upon the will of the immortal author who chooses to write of them.
Their deeds, although a thousand times more distinguished, their
popularity, though a thousand times greater, can not save from oblivion
even so much as their names. And nothing that they built will abide. Of
the “topless towers” of empire that the one assisted to erect, and the
other to buttress, not a vestige will remain. But what can efface “The
Testimony of the Suns”? Who can unwrite “To Helen”?

If there had been no Washington, American independence would
nevertheless have been won and the American republic established. But
suppose that he alone had taken up arms. He was neither indispensable
nor sufficient. Without Lincoln the great rebellion would have been
subdued and negro slavery abolished. What kind of greatness is that—to
do what another could have done, what was bound to be done anyhow?
I call it pretty cheap work. Great statesmen and great soldiers are
as common as flies; the world is lousy with them. We recognize their
abundance in the saying that the hour brings the man. We do not say
that of a literary emergency. There the demand is always calling for
the supply, and usually calling in vain. Once or twice in a century, it
may be, the great man of thought comes, unforeseen and unrecognized,
and makes the age and the glory thereof all his own by saying what none
but he could say—delivering a message which none but he could bear. All
round him swarm the little great men of action, laying sturdily about
them with mace and sword, changing boundaries which are afterward
changed back again, serving fascinating principles from which posterity
turns away, building states that vanish like castles of cloud, founding
thrones and dynasties with which Time plays at pitch-and-toss. But
through it all, and after it all, the mighty thought of the man of
words flows on and on with the resistless sweep of “the great river
where De Soto lies”—an unchanging and unchangeable current of eternal
good.

    They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
    The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
      And Bahram, that great Hunter—the wild ass
    Stamps o’er his Head, but can not break his sleep.

But the courts that Omar reared still stand, perfect as when he “hewed
the shaft and laid the architrave.” Not the lion and the lizard—we
ourselves keep them and glory in them and drink deep in them, as did
he. O’er his head, too, that good man and considerable poet, Mr. Edgar
Fawcett, stamped in vain; but a touch on a book, and lo! old Omar is
broad awake and with him wakens Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a
lute.”

Art and literature are the only things of permanent interest in this
world. Kings and conquerors rise and fall; armies move across the
stage of history and disappear in the wings; mighty empires are evolved
and dissolved; religions, political systems, civilizations flourish,
die and, except in so far as gifted authors may choose to perpetuate
their memory, are forgotten and all is as before. But the thought of
a great writer passes from civilization to civilization and is not
lost, although his known work, his very name, may perish. You can
not unthink a thought of Homer, but the deeds of Agamemnon are long
undone, and the only value that he has, the only interest, is that he
serves as material for poets. Of Cæsar’s work only that of the pen
survives. If a statue by Phidias, or a manuscript by Catullus, were
discovered to-day the nations of Europe would be bidding against one
another for its possession to-morrow—as one day the nations of Africa
may bid for a newly discovered manuscript of some one now long dead
and forgotten. Literature and art are about all that the world really
cares for in the end; those who make them are not without justification
in regarding themselves as masters in the House of Life and all others
as their servitors. In the babble and clamor, the pranks and antics
of its countless incapables, the tremendous dignity of the profession
of letters is overlooked; but when, casting a retrospective eye into
“the dark backward and abysm of time” to where beyond these voices
is the peace of desolation, we note the majesty of the few immortals
and compare them with the pigmy figures of their contemporary kings,
warriors and men of action generally—when across the silent battle
fields and hushed _fora_ where the dull destinies of nations were
determined, nobody cares how, we hear,

                like ocean on a western beach,
    The surge and thunder of the Odyssey—

then we appraise literature at its true value; and how little worth
while seems all else with which Man is pleased to occupy his fussy soul
and futile hands!

  1901.



                           POETRY AND VERSE


Love of poetry is universal, but this is not saying much; for men
in general love it not as poetry, but as verse—the form in which
it commonly finds utterance, and in which its utterance is most
acceptable. Not that verse is essential to poetry; on the contrary,
some of the finest poetry extant (some of the passages of the Book
of Job, in the English version, for familiar examples) is neither
metric nor rhythmic. I am not quite sure, indeed, but the best test of
poetry yet discovered might not be its persistence or disappearance
when clad in the garb of prose. In this opinion I differ, though with
considerable reluctance, with General Lucius Foote, who asserts that
“every feature which makes poetry to differ from prose is the result
of expression.” This dictum he has fortified by but a single example:
he puts a stanza of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” into very
good prose. Now, for one who has at times come so perilously near to
writing genuine poetry as has General Foote, this is a little too bad.
Surely no man of so competent literary judgment ever before affected
to believe that Tennyson’s resonant patriotic lines were poetry, in
any sense. They are, however, a little less distant from it in General
Foote’s prose version—“There were some cannons on the right, and some
on the left, and some in front, and they fired with a great noise”—than
they are in the original. And I have the hardihood to add that as a
rule the “old favorites” of the lyceum—the ringing and rhetorical
curled darlings of the public—the “Address to the American Flag,”
“The Bells,” the “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night,” and all the ghastly
lot of them, are very rubbishy stuff, indeed. There are exceptions,
unfortunately, but to a cultivated taste—the taste of a mind that not
only knows what it likes, but knows and can definitely state why it
likes it—nine in ten of them are offencive. I say it is unfortunate
that there are exceptions. It is unfortunate as impairing the beauty
and symmetry of the rule, and unfortunate for the authors of the
exceptional poems, who must endure through life the consciousness that
their popularity is a cruel injustice.

Far be it from me to underrate the value of the delicate and difficult
art of managing words. It is to poetry what color is to painting. The
thought is the outline drawing, which, if it be great, no dauber who
stops short of actually painting it out can make wholly mean, but to
which the true artist with his pigments can add a higher glory and
a new significance. No one who has studied style as a science and
endeavored to practice it as an art; no one who knows how to select
with subtle skill the word for the place; who balances one part of
his sentence against another; who has an alert ear for the harmony
of stops, cadences and inflections, orderly succession of accented
syllables and recurrence of related sounds—no one, in short, who knows
how to write prose can hold in light esteem an art so nearly allied
to his own as that of poetic expression, including as it does the
intricate one of versification, which itself embraces such a multitude
of dainty wisdoms. But expression is not all; while, on the one hand,
it can no more make a poetic idea prosaic than it can make falsehood
of truth, so, on the other, it is unable to elevate and beautify a
sentiment essentially vulgar or base. The experienced miner will no
more surely detect the presence of gold in the rough ore than a trained
judgment the noble sentiment in the crude or ludicrous verbiage in
which ignorance or humor may have cast it; and the terrier will with no
keener nose penetrate the disguise of the rat that has rolled in a bed
of camomile than the practiced intelligence detect the pauper thought
masquerading in fine words. The mind that does not derive a quiet
gratification from the bald statement that the course of the divine
river Alph was through caves of unknown extent, whence it fell into a
dark ocean, will hardly experience a thrill of delight when told by
Coleridge that

    Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man,
      Down to a sunless sea.

Nor would one who is capable of physically feeling the lines,

    Full many a glorious morning have I seen
      Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

have disdained to be told by some lesser Shakspeare that he had
observed mornings so fine that the mountains blushed with pleasure to
be noticed by them. Poetry is too multiform and many sided for anyone
to dogmatize upon single aspects and phases of it as if they were
the whole; it has as many shapes as Proteus, and as many voices as a
violin. It sometimes thunders and sometimes it prattles; it shouts
and exults, but on occasion it can whisper. Crude and harsh at one
time, the voice of the muse is at another smooth, soft, exquisite,
luxurious; and again scholarly and polite. There is ornate poetry, like
the façade of a Gothic cathedral, and there is poetry like a Doric
temple. Poems there are which blaze like a parterre of all brilliant
flowers, and others as chaste and pallid as the white lily. It is all
good (though I hasten to explain with some alarm that I do not think
all verse is good) but the best minds are best agreed in awarding the
palm to poetry that is most severely simple in diction—in which are
fewest “inversions”—from which words of new coinage and compounding
are rigorously excluded, and the old are used in their familiar sense;
poetry, that is to say, that differs least in expression from the best
prose. A truly poetic line—a line that I never tire of repeating to
myself—is this from Byron:

    And the big rain comes dancing to the earth.

It is from the description of a storm in the Alps, in “Childe Harold.”
I will quote the whole stanza in order that the reader may be reminded
how much of the excellence of this line depends upon its context:

      And this is in the night—most glorious night!
        Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
      A sharer in thy fierce and far delight—
        A portion of the tempest and of thee!
      How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
        And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
      And now again ’tis black—and now the glee
        Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
    As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.

It would not be difficult, were it worth while, to point out in this
stanza almost as many faults as it has lines; after the “lit lake” the
“phosphoric sea”—a simile that repeats the image and debauches it—is
singularly execrable, and the “young earthquake’s birth” is almost as
bad; but all the imperfections of the stanza count for nothing, for
they are redeemed by its merits, and particularly by that one splendid
line. Yet how could the thought it holds be more baldly stated? I only
stipulate that the rain shall be “big,” and “dancing” seem to be the
manner of its approach. With these not very hard, and perfectly fair,
conditions let ingenuity do its malevolent worst to vulgarize that
thought. These few instances prove, I hope, that poetry, whatever it
is, is something more than “words, words, words”—that there is such a
thing as poetry of the thought.

But let us take a different kind of example. If poetry is all in the
manner, as General Foote avers, expression must be able to create
poetry out of anything; at least, no line has been drawn between the
prosaic ideas upon which expression can work its miracle and those
upon which it can not. I am, therefore, justified by a familiar law of
logic in assuming that it is meant that expression, by the mere magic
of method, can make any idea poetical. Now, I beg most respectfully to
submit the following problems to be “worked out” by believers in that
dictum: Make poetry of the thought that—

(1) Glue is made from the hoofs of cattle, and (2) silk purses by
macerating the ears of sows in currant jelly.

If anyone will build a superstructure of poetry upon either of those
“ideas” as a foundation I will be first and loudest in calling
attention to the glory of the edifice.

I have said that men in general do not love poetry as poetry, but as
verse. They are pleased with verse, but if the verse contain poetry
they like it none the better for that. To the vast majority of the
readers of even the higher class newspapers, verse and poetry are
terms strictly synonymous. The pleasure they get from metre and rhyme
is merely physical or sensual. It is much the same kind of pleasure
as that derived from the clatter of a drum and the rhythmic clash
of cymbals, and altogether inferior to the delight that the other
instruments of a band produce. Emerson, I believe, accounts for our
delight in metrical composition by supposing metre to have some
close relation to the rhythmical recurrences within our physical
organization—respiration, the pulse-beat, etc. No doubt he is right,
and if so we need not take the trouble to deride the easy-going
intellect that is satisfied with sound for sentiment whenever the sound
is in harmony with the physical nature that perceives it, for in such
sounds is a natural charm. The old lady who found so much Christian
comfort in pronouncing the word “Mesopotamia” was nobody’s fool; the
word consists of two pure dactyls.

For an example of the satisfaction the ordinary mind takes in mere
metre there is nothing better than the senseless refrains of popular
songs—things which make not even the pretense of containing ideas.
From the “hey ding a ding” of Shakspeare and the “luddy, fuddy,” etc.,
of Mr. Lester Wallack’s famous thieves’ song in “Rosedale,” to the
“whack fol-de-rol” of inferior and less original composers, they are
all alike in appealing to nothing in the world but the sense of time.
And in this they differ in no essential particular from the verses in
the newspapers; for such ideas as these contain—and God knows they are
harmless—are probably never perfectly grasped by the reader, who, when
he has finished his “poem,” is very sure to be unable to tell you what
it is all about. I have proved this by repeated experiments, and I
believe I am not far wrong on the side of immoderation in saying that
of every one hundred adults who can read and write with ease, there
are ninety and nine to whom poetry is a sealed book—who not only do
not recognize it when read, but do not understand it when pointed out.
There is hardly any subject on which the ignorance of educated persons
is more deep, dark and universal. And in one sense it is hopeless. By
no set instruction can a knowledge of poetry be gained. It is (to those
having the capacity) a result of general refinement—the fruit of a
taste and judgment that come of culture. The difficulty of imparting it
is immensely enhanced by the want of a definition. If one have gift and
knowledge it is easy enough to say what is poetry, but not so easy to
say what poetry is.

Hunters have a saying that a deer is safe from the man that never
misses. Likewise it may be said that the faultless poet gets no
readers; for, as the hunter can never miss only by never firing, so
the poet can avoid faults only by not writing. There is no such thing
in art or letters as attainable perfection; the utmost that any man
can hope to do is to make the sum and importance of his excellences so
exceed the sum and importance of his faults that the general impression
shall seem faultless—that the good shall divert attention from the bad
in the contemplation and efface it in the recollection. In considering
the character of a particular work and assigning it to its true place
amongst works of similar scope and design, we must, indeed, balance
merits against demerits, endeavoring in such a general way as the
nature of the problem permits, to say which preponderate, and to what
extent, making allowance in censure and modification in praise. But the
author of the work is to be rightly judged by a different method, and
he who has done great work is great, despite the number and magnitude
of his failures and imperfections. These may serve to point a moral
or illustrate a principle by its violation, but they do not and can
not dim the glory of the better performance. Is he not a strong man
who can lift a thousand pounds, notwithstanding that in acquiring the
ability he failed a hundred times to lift the half of it? Who was the
strongest man in the world—he who once lifted the greatest weight,
or he who twice lifted the second greatest? The author of “Paradise
Lost” wrote afterward “Paradise Regained.” He who wrote a poem called
“In Memoriam” wrote a thing called “The Northern Farmer.” Of what
significance is that? Shall we count also a man’s washing-list against
him? Suppose that Byron had not written the “Hours of Idleness”—would
that have enhanced the value of “Childe Harold”? Is our hoard of
Shakspearean pure gold the smaller because from the mine whence it came
came also some of the base metal of “Titus Andronicus”? Surely it does
not matter whether the hand that at one time wrote the lines “To Helen”
was at another time writing “The Bells” or whittling a pine shingle.
Literature is not like a game of billiards, in which the player is
rated according to his average. In estimating the relative altitudes of
mountain peaks we look no lower than their summits.

In judging men by this broader method than that which we apply to
their work we do but practice that method whereby posterity arrives
at judgments so just and true that in their prediction consists the
whole science of criticism. To anticipate the verdict of posterity—that
is all the most daring critic aspires to do, and to do that he
should strive to exclude the evidence that posterity will not hear.
Posterity is a tribunal in which there will be no testimony for the
prosecution except what is inseparable from the strongest testimony
for the defence. It will consider no man’s bad work, for none will be
extant. Nay, it will not even attend to the palliating or aggravating
circumstances of his life and surroundings, for these too will have
been forgotten; if not lost from the records they will be whelmed under
mountains of similar or more important matter—Pelion upon Ossa of
accumulated “literary materials.”

These are points to which the critics do not sufficiently attend—do
not, indeed, attend at all. They endeavor to anticipate the judgment
of posterity by a method as unlike posterity’s as their judgment and
ingenuity can make it. They attentively study their poet’s private
life and his relation to the time and its events in which he lived.
They go to his work for the key to his character, and return to his
character for the key to his work, then ransack his correspondence for
side-lights on both. They paw dusty records and forgotten archives;
they thumb and dog’s-ear the libraries; and he who can turn up an
original document or hitherto unnoted fact exults in the possession
of an advantage over his fellows that will justify the publication of
another volume to befog the question. Then comes posterity, calmly
overlooks the entire mass of ingenious irrelevance, fixes a tranquil
eye upon those lines which the poet has inscribed the highest, and
determines his mental stature as simply, as surely and with as little
assistance as Daniel discerning the hand of God in the letters blazing
upon the palace wall.


                                  II

The world is nearly all discovered, mapped and described. In the hot
hearts of two continents, and the “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed
ice” about the poles, uncertainty still holds sway over a lessening
domain, and there Fancy waves her joyous wing unclipped by knowledge.
As in the material world, so in the world of mind. The daring
incursions of conjecture have been followed and discredited by the
encroachments of science, whereby the limits of the unknown have been
narrowed to such mean dimensions that imagination has lost her free,
exultant stride, and moves with mincing step and hesitating heart.

I do not mean to say that to-day knows much more that is worth
knowing than did yesterday, but that with regard to poetry’s
materials—the visible and audible without us, and the emotional
within—we have compelled a revelation of Nature’s secrets, and found
them uninteresting to the last degree. To the modern “instructed
understanding” she has something of the air of a detected impostor,
and her worshipers have neither the sincerity that comes from faith,
nor the enthusiasm that is the speech of sincerity. The ancients not
only had, as Dr. Johnson said, “the first rifling of the beauties of
Nature”; they had the immensely greater art advantage of ignorance of
her dull, vulgar and hideous processes, her elaborate movements tending
nowhither, and the aimless monotony of her mutations. The telescope
had not pursued her to the heights, nor the microscope dragged her
from her ambush. The meteorologists had not analyzed her temper, nor
constructed mathematical formulæ to forecast her smiles and frowns.
Mr. Edison had not arrived to show that the divine gift of speech
(about the only thing that distinguishes men, parrots, and magpies
from the brutes) is also an attribute of metal. In the youth of the
world they had, in short, none of the disillusionizing sciences with
which a critical age, delving curiously about the roots of things, has
sapped the substructure of religion and art alike. I do not regret the
substitution of knowledge for conjecture, and doubt for faith; I only
say that it has its disadvantages, and among them we reckon the decay
of poesy. In an enlightened age, Macaulay says,

  Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will
  talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain
  extent enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the
  effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony,
  the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek rhapsodists,
  according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into
  convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping-knife while he
  shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales
  and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers
  almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a civilized
  community, and most rare among those who participate most in its
  improvements. They linger among the peasantry.

While it is true in a large sense that the world’s greatest poets have
lived in rude ages, when their races were not long emerged from the
night of barbarism—like birds the poets sing best at sunrise—it must
not be supposed that similarly favorable conditions are supplied to
a rude individual intelligence in an age of polish. With a barbarous
age that had recently set its face to the dawn a Joaquin Miller would
have been in full sympathy, and might have interpreted its spirit in
songs of exceeding splendor. But the very qualities that would have
made him _en rapport_ with such an era make him an isolated voice in
ours; while Tennyson, the man of culture, full of the disposition of
his time—albeit the same is of less adequate vitality—touches with a
valid hand the harp which the other beats in vain. The altar is growing
cold, the temple itself becoming a ruin; the divine mandate comes with
so feeble and faltering a voice that the priest has need of a trained
and practiced ear to catch it and the gift of tongues to impart its
meaning to a generation concerned with the unholy things whose voice
is prose. As a poetical mental attitude, that of doubt is meaner
than that of faith, that of speculation less commanding than that of
emotion; yet the poet of to-day must assume them, and “In Memoriam”
attests the wisdom of him who “stoops to conquer”—loyally accepting
the hard conditions of his epoch, and bending his corrigible genius in
unquestioning assent to the three thousand and thirty-nine articles of
doubt.

As inspiration grows weak and acceptance disobedient, form of delivery
becomes of greater moment; in so far as it can, the munificence of
manner must mitigate the poverty of matter; so it occurs that the
poets of later life excel their predecessors in the delicate and
difficult arts and artifices of versification as much as they fall
below them in imagination and power.

  1878.



                          THOUGHT AND FEELING


“What is his idea?—what thought does he express?” asks—rather loftily—a
distinguished critic and professor of English literature to whom I
submitted a brief poem of Mr. Loveman. I had not known that Mr. Loveman
(of whom, by the way, I have not heard so much as I expect to) had
tried to express a thought; I had supposed that his aim was to produce
an emotion, a feeling. That is all that a poet—as a poet—can do. He
may be philosopher as well as poet—may have a thought, as profound a
thought as you please, but if he do not express it so as to produce an
emotion in an emotional mind he has not spoken as a poet speaks. It is
the philosopher’s trade to make us think, the poet’s to make us feel.
If he is so fortunate as to have his thought, well and good; he can
make us feel, with it as well as without—and without it as well as with.

One would not care to give up the philosophy that underruns so much of
Shakspeare’s work, but how little its occasional absence affects our
delight is shown by the reading of such “nonsense verses” as the song
in a “As You Like It,” beginning:

    It was a lover and his lass,
      With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.

One does not need the music; the lines sing themselves, and are full of
the very spirit of poetry. What the dickens they may chance to mean is
quite another matter. What is poetry, anyhow, but “glorious nonsense”?
But how very glorious the nonsense happens to be! What “thought” did
Ariel try to express in his songs in “The Tempest”? There is hardly
the tenth part of a thought in them; yet who that has a rudimentary,
or even a vestigial, susceptibility to sentiment and feeling, can
read them without the thrill that is stubborn to the summoning of the
profoundest reflections of Hamlet in his inkiest cloak?

Poetry may be conjoined with thought. In the great poets it commonly
is—that is to say, we award the palm to him who is great in more than
one direction. But the poetry is a thing apart from the thought and
demanding a separate consideration. The two have no more essential
connection than the temple and its granite, the statue and its bronze.
Is the sculptor’s work less great in the clay than it becomes in the
hands of the foundry man?

No one, not the greatest poet nor the dullest critic, knows what
poetry is. No man, from Milton down to the acutest and most
pernicious lexicographer, has been able to define its name. To catch
that butterfly the critic’s net is not fine enough by much. Like
electricity, it is felt, not known. If it could be known, if the secret
were accessible to analysis, why, one could be taught to write poetry
without having been “born unto singing.”

So it happens that the most penetrating criticism must leave eternally
unsaid the thing that is most worth saying. We can say of a poem as
of a picture, an Ionic column, or any work of art: “It is charming!”
But why and how it charms—there we are dumb, its creator no less than
another.

What is it in art before which all but the unconscious peasant and the
impenitent critic confess the futility of speech? Why does a certain
disposition of words affect us deeply when if differently arranged to
mean the same thing they stir no emotion whatever? He who can answer
that has surprised the secret of the Sphinx, and after him shall be no
more poetry forever!

Expound who is able the charm of these lines from “Kubla Khan:”

    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw.
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.

There is no “thought” here—nothing but the baldest narrative in common
words arranged in their natural order; but upon whose heart-strings
does not that maiden play?—and who does not adore her?

Like the entire poem of which they are a part, and like the entire
product of which the poem is a part, the lines are all imagination
and emotion. They address, not the intellect, but the heart. Let the
analyst of poetry wrestle with them if he is eager to be thrown.

  1903.



                         THE TIMOROUS REPORTER



                         THE PASSING OF SATIRE


“Young man,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not commonly permit
myself to be ‘interviewed’; what paper do you represent?”

The Timorous Reporter spoke the name of the great journal that was
connected with him.

“I never have heard of it,” said the Melancholy Author. “I trust that
it is devoted to the interests of Literature.”

Assurance was given that it had a Poets’ Corner and that among its
regular contributors it numbered both Aurora Angelina Aylmer and
Plantagenet Binks, the satirist.

“Indeed,” said the great man, “you surprise me! I had supposed that
satire, once so large and wholesome an element in English letters, was
long dead and d—— pardon me—buried. You must bear with me if I do not
concede the existence of Mr. Binks. Satire cannot co-exist with so
foolish sentiments as ‘the brotherhood of man,’ ‘the trusteeship of
wealth,’ moral irresponsibility, tolerance, Socialism and the rest of
it. Who can ‘lash the rascals naked through the world’ in an age that
holds crime to be a disease, and converts the prison into a sanitarium?”

The Timorous Reporter ventured to ask if he considered crime a symptom
of mental health. By way of fortifying himself for a reply, the
melancholy one visited the sideboard and toped a merciless quantity of
something imperfectly known to his visitor from the arid South.

“Crime, sir,” said he, partly recovering, “is merely a high degree of
selfishness directed by a low degree of intelligence. If selfishness
is a disease none of us is altogether well. We are all selfish, or
we should not be living, but most of us have the discernment to see
that our permanent advantage does not lie in gratification of our
malevolence by murder, nor in augmenting our possessions by theft.
Those of us who think otherwise should be assisted to a saner view by
punishment. It is sad, so sad, to reflect that many of us escape it.”

“But it is agreed,” said the journalist, “by all our illustrious
sociologists—Brand Whitlock, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs and Emma
Goldman—that punishment is useless, that it does not deter; and they
prove it by the number of convictions recorded against individual
criminals. Will you kindly say if they are right?”

“They know that punishment deters—not perfectly, for nothing is
perfect, but it deters. If every human institution that lamentably
fails to accomplish its full purpose is to be abolished none will
remain.”

The Timorous Reporter begged to be considered worthy to know what,
apart from its great wisdom and interest, all this had to do with
satire.

“Satire,” said the Melancholy Author, “is punishment. As such it has
fallen into public disfavor through disbelief in its justice and
efficacy. So the rascals go unlashed. Instead of ridicule we have
solemn reprobation; for wit we have ‘humor’—with a slang word in the
first line, two in the second and three in the third. Why, sir, the
American reading public hardly knows that there ever was a distinctive
kind of writing known, technically, as satire—that it was once not
only a glory to literature but, incidentally, a terror to all manner
of civic and personal unworth. If we had to-day an Aristophanes, a
Jonathan Swift or an Alexander Pope, he would indubitably be put into a
comfortable prison with all sanitary advantages, fed upon yellow-legged
pullets and ensainted by the Little Brothers of the Bad. For they would
think him a thief. In the same error, the churches would pray for him
and the women compete for his hand in marriage.”

The thought of so great a perversion of justice overcame the creator
of the vision and he sank into a chair already occupied by the cat—a
contested seat.



                     SOME DISADVANTAGES OF GENIUS


“My child,” said the Melancholy Author, “the sharpest affliction
besetting a man of genius is genius.”

The Timorous Reporter ventured to explain that he had been taught
otherwise.

“In the first place,” continued the Melancholy Author, inattentive
to dissent, “the man of genius cannot hope to be understood by his
contemporaries. The more they concede his genius, the less will they
comprehend any particular manifestation of it. Carlyle has said that
the first impression of a work of genius is disagreeable. There are
magazines and publishing houses that say they receive as many as
twenty-five thousand manuscripts a year. Of course, as Dr. Holmes
pointed out, one does not have to eat an entire cheese to know if he
likes it—it is needless to read all manuscripts through to the bitter
end. But how if in those that are really great the apparently bitter
end is the beginning? If the first impression is disagreeable—to one
who is _not_ a genius, just an editor—what chance of acceptance has the
work?”

Not daring to affirm his steadfast conviction that all editors are men
of genius, the interviewer suffered in (and from) silence, and the
great man went on:

“Furthermore, the work of a man of genius is necessarily different from
that of all others; by that difference, indeed, it is credentialed—to
posterity—as a work of genius. But the editor, or the publisher’s
reader—will he feel sure of his ground when dealing with that to which
he is unaccustomed?—of whose acceptability to the public he is without
the _criteria_ to judge? With an abiding though secret sense of his
own fallibility, will he not think it expedient to take the safe side
and reject the work? That will at least entail no possible ‘difference
of opinion’ with his employer. Dead manuscripts tell no tales. Sir, in
the noble profession of letters it is the rule, attested by a thousand
familiar instances, that the man of genius is starved by those whose
successors in the seats of authority pay enormous prices for any
scrap of his work that may survive him. Consider the case of Poe, of
Lafcadio Hearn—who confessed that in the last dozen years of his life
his average annual earnings by his pen did not exceed five hundred
dollars. And I am no millionaire myself.”

As the Melancholy Author paused to celebrate his poverty at the
sideboard his auditor cautiously advanced the view that several living
writers of indubitable genius were pretty prosperous.

“Despite their genius,” said the great man, drying his lips with
his coat-sleeve, “and because of something else. One of them may
have the good fortune to take the attention of some distinguished
person having the world’s ear at his tongue’s end, and the habit of
loquacity—a person like Colonel Roosevelt, or the late Mr. Gladstone.
Did not the latter, by a few words of commendation, provide for life
for Mrs. Humphry Ward and for eternity for Marie Bashkirtseff? True,
the one is impenitently dull and the other was a shrilling lunatic;
but by accident he _might_ have praised an author of consummate
ability. Another really great writer may be prosperous—that is to
say, popular—because of some engaging mannerism or artifice; as Mr.
Kipling bends from his Olympian omniscience to flatter his readers
with colloquial familiarity. Another, like Dickens, may have the good
luck to be an amusing vulgarian, or, like Mr. Riley, be willing to
write lyrics of the pumpkin-field in the ‘dialect’ of those who eat
pumpkins. It may happen, too, although in point of fact it never does
happen, that a man of genius is at the little end of a long, brass
trumpet—I mean, is editor of Our Leading Magazine. Even conceding your
entire claim for these fortunate persons (which I do not) it is clear
that their genius has had nothing to do with their success. You are a
hebetudinous futilitarian!”

The Timorous Reporter “shrank to his second cause and was no more.”
On reviving, he humbly submitted that he had affirmed nothing of the
authors named, nor even mentioned them.

“Genius has been a thousand times defined,” resumed the oracle,
regardless; “nevertheless we know fairly well what, partly, it is.
_Inter alia_, it is the faculty of knowing things without having to
learn them. When Hugo wrote his immortal narrative of Waterloo he had
never seen a battle; nor was Dickens ever in solitary confinement
in the Pennsylvania penitentiary. But will the possessor of this
miraculous faculty profit by it, or even be able rightly to use it in
the service of another’s gain? No; in his dealings with his fellow
men, editors and publishers included, he will find them unaware, and
unable to perceive, that he knows any more than they do. He will
encounter, indeed, the most insuperable distrust, even from those who
concede his genius; for genius is almost universally held to be a
particular kind of brilliant disability. The story of Homer instructing
the sandal-maker how to make foot-gear is, of course, apocryphal, but
no more credence is given to the authentic instance of Lord Brougham
showing the brewer how to make beer. Even those who assent to the
best definition of genius ever made—‘great general ability directed
into a particular channel’—will unconsciously assume that it is
confined to that channel, and will assist in keeping it there. Its
most distinguishing feature—versatility—the power to do many kinds
of work equally well—will get no contemporary recognition. Having a
reputation for writing great stories (for example) you will write
equally great essays, satires and what not, all in vain. It is only to
mediocrity that ‘great general ability’ is conceded. That is why the
late William Sharp, turning to another kind of work than that in which
he had distinguished himself, took a feminine name, and, secure from
disparaging comparison with himself, was accessible to commendation.
As the work of William Sharp, that of ‘Fiona McLeod’ would have evoked
a chorus of deprecation as evidence of failing power. In literature, a
single specialty is all that contemporary criticism is willing to allow
to genius. Posterity tells a juster tale, albeit disposed to go to the
other extreme, seeing something of the fire divine in even the paste
jewels wherewith the great lapidary pelted the wolf from his door.”

“Then you would advise the writer of distinction to stick to
his—latest?”

“That will not save him. The criticism that will not concede
versatility will deny stability. After a few years, the man of genius,
however he may confine himself to the kind of work in which, despite
its excellence, he has been successful, must face the inevitable and
solemn judgment that he has ‘exhausted the vein,’ ‘fallen down,’
‘gone stale.’ It matters not if practice and years have ripened his
imagination, broadened his knowledge and refined his taste—for great
minds do not decay with age; his contemporaries will have it that he
is ‘written out,’ for he is no longer a new thing under the sun.”

The Melancholy Author himself looks hardly more than seventy-five.

“‘Written out, written out’—England said so of Dickens and Tennyson;
America said so of Bret Harte; both have for five years been saying so
of Kipling. The great writer is likely, by the way, to share that view
himself, as Thackeray, reading over some of his early work, exclaimed:
‘What a giant I was in those days!’

“Another lion in the path of genius is its own success—the low kind of
success that is called popularity, for which some sons of the gods,
with their bellies sticking to their backs, really do strive. Let one
of them achieve a result of this kind and he will find it all the
harder to achieve another. Read Stockton’s story of ‘My Wife’s Deceased
Sister.’ The narrator tells how, having published a popular tale with
that title, he was ever thereafter what is called in the slang to which
your detestable profession is addicted, ‘a dead one.’ Editors would
take nothing that he offered, but always begged for something like ‘My
Wife’s Deceased Sister.’ Sir, I know how it feels to go up against
that invincible competitor, oneself. After publication of my famous
story, ‘The Maiden Pirate,’ my greater (and even longer) work, ‘A
Treatise on the Chaldean Dative Case,’ was rejected by twenty editors!
Let the man of genius beware of popularity; one slip of that kind and
a brilliant future is behind him. But it does not greatly matter, for
even without incurring the mischance of a ‘hit,’ the great writer is,
as I said, foredoomed to the charge of degeneracy.”

The Timorous Reporter humbly murmured the names of Hall Caine, Henry
James, the late F. Marion Crawford, Mrs. Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss
Mary Murfree, Miss Mary Edward Bok, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
Sylvester Vierick, and the venerable Hildegarde Hawthorne—then edged
himself softly toward an open door. With unforeseen resourcefulness,
the sad-eyed deprecator of dissent seized a convenient missile, but it
happened to be a decanter of Medford rum, and the situation was saved.
With fortified solemnity the father of the maiden pirate again took up
his parable:

“Certain literary domains are posted with warnings to the trespasser,
and against men of genius the inhibition is fiercely enforced.
Irruptions of mediocrity entail no penalty because unobserved by
the constabulary. The supposed proprietors of these guarded estates
are long dead, leaving no heirs; the ‘notices’ are put up without
authority, for the land is really a common. One of these closed areas
is that of Jonathan Swift, who dispossessed some of the successors of
Lucian. Whom Lucian dispossessed we do not know, all evidences of an
earlier occupancy than his having been effaced by the burning of the
great library at Alexandria. All, doubtless, incurred ‘the penalty of
the law,’ each in his turn, from the dunces of his day. The ‘penalty’
is execration as an imitator. Long before Swift, and probably long
before Lucian, an accepted method of satire was comparison of actual
with imaginary civilizations, through tales of fictitious travelers
in unreal regions. But since Swift, woe to the writer having the
hardihood to adopt the method, however candidly avowed, and however
different the manner! It is as if guardians of Homer’s fame had chased
Dante and Camoëns out of the field of the epic, and had put up the
bars against Milton. Nay, it is as if an engineer platting a survey
were accused of imitating Euclid. True, Virgil, who did imitate Homer
most shamelessly, escapes censure. I fancy the Proponents-Militant of
Originality have not heard of him.

“In our own day Bret Harte wrote charming sketches of life and
character in Californian mining camps. Many others had done so before
him, but for many years after his first work in that field none could
enter it without incurring austere denunciation as imitator and
plagiarist; and even to-day one having the experience to observe or
the genius to imagine the life of a Californian mining camp, or any
interesting feature of it, delivers his tidings, like the heralds of
old, at his peril.

“Another of these posted preserves is that of satire in iambic
pentameter verse. This mode of expression is supposed to belong
by right divine to Alexander Pope, who made the most constant and
cleverest use of it. With its concomitants of epigram and antithesis,
it was old before Pope was young. He was himself a ‘trespasser’; he
was roundly reviled for imitating Dryden. The form was used by other
Queen Anne’s men, acceptably by Johnson and by many a later; but of
this the patrolmen and gatekeepers of the Pope reservation in our day
have not been apprised by ‘report divine’—the only way that they can
be made to know anything, for read, the devil a bit do they. In the
literary landscape they see only the highest peaks of the Delectable
Mountains. They know only the large, familiar figures, and these only
by their most characteristic work. To their indurated understandings
each individual of this bright band stands for a particular field of
composition. His title to exclusive possession is _res adjudicata_. If
anybody set foot across the sacred boundary—little fellows excepted—he
will find himself the fundamental element in a cone of pummeling
custodians. Young man, in your report of this interview you will be
good enough to quote me as deprecating that situation.”

The interviewer pledged his life, his sacred fortune and his honor to
the performance of that duty, and the great man resumed:

“Of all these inhibiting _censores literarum_, the most austere and
implacable are those guarding the sovereignty of Poe. They have made
his area of activity a veritable _mare clausum_—as if he were

        the first that ever burst
    Into that silent sea.”

The Timorous Reporter signified his sense of the speaker’s fertility of
metaphor: there had been an inundation (of words) and the “estate” had
become a “sea.” He whistled softly “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”

“It was not an unknown sea; it was cris-crossed by the wakes of a
thousand ships and charted to the last reef. Tales of the tragic and
the supernatural are the earliest utterances in every literature. When
the savage begins to talk he begins to tell wonder tales of death and
mystery—of terror and the occult. Tapping, as they do, two of the
three great mother-lodes of human interest, these tales are a constant
phenomenon—the most permanent, because the most fascinating, element
in letters. Great Scott! has the patrol never heard of _The Thousand
and One Nights_, of _The Three Spaniards_, of Horace Walpole, of ‘Monk’
Lewis, of De Quincey, of Maturin, Ingemann, Blicher, Balzac, Hoffmann,
Fitz James O’Brien?”

The reporter summoned the boldness to say that the charge of imitation
had not been made against De Maupassant, who certainly was not an
unobserved “little fellow,” and was contemporary with the offending
critics.

“Why, sir,” said the Melancholy Author, “you forget—he wrote in
French. Translations? Dear me, have there been translations? How sad!

“As to ‘originality’ that is merely a matter of manner. The ancients
exhausted the possibilities of method. In respect of that, one cannot
hope to do much that is both new and worth doing, but there are as
many styles—that is, ways of doing—as writers. One can no more help
having some individuality in manner than one can help looking somewhat
different from anybody else, although hopeless of being much of a
giant, or unique as to number and distribution of arms, legs and head.
But, sir, this demand for ‘originality’ is a call for third-rate men,
who alone supply such a semblance of it as is still possible. The
writer of sane understanding and wholesome ambition is content to
meet his great predecessors on their own ground. He enters the public
stadium, and although perversely handicapped because of his no record
and mocked by the _claque_; and although the spectators are sure to
declare him beaten, that ultimate umpire, Posterity, will figure the
matter out, and may announce a different result.”

The reporter has reason to think that much more was said, but he had
the misfortune to fall asleep; and when wakened by the sound of a
closing door he was alone. “My!” he said; “I have had a narrow escape;
if the man that once proclaimed me a genius had not happened to be a
fool I know not what evils might have befallen me.”

  1909.



                      OUR SACROSANCT ORTHOGRAPHY


“No,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not understand British
criticism of American attempts at spelling reform. The claim of our
insular cousins to a special ownership and particular custody of
our language is impudent. English is not a benefaction that we owe
to living Englishmen, nor a loan to be enjoyed, under conditions
prescribed by the creditors. When our ancestors ‘came over’ they did
not sign away any rights of revision of their own speech; and if a man
come not honestly by his mother-tongue I know not what he may be said
legitimately to own. I am not addicted to intemperate words, and harsh
retaliation does not engage my assent, but when I see an Englishman
reaching ‘hands across the sea’ to punish what he chooses to call an
infraction of the laws of _his_ language, I am tempted to slap his
wrist.”

In the presence of this portentous incarnation of justice the Timorous
Reporter trembled appropriately and was silent in all the dialects of
his native land and Kansas.

“What would they have,” continued the great, sad man—“these
‘conservatives’? A language immune to change? That would be a dead
language and we should have to evolve a successor. Ours has never been
a changeless tongue; nothing is more mutable, even in its orthography.
As it existed a few centuries ago it is now unintelligible except to a
few specialists, yet every change has encountered as fierce hostility
as any that is now proposed. Compare a page of ‘Beowulf’ with a page
of the London _Times_ or _The Spectator_ and see what incalculable
quantities of ‘crow’ the luckless ‘guardians of our noble tongue’ have
had to swallow. Do you wonder, young man, that they are a dyspeptic
folk? And did not Dr. Samuel Johnson formulate a great truth in the
dictum that ‘every sick man is a scoundrel’?”

“Surely,” ventured the Timorous Reporter, “you would not apply so harsh
a word to the great English reviewers, nor to our own beloved Professor
Harry Thurston Peck!”

“To be consistent these gentlemen should not demand that the
spelling remain as it is, for its present condition is the result
of innumerable defeats of themselves and their predecessors by hardy
‘corruptors.’ It is pusillanimous of them not only to accept a
situation that has been forced upon them but to proclaim it sacred and
fight for its eternal maintenance. They should be making heroic efforts
to restore at least the spelling of Hakluyt and Sir John Mandeville. It
is not so very long since a few timid innovators began (as secretly as
the nature of the rebellious act would permit) to leave off the ‘k’ in
such words as ‘musick’ ‘publick’ and so forth. Instantly

    The wonted roar was up amid the woods,
    And filled the air with barbarous dissonance—

the self-appointed ‘guardians of our noble tongue’ rose as one old lady
and swore that rather than submit they would run away! That sacred ‘k’
is no more, but they are with us yet, untaught by failure and unstilled
by shame. It is the nature of a fool to hate a thing when it is new,
adore it when it is current, and despise it when it is obsolete.”

Pleased with his epigram, the Melancholy Author so accentuated the
sadness of his countenance as to invite a sincere compassion.

“We hear much from the scholar-folk about the importance of preserving
the derivation of words, not only as a guide to their meaning, but
because from the genealogy and biography of words we get instructive
side-lights on the history and customs of nations. That is all true:
philology is a useful and fascinating study. Read _The Queen’s English_
of the late Dean Alford if you think it is not. (Incidentally, I
may mention my own humble volumes on _The Genesis and Evolution of
‘Puss’ as the Vocative Form of ‘Cat.’_) But derivation is really not
a very sure guide to signification. For example, what do I learn
of the meaning of ‘desultory’ by knowing that it is from the Latin
‘desultor,’ a circus performer that leaps from horse to horse? In many
instances the origin of a word is misleading, as in ‘miscreant,’ which,
etymologically, means nothing worse than ‘unbeliever.’ Of course it is
interesting to hear in it a lingering echo of an ecclesiastic damning
in a time when nothing worse than an unbeliever was thought to exist.

“But, as the late Prof. Schele de Vere pointed out, the roots of words
are better disclosed in their sound than in their spelling. By phonetic
spelling only can their pronunciation be made nearly uniform—if that
is an advantage. If this is not obvious, human intelligence is a shut
clam.”

The creator of this beautiful figure celebrated it at the sideboard and
resumed his illuminating discourse.

“To those who deem it worth while to be happy, the study of derivations
is, indeed, a perpetual banquet of delights, but it is important to
remember that language is not merely, nor chiefly, a plaything for
scholars, but a thing of utility in the conduct of life and affairs. To
its service in that character all obstruent considerations should, and
eventually do, give way. It may please, and to some extent profit, to
know that ‘phthisis’ comes from the Greek ‘phthio’—to waste away—but
if in order that one may see this, as well as hear it, I must so spell
it as to deny to certain letters of the alphabet their customary and
established powers I protest against the desecration. Our orthography
has no greater sanctity than have the vested rights of the vowels and
consonants by which we achieve it. Why do not ‘the whiskered pandours
and the fierce hussars’ of conservatism stand forth as champions of
that noble Roman, the English alphabet?

“Yes, I concede the importance of being able to trace the origin
of words, for words are thoughts, and their history is a record of
intellectual progress, but in very few of them would a simplified, even
a consistently phonetic, spelling tend to obscure the trail by which
they came into the language. And as to these few, why not learn their
origin from the dictionaries once for all and have done with it? The
labor would be incomparably less than that of learning to spell as we
do.”

Impressed but not silenced, the thirsty soul at the fountain of wisdom
cautiously advanced the view that the reformed spelling is uncouth to
the eye.

“It is most dispiriting,” said the oracle, in the low, sad tones that
served to distinguish him from the bagpipes of Skibo castle, “to
hear from the beardless lips of youth a folly so appropriate to age
and experience. To the unobservant, any change in the familiar looks
disagreeable. The newest fashion in silk hats looks ridiculous; a
little later the old style looks worse. To me nothing is uncouth: the
most refined and elevated sentiment loses nothing by its expression in
as nearly phonetic spelling as our inadequate alphabet will permit.
For my reading you may spell like Josh Billings if you will not write
like him.”

“From all that you have been kind enough to say,” said the Timorous
Reporter, with a sudden access of courage that alarmed him, “I infer
that in your forthcoming great work, _The Tyrant Preposition_, you will
employ the Skibonese philanthropography.”

“Not I. Courage is an excellent thing in man: the soldier is useful;
but each to his trade. Mine, sir,” he concluded, with a note of pride
underrunning the grave, sweet monotony of his discourse, “is writing.”



                     THE AUTHOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY


“To the literary man,” said the Melancholy Author, “life is not all
‘beer and skittles’ by much. He is in a peculiar sense the custodian of
‘troubles of his own.’ Of these, one of the most insupportable grows
out of the fact that almost every man, woman or child thinks himself,
herself or itself an expert in literature, and the literary man a
Heaven-sent Opportunity. No hawk ever watched a plump pullet detaching
itself from the flock, with a more possessing delight than burns in
the bosom of the average human being when a defenceless author ‘swims
into his ken.’ Lord, Lord, with what alacrity he swoops down upon the
incautious wight and holds him with his glittering eye to ‘talk books’
at him!

“He knows it all, the good assailant—knows all about books,
particularly ‘the English classics’ and the newest novel. This
knowledge—consisting, at the best, in whatever is current in popular
criticism of the newspaper and magazine sort—he has quite persuaded
himself is knowledge of Literature. It never occurs to the good
creature that books are not literature; that he might have read every
book in the world yet know no more of literature than a horned toad.
Naturally, you do not care to explain to him that literature is an
art—the art of which books are merely a result. He sees the result, but
of the art behind them he knows not even so much as its existence.

“He thinks that good writing is done as naturally, instinctively and
with as little training as a bird sings in a tree, or a pig in a gate.
He would be willing to admit that good painting cannot be done, good
music executed, a good plea made in court, or good medical attendance
given to the sick, without a deal of hard study of principles and
methods. But writing—why, writing is merely setting down what you
think; everybody writes.

“Even the literary critic—may hornets afflict him!—cannot be
intelligently objectionable without a technical knowledge of his
business. A great poet has said:

    A man must serve his time at every trade,
    Save censure; critics all are ready made.

“And ‘censure’ here, you will have the goodness to observe, means not
condemnation, as in our common speech, but the passing of judgment of
any kind on the work of another.

“Suppose you were a famous electrician, and all other persons, eager to
show you that they, too, know a thing or two and solemnly persuaded of
the necessity of regaling you with scraps from your own table, should
gravely define electricity as a ‘mysterious force,’ express to you the
belief that it is destined to ‘revolutionize the world’ and declare
their admiration of Benjamin Franklin’s gigantic achievement in drawing
it from a cloud. Suppose you could turn away from one tormentor only
to fall into the hands of another and another, all uttering the same
infantile babble—the same shallow platitudes, the same false judgment.
That would be no more than we authors have to endure, and smile in the
endurance. Nay, not so much, for not only do we have to suffer all this
talk of the ‘shop’—our shop—with all its irritating idiocy, but if we
open our mouths to say something worth while, God help us!—we’ve a
‘fight’ on hand forthwith. For it is of the nature of ignorance to be
disputatious, contentious, cantankerous. The more a man does not know,
the more aggressive his manner of not knowing it. Venture to rack one
of his ugly literary idols by so much as the breadth of a finger and—!”

Unable to suppress his emotion, the Melancholy Author rose and strode
three paces toward an open door, then turned and, striding back again,
dropped into his seat and tried to look unconcerned.

“The very persons who seek your society because they honestly admire
your intellect will resent every manifestation of it. Whatever they
do not understand, whatever is unfamiliar to them, is bad—false and
immoral and insincere. Why, I remember a woman who came four hundred
miles to see me—to sit at my feet, she was kind enough to say, and
partake of my wisdom. In less than ten minutes she was angrily
affirming the unworth of my opinions and attempting to inoculate me
with her own. What did I do? My friend, what could I do, but wait until
the storm had subsided and then express my admiration of the pink bow
that she wore at her throat. Alas, I had sailed into a zone of storms,
for it was cherry, and away went she!

“Now, I am willing to talk of literature—it is one of the delights of
my life to do so. I am even willing to ‘talk books.’ But it must be
with my equals, or with those who show some sense of the fact that a
lifetime passed in the study of my art, and in its practice counts for
something. Few things are more agreeable than imparting knowledge to
those who in good faith and decent humility seek it; and such there
are. I know some of them, and in their service find enough to do to
keep me awake nearly all day. But the other sort: readers of brand-new
books and reviews thereof; persons who think the ancients were
barbarians; philosophers by birth and critics by inspiration who know
it all without having learned any part of it—may Heaven,” concluded the
Melancholy Author, with a fine flourish of his right hand, “bestow them
as friends upon my enemies.”



                         ON POSTHUMOUS RENOWN


“No,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not expect my name to be
shouted in brass on the frieze of Miss Helen Gould’s ‘Temple of Fame.’”

The Timorous Reporter ventured to inquire if that was because he had
the misfortune to be alive.

“That is a disqualification that time will remove,” answered the
Melancholy Author. “The ground of my hope is different: I shall cause
to be inscribed upon my tombstone the lines following:

    Good friends, for Jesus’ sake forbear
    To grieve the soul that’s gone to—where?
    Blest be the man that spares my fame,
    And curst be he that flaunts my name!

“The lines are admirable and extremely original,” said the Timorous
Reporter. “May I ask if your reluctance to have your name emblazoned
in the Temple is due to disesteem of the methods and results of
selection, or to that innate modesty which serves to distinguish you
from the violet?”

“To neither. It is due to my consciousness of the futility of all
attempts to perpetuate an individual fame. When I die my fame will die
with me. It is mine no longer than I live to bear it. When there is no
nominative there can be no possessive.

“For illustration, you speak of Shakspeare’s fame. But there is no
Shakspeare. The fame that you speak of is not ‘his’; it is ours—yours,
mine and John Smith’s. To call it ‘his’—why, sir, that is as if one
should concede the ownership of property to a vacuum. The dead are
poor—they have nothing. Our mental confusion in this matter is no doubt
largely due to our imperfect grammar: we have not enough cases in our
declension; or, rather, there are not enough names for the cases that
we have. In the phrase ‘a horse’s tail’ we say rightly that ‘horse’s’
is in the possessive case: the animal really possesses—owns—the tail.
But in the phrase ‘a horse’s price’ there is no possessive, for the
horse does not own the price: there should be another name for the
case. When dead, the horse does not own even the tail. It is the
same with ‘Shakspeare’s fame’: while he lived the phrase contained a
possessive case; now it is something different—merely what the Latin
calls a genitive. Our name for it misleads the unenlightened and makes
them think of a dead man as owning things. One of my ambitions, I may
add, is to bring English grammar into conformity with fact, promoting
thereby every moral, intellectual and material interest of the race!”

The Timorous Reporter summoned the courage to rouse him from ecstatic
contemplation of the glory of his great reform by directing his
disobedient attention to the fact that the Latin grammar, also,
is defective, in that its genitive case is not supplemented by a
possessive; yet the Romans appear to have had a pretty definite
conception of “mine” and “thine,” albeit the latter was less lucidly
apprehended than the former, and held a humbler place in the national
conscience. Deigning to ignore the argument, the Melancholy Author
resumed his discourse:

“Posthumous fame being what it is—if nothing can be said to be
something—the desire to attain it is comic. It seems the invention of
a humorist, this ambition to attach to your name (and equally to that
of every person bearing it, or to bear it hereafter) something that
you will not know that you have attached to it. You labor for a result
which you are to be forever unaware that you have brought about—for a
personal gratification which you know that you are eternally forbidden
to enjoy: if the gods ever laugh, do they not laugh at that?”

To signify his sense of the humor of the situation, the Melancholy
Author fashioned the visage of him to so poignant a degree of visible
dejection as might have affected an open tomb with envy and despair.

“Some time,” he continued, “the earth, her spinning retarded by the
sun’s tidal action, will turn on her axis only once a year, presenting
always the same side to the sun, as Venus does now, and as the moon
does to the earth. That side will be unthinkably hot; the other, dark
and unthinkably cold. Of man and his works nothing will remain. Later,
the sun’s light and fire exhausted, he and all his attendant planets
and their satellites will whirl, as dead invisible bulks, through the
black reaches of space to some inconceivable doom. Suppose that then
a man who died to-day—or yesterday in Assyria—should be miraculously
revived. He would think that he had waked from a sleep of an instant’s
duration. What to him would seem to have been the advantage of what
he once knew as ‘fame’—sometimes as ‘immortality’? Would he not smile
to learn that his name had once evoked sentiments of admiration and
respect—that it had been carved in stone or cast in metal to adorn a
Temple of Fame? And when again, and finally, put to death for nothing,
would not his last squeak and gurgle carry an aborted jest?

“My boy,” continued the Melancholy Author, suffering a look of
compassion to defile the dread solemnity of his aspect, “I perceive
that I have put the matter too strongly for you. You are not at home in
the fields of space; you are disconcerted by the dirge of the spheres.
Let us get back to earth as we have the happiness to know it. I will
read you the concluding lines of a poem by an obscure pessimist, on the
brevity of time and the futility of memorial structures:

        Then build your mausoleum if you must,
        And creep into it with a perfect trust;
          But in the twinkling of an eye the plow
        Shall pass without obstruction through your dust.

        Another movement of the pendulum
        And, lo! the desert-haunting wolf shall come
          And, seated on the spot, howl all the night
        O’er rotting cities, desolate and dumb.”

Delighted with his ruse of binding an unresisting auditor by passing
off his own poetry as that of another, the Melancholy Author fell into
a sea-green stupor, and the Timorous Reporter, edging himself quietly
through the door of opportunity, departed that life.



                       THE CRIME OF INATTENTION


“When the germ of egotism is discovered,” said the Curmudgeon
Philosopher, “it will be readily recognized. The cholera germ is
sometimes called the ‘comma bacillus,’ from its resemblance to the
printer’s comma; the bacillus of egotism does not look like a capital
I, as you would naturally suppose, but like the note of admiration.
In order to discover it you have only to shed the gore of the first
man you meet (who is sure to be a bore and deserve it) and put a drop
under the microscope. True, you may have defective eyesight from long
contemplation of your dazzling self, and so miss it, but it is there as
plain as the nose on an elephant’s face.”

The Timorous Reporter ventured to suggest that when the note of
admiration was named, to admire meant, not to esteem, but to
wonder—that Milton so uses it in relating the meeting of Satan and
Death at the gates of Hell. There was no reason, he said, why the germ
of egotism or self-esteem should have the shape of that point.

“Having discovered and isolated the germ of egotism,” continued the
Curmudgeon Philosopher, apparently addressing some exalted intelligence
behind the Timorous Reporter, “the physicians will naturally cast about
for a serum that will be powerful enough to beat it.”

The Curmudgeon Philosopher had the condescension to darken his
environment with a smile.

“I should suppose that this might be made from the blood of a whale, a
rhinoceros, a tiger and an anaconda, all, of course, duly inoculated
with the germ till silly. If a few gallons of this mighty medicament
were injected into the veins of a patient not more than two years of
age it might so check his self-esteem that on growing up he would
emblazon the violet on his coat of arms.”

The Curmudgeon Philosopher manifested his sense of his own distinction
as a wit by a gesture singularly and appropriately elephantine. He had
the goodness to continue: “A few years ago, before a just appreciation
of the dignity of my position as a philosopher had compelled my
withdrawal from the clubs and taverns, I used to observe that of a
half-dozen men sitting about a table and engaged in the characteristic
industry of smoking and drinking, four were commonly talking of
themselves, one, with an impediment in his enterprise, was endeavoring
to ‘get the floor’ in order to talk about _him_self, and the other
(I trust it is needless to name him) was vainly asking attention to
matters of interest and importance.

“It was customary among these gentlemen to interrupt one another in the
middle of a sentence by ordering drinks or entering into a colloquy
with the waiter, or addressing a trivial question to another of the
party. Habitually the person speaking had the mortification to see his
interlocutor turn squarely away from him and himself begin a monologue,
only to be disregarded in his turn. There is something singularly
pathetic in the spectacle of a man with an unfinished discourse turning
to the only one of the party that has the civility to hear him out. It
is one of the minor tragedies of social life, demanding an infinite
compassion. Sometimes the sufferer would signify a just resentment by
abruptly rising and leaving the table, but the rebuke was never even
observed.

“Not the monologist alone was ignored in this unmannerly way; the
nimble epigrammatist fared no better. The brightest sallies of wit,
the oddest ventures in paradox, the most delicious bits of humor and
the finest turns of wisdom—all met the same fate, all alike fell upon
the stony soil of inattention. Remember that I speak, not of ordinary
dullards, but of the so-called choice spirits of clubland, ‘gentlemen
of wit and pleasure about town.’”

With a sidewise movement toward the door the Timorous Reporter
cautiously advanced the notion that possibly something in the quality
of the Curmudgeon Philosopher’s wit may not have had the good fortune
to commend itself to his auditors.

“Selected from Apuleius, from Rabelais, Pascal, Rochefoucauld, Pope,
and boldly worked into the conversation, they always passed without
recognition of either their source or their wit. The company was simply
unaware that anything out of the common had been said. Egotism has a
bale of cotton in each ear.”

The Curmudgeon Philosopher paused to note the effect of his epigram.
Seeing that safety meant either applause or absence the Timorous
Reporter deemed it expedient to withdraw by way of an open window.



                               FETISHISM


“We are wiser in many ways than our savage ancestors; we are wiser
than the savages of to-day,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, with the
air of one making a great concession; “yet for every folly or vice of
uncivilized man I can show you a corresponding one among ourselves.
In the matter of religions, for example, and of religious rites and
observances, we have, mixed in with our better faiths, vestiges of all
the primitive superstitions that have marked the childhood of the race.
Vestiges, did I say? Why, sir, in many instances we have the veritable
thing itself in all the vigor of its perennial prime.”

The Reporter ventured to express a conviction that a crude and
primitive religion could have no devotees among so enlightened and
cultivated a people as ours.

“Sir,” thundered the Adversary of Presumption, turning a delicate
purple, “races are like individuals; along with the vices and
virtues of maturity they have those of infancy. No people ever is
sufficiently civilized and enlightened to have laid aside any of its
early superstitions and absurdities. To these it adds better things. It
overwrites its primitive ideas with ideas less crude and reasonless;
but nothing has been effaced. The latest text of the palimpsest is
most in evidence, but all is there and, to a keen enough observation,
legible. Did you never see a whole concourse of moderns uncover to a
flag?”

The Reporter confessed that those whom he had seen performing this
religious rite were mostly moderns.

“They will say when detected,” continued the oracle, “that what they
uncover to is not the flag, but the sentiment that it represents. If
ingenious enough, the idolater would make the same defence. So would
the shagpated chap that prostrates himself before the sacred moogoo
tree.

“What’s that—a flag is a symbol? Why, yes, ‘symbol’ is the name we
choose to give to objects which we know to have no real sanctity, yet,
either from hereditary instinct or other unreasoning impulse, cannot
forbear to revere. The word is also used to denote a mere ‘survival,’
an object that once had a useful purpose, but now exists only because
of our habit of having it. Be pleased to look down into that burial
place.”

The Curmudgeon Philosopher’s dwelling had characteristically been
chosen because of its contiguity to a cemetery.

“Note the number of ‘dummy’ urns surmounting the monuments. Centuries
ago, when cremation was the rule, as it seems likely to be again,
those would have been true urns, holding ashes of the dead. We have
inherited the tendency to have them, but as they have now no utility we
spare ourselves the trouble of accounting for them by saying they are
symbolic—whereby the fashion is exalted to a high dignity.

“I assume your familiarity with the word ‘fetish.’ It is spelled two
ways and pronounced four; I pronounce it as I was taught at my mother’s
knee.”

By way of accentuating the fact that he had had a mother he affected
a rudimentary tenderness of tone and expression which in a case of
doubtful identity would have assisted in distinguishing him as a pirate
of the Spanish Main.

The Reporter asked what fetish worship might have the hardihood to be.

“Fetish worship,” replied the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “is the most
primitive of religions. It is the form that belief in the supernatural
takes in our lowest stage of intellectual development—the adoration of
material objects. A stone or a tree supposed to possess supernatural
powers of good or evil, or to have some peculiar sanctity, is a fetish.
Idolatry and the worship of living things are not uncommonly confounded
with fetish worship, but in reality are another and higher form of
religion, belonging to a more advanced culture.”

“You have seen the proposal to transport Plymouth Rock about the
country for a show? It is in the morning papers, one of which I had the
bad luck to pick up while at breakfast. Hate the morning papers!”

The Timorous Reporter signified his regret.

“I hope it will not be done,” continued the Curmudgeon Philosopher,
ignoring the apology. “In the first place, the Rock is devoid of
authenticity. It is indubitably a rock, and it is at Plymouth,
but its connection with the landing of the Pilgrims was supplied
by imagination. That is all right; by imagination we demonstrate
our superiority to the novelists. Historians and scientists are
credentialed by imagination; through imagination the philosopher
attains to a knowledge of the meaning and message of things. Without
imagination we should be as the magazine poets that perish.”

With obvious satisfaction in his character of cynic the Curmudgeon
Philosopher again mitigated the austerity of his countenance—this time
by something that may have been honestly intended as a smile.

“We have seen bands of children taught to march about a cracked bell,
throw flowers upon it, sing hymns to it. When it stopped in the several
cities that it was carried through on a triumphal car the populace
turned out to worship it. It was supplied with a ‘guard of honor.’
Bands played appropriate music before it, and mayors ‘delivered
eulogies.’ No popular hero or august sovereign could be accorded a more
obsequious homage than this lifeless piece of cracked metal—nay, its
progress is more like that of a Grecian god. This was fetishism, pure
and undefiled.

“If this new project is carried out the people that worshiped a bell
will worship a stone. True, the stone weighs several tons.”

Proud of his generosity in making so great a concession, the Curmudgeon
Philosopher looked over the top of his spectacles for the applause that
came not to his hope.

“Sir,” he concluded, his great fist falling like a thunderbolt upon the
table at which he stood, “we are Pottawattomies!”



                          OUR AUDIBLE SISTERS


“No,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “I am no believer in ‘the
elevating influence of woman.’ We have had women a long time, now;
the influence is obvious, but the elevation—we are still waiting
for that. Perhaps it was different in the old days when they had no
connection with public affairs and could devote their entire attention
to the business of giving men ‘a leg up,’ but to-day they are so busy
assisting us to conduct the world’s large activities that they overlook
our dissatisfaction with the low moral plane that we occupy.

“I think, sir, that old Sir William Devereux was wrong when he said
that the best way to keep the dear creatures from playing the devil
was to encourage them in playing the fool. We have been for more than
a generation encouraging them to play the fool in a thousand and fifty
ways, and they play the devil as never before.

“These dreadful creatures—I mean these dear, delightful darlings—care
for nothing but abstract ideas having no practical application to
actual conditions in a faulty world. In the councils of Them Loud
nobody cares for anything but principles and Principle. Every Mere Male
who anywhere ventures to lift up his voice in behalf of an imperfect
but practicable reform is outfitted by them with a set of motives that
would disgrace a pirate. To the she colonels of uplift, nothing is so
fascinating as Abstract Reform; they roll it as a sweet morsel under
and over their tireless tongues. At every session of Congress you
shall hear again the clank of the female saber in the corridors and
committee rooms of the Capitol, intimidating the poltroon law maker.
You shall hear the war whoop of the Sexless Impracticables, acclaiming
the Sufficient Abstraction and denouncing the coarse expedients of the
Erring Male. May the devil shepherd them in a barren place!”

Overcome by his emotions, the Curmudgeon Philosopher cruelly kicked the
house dog (which “answered not with a caress”), and snorted at vacancy.

“What good does it all do, anyhow—this irruption of women into the
domain of public affairs? The advantages that Lively Woman promised
even herself in becoming New and Audible are illusory; those that she
renounced were real. For one thing, we no longer love her. Why, sir,
I remember the time when I myself would have taken trouble to serve
and honor women. I may say that I felt for them a special esteem. How
is it to-day? They pass me by as the idle wind, unobserved, and—most
significant of all—unobserving.

“Love, sir, ‘romantic love,’ as Tolstoi calls it, is a purely
artificial thing. Many nations know it not. The ancient Greeks knew it
not; the Japanese of yesterday did not at all comprehend it. There have
been no other really civilized nations. We love those who are helpless
and dependent on us. That is why we love our children and our pets.

“In demanding equal rights before the law woman renounces her claim
to exceptional tenderness; in granting the demand, man accepts the
renunciation in good faith. If the rest of you are going to look out
for my wife, sir, I am left free to look out for myself. Have I really
a wife? God forbid—I’m supposing one.

“When in the history of our civilization was romantic love at high
noon? Why, sir, ‘when knighthood was in flower’; when woman was a
chattel; when a gentleman could divorce himself with a word. It was
then that woman was set upon a pedestal and adored. Men consecrated
their lives to the service of the sex—fought for woman, sang of her
with a sincerity that is sadly lacking in the imitation troubadours of
our time. Why, sir, even I, in my youth, composed some verses.”

The Curmudgeon Philosopher educed a manuscript from his breast-pocket
and the Timorous Reporter began to withdraw from the Presence.

“O, very well—I’ll not force them on you; but permit me to remark,
sir, that the decay of courtesy toward women is not unattended with a
certain growing coarseness of manners in general. Those who have caught
the base infection are not gentlemen, and you may go to the devil!”



                           THE NEW PENOLOGY


“True science,” said the Curmudgeon Philosopher, “began with
publication, in 1620, of Lord St. Albans’ _Novum Organum_. Why not Lord
Bacon’s? Because, my benighted friend, there was no ‘Lord Bacon.’ He
was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, and, later, Viscount St. Albans. When
you hear a man speak of ‘Lord Bacon’ fly from that man.

“The _Novum Organum_, or new method, has overthrown the _Organum_
of Aristotle and released men’s minds from thraldom to the belief
that truth could be got by mere reasoning, unaided by observation
and experiment. This faith in the all-sufficiency of Logic had
persisted for more than two thousand years, an intellectual paralysis
invulnerable to treatment; and all the while the world thought itself
enjoying robust mental health.

“Belief in the sufficiency of Deduction was not the only delusion that
dominated and shackled the human mind, and some of the others are with
us to-day, to comfort and inspire! We think that if we did not have
them we should be sick.”

Pleased with his wit, the Curmudgeon Philosopher executed the great
convulsion of nature which he knew as a smile.

“One of the most mischievous of these false and futile faiths is known
as the Reformation of Criminals. With no result, we have been embracing
it with a devout fervor since the dawning of time. Our mistake is not
so much that we have neglected to get the consent of the criminals as
that we think ourselves able to reform them without it.

“Each habitual criminal is the hither end of an interminable line
of criminal ancestors. He can reform no more than he can fly: his
character is as immutable as the shape of his head or the texture of
the muscle that he calls his heart. Our efforts in his behalf recall
the story of the physician who, after examining a patient afflicted
with a disorder of the skin, said: ‘This is hereditary; we must begin
at the beginning. Go home and tell your father to take a sulphur bath.’
Our criminals are in worse case than that patient; he had an accessible
father for the treatment.

“What have I to propose? What is the ‘New Method’ that I favor?
What would I substitute for ‘reformation’ of the unworthy? Their
destruction—I would kill them.”

With obvious pride in this humane suggestion, he stroked his ragged
beard with both hands and adored his reflection in the mirror opposite
his pedestal.

“It sounds harsh, I dare say, to one unfamiliar with the thought, and I
might have said ‘remove’ if that would seem less alarming; but ‘kill’
is an honest word, and I’ll stand to it.

“Think of it! The New Method would give us in two generations a nation
without habitual criminals! What other will do that? Think of the
lessened misery, the security of life and property, the lighter burden
of taxation to maintain the machinery of justice, the no police—all
that the besotted proponents of ‘Reformation’ hope and hope again and
hope in vain to accomplish brought about in the lifetime of one man!

“And by means that are merciful to the criminals themselves. Can there
be a doubt that if in him the love of life were not the mere brute
instinct of a perverted soul the habitual criminal would prefer death?
What does life hold that is worth anything to such as he, devoid of
self-respect and the respect of others, victim alike of justice and
injustice, denied the delights that come of refined sensibilities,
hunted from pillar to post and ever cowering in fear of the law?
Nothing is more cruel than to let him live. And at last he dies anyhow.

“But suppose that the painless putting to death of all criminals
were as deep a misfortune as it would be to—to philosophers, for
example? Yet in the long run it would vastly lessen the total of
human unhappiness, even of public executions. The earth was not made
yesterday: for thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years, men
have been putting other men to death for crime.

“Even under the mild laws of to-day in civilized countries the number
executed will in the course of the ages enormously exceed to-day’s
total criminal population. Moreover, it would not be necessary to kill
them all: most of them, if confronted by a law for their killing, would
take themselves out of the country, quarter themselves upon foolish
nations still willing to stand their nonsense—nations still enamored of
that ancient delusion, Reformation of Criminals.

“That would serve _your_ purpose as well as anything, but as a citizen
of the world, owing my first allegiance to Mankind,” concluded the
Curmudgeon Philosopher, with a gesture appropriate to some noble
ancestral sentiment, “I should deem it my duty to endeavor to prevent
their escape by writs of _ne exeat regno_.”



                           THE NATURE OF WAR


The Bald Campaigner was looking over the tops of his spectacle lenses,
silent, obviously wise, a thing of beauty.

“Do you approve the punishment of General Jacob Smith, who was
dismissed from the army for barbarism?” asked the Timorous Reporter.
“Doubtless you remember the incident.”

“My approval,” said the great soldier, “is needless and of no
significance. I have long been on the retired list myself, and am not
the reviewing officer in this case. I think General Smith’s punishment
just, if that’s what you want to know. He committed a serious
indiscretion. As a commander of troops in the island of Samar he gave
to a subordinate the following oral instructions:

“‘I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill
and burn the better you will please me.’ He said, further, that he
wanted all persons killed who were capable of bearing arms and were in
actual hostilities against the United States—I am quoting the Secretary
of War—and, in reply to a question by his subordinate, asking for an
age limit, designated it as ten years.

“All this was highly improper and unmilitary. It is customary
in matters of so great importance for the commander to give his
instructions in the form of written orders—a good commander is without
a tongue.

“I am no great literary genius, but in the matter of military orders
I know a hawk from a handsaw by the handsaw’s teeth. Suppose General
Smith’s orders (written orders) had read like this:

“‘It is thought that it will be to the advantage of the expedition
in point of celerity of movement, and will simplify the problem of
supply, if the column be not encumbered with prisoners. The commander
of the expedition will not be unmindful of the military advantages
that flow from the infliction of as many casualties upon the enemy as
is practicable with the small force that he commands and the evasive
character of the enemy; nor will he overlook the need of removing
by fire such structures and supplies as are incompatible with the
interests of the United States, or inconsistent with professions of
amity on the part of the island’s inhabitants, or conducive to the
prosperity of those in rebellion. No person engaged in hostilities
against the United States will, of course, be suffered to plead sex or
age in mitigation of such mischances as the fortunes of war may entail,
provided, however, that no non-combatants of either sex under the age
of ten years shall under any circumstances be put to death without
authority from these headquarters; the traditional benevolence of the
American army must not be impaired.’

“Sir, if General Smith had issued an order like that he would to-day be
a popular hero and an ornament to the active list of the army.”

Waving his remaining arm with a gesture singularly cogent and
convincing, the Bald Campaigner ceased and marched against a hostile
bottle near by. After study of the suppositious “order” in his
stenographic notes, the reporter ventured the opinion that the
difference between it and the oral instructions actually given was
mainly one of expression. The Bald Campaigner said in reply:

“Expression is everything. An army officer should be a master of
expression, as a baseball pitcher should be a master of delivery. The
straight throw and the curved throw carry the ball to the same spot,
but consider the different effect upon the fortunes of the pitcher.
What General Smith lacked was not heart, but style. He was not cruel,
but clumsy. His words were destitute of charm. His blundering tongue
had succeeded only in signifying his fitness to be thrown to the
civilian lions.”

The reporter hazarded a belief that the General’s instruction to make
Samar “a howling wilderness” was brutal exceedingly.

“Certainly it was,” assented the Bald Campaigner, “an officer of
refinement and taste would have said: ‘It will be found expedient to
operate against the enemy’s material resources.’ There is never a
military necessity for coarse speech.

“As to devastation—did you mention devastation?—that is the purpose of
war. War is made, not against the bodies of adult males, but against
the means of subsistence of a people. The fighting is incident to the
devastation: we kill the soldiers because they protect their material
resources—get between us and the fields that feed them, the factories
that clothe them, the arsenals that arm them. We cannot hope to kill
a great proportion of them at best; the humane thing is to overcome
them by means of hunger and nakedness. The earlier we can do so, the
less effusion of blood. Leave the enemy his resources and he will fight
forever. He will beget soldiers faster than you can destroy them.

“Do you cherish the delusion that in our great civil war, for example,
the South was subdued by killing her able-bodied males who could bear
arms? Look at the statistics and learn, to your astonishment, how small
a proportion of them we really did kill, even before I lost my arm.

“The killing was an incident. I speak of the latter part of the
conflict, when we had learned how to conduct military operations.
As long as our main purpose was bloodshed we made little progress.
Our armies actually guarded the homes and property of the men they
were sent to conquer—the very men that were fighting them, and who,
therefore, assured of the comfort and safety of their families,
continued fighting with cheerful alacrity. If we had continued that
rose-water policy they might have fought us to this day.”

The reporter involuntarily glanced at a calendar on the wall, and the
war oracle continued:

“Wisdom came of experience: we adopted the more effective and more
humane policy of devastation. With Sherman desolating the country from
Atlanta to Goldsborough and Sheridan so wasting the Shenandoah Valley
that he boasted the impossibility of a crow passing over it without
carrying rations, the hopes of Confederate success went up in smoke.

“And,” concluded the hairless veteran, rising and opening the door
as a delicate intimation that there was nothing more to say, “I beg
leave to think that the essential character of the _Ultima Ratio_ is
not permanently obscurable by the sentimental vagaries of blithering
civilians such as you have the lack of distinction to be.”

The Timorous Reporter retired to his base of operations and the
war-drum throbbed no longer in his ear.



                           HOW TO GROW GREAT


“I do not overlook the disadvantages of defeat in a war with some
foreign power,” said the Bald Campaigner; “I only say that in the
resulting humiliation would be a balance of advantage. It does a nation
good to ‘eat the leek.’ The great Napoleon thrust that tonic vegetable
into the mouths of Prussia and the other German states. They took a
bellyful each, and the result of that penitential feast is the splendid
German empire of to-day. Before their racial health was entirely
restored the Germans passed the unwelcome comestible to the ailing
dominion of Napoleon the Stuffed, and France has so thriven on the diet
that she no longer fears the hand that wrote the _menu_. Alone among
modern states, Great Britain has grown powerful without having had to
cry for mercy. In the voice of supplication is heard the prophecy of
power.”

The Timorous Reporter cautiously named our own country as one that has
risen to greatness without suffering defeat and humiliation.

“Sir, you are in error,” said the Bald Campaigner loftily. “We were
defeated in the War of 1812. Wherever our raw volunteers met the
trained veterans of Great Britain (except at New Orleans, when the war
was over) we were beaten off the field. Our attempts to invade Canada
were all repelled, our capital was taken and sacked, and when we sued
for peace it was granted in a treaty in which the grievance for which
we had taken up arms was contemptuously ignored.

“Remember that for this conflict we enlisted and equipped more than a
half-million men, while Great Britain had at no time more than sixteen
thousand opposing us.

“As historians of the conflict we have done heroic work, as have
Southern historians of our civil war and French historians of the
struggle with the Germans—as all beaten peoples naturally do. Sir,
do you know that the great body of the Spanish people believe, and
will always believe, that Spain brought us to our knees in 1898? The
Russian who does not think that the armies of the Czar wrung the most
humiliating terms from the Japanese is an exceptionally intelligent
Russian—he knows enough to disbelieve the ‘popular histories’ in the
Russian tongue and the official falsehoods of his government.”

The Timorous Reporter inquired how a second beating would profit us,
seeing that we got no good out of the other.

“The other was not bad enough,” the great man explained. “Having
Napoleon on her hands, Great Britain did not, until he had been got rid
of, make an aggressive war. When she began to we cried for mercy. What
we need is a beating that neither our vanity can deny nor our ingenuity
excuse—one which, in the slang of your pestilent trade, ‘will not come
off.’”

“And then?”

“Then, sir, we shall give ourselves an army strong enough to repel
invasion from the north, or, if something should happen to our
navy, from the east or west. Then, sir, we shall get our soldiers
by conscription, and the man who is drawn will serve. The words
‘volunteer,’ ‘recruiting,’ ‘bounty,’ ‘substitute’ will disappear from
our military vocabulary, with all the inefficiency, waste, and shame
that they connote. In brief, we shall recognize the truth, obvious
to reason, that a citizen owes his country military service in the
same way that he owes it pecuniary support. (If taxpaying had always
been optional what an expostulation would meet the proposal to make
it compulsory!) We shall then not need to concern ourselves with ‘the
problem of desertion,’ ‘the effect on the army of high wage-rates
in civil employment,’ and the rest of it. There will be no problem
of desertion: the discernment that recognizes a citizen’s military
obligation will find an effective method preventing him from running
away from it. All this will come after we have been sorely defeated by
some power, or combination of powers, that has not only a navy but an
army.”

The Timorous Reporter hesitatingly advanced the view that a large
standing army might seriously imperil the subordination of the military
to the civil power.

“Young man,” said the hairless veteran, austerely, “you talk like a
Founder of this Republic!”



                          A WAR IN THE ORIENT


“Considering your pro-Russian sympathies,” said the Timorous Reporter,
“the results of some of the fighting in the Japanese and Russian war
must have been deeply disagreeable to you—that of the great naval
engagement in the Sea of Japan, for example.”

“Yes,” replied the Bald Campaigner, “the escape of two or three Russian
ships affected me most unpleasantly.”

The reporter professed himself unable to understand.

“I had confidently expected Togo to destroy them all. He is
disappointing—Togo.”

“Please pardon me,” said the man of letters; “I thought that you had
favored the Russian cause.”

“So I did, sir, so I did, and do. But something is due to the art and
science of war. As a soldier I stand for them, deprecating any laxity
in the application of the eternal principles of strategy and tactics
by land or sea. Admiral Togo should have been dismissed for permitting
those ships to escape.”

The reporter suggested the possibility that in the uproar and obscurity
of battle the ships that got away were overlooked.

“Nothing should be overlooked,” said the Bald Campaigner. “The
commander in battle should know everything that is going on—or going
away. With the light that we have, I am unable to explain the Japanese
admiral’s lamentable failure; I can only deplore it.”

“Had he, then, so overwhelming an advantage?” the reporter asked. “It
is thought the fleets were pretty evenly matched.”

“Sir,” said the Bald Campaigner, loftily, “it was a fight between
an inland people and an insular. If Rojestvensky had had a hundred
battleships he would have been over-matched and defeated. Ships and
guns do not make a navy, and landsmen are not transmuted into sailors
by sending them to sea. The Russians are not a sea-going people. Their
country has no open ports—that is what they are always fighting to get.
They have no foreign commerce; they have no fisheries. Why, sir, it
reminds me of the reply made by a Scotch carter to an angry soldier
who had challenged him to fight. ‘Fecht wi’ ye? Na, na, fechtin’s yer
trade. But I’ll drive a cart wi’ ye.’ If command of the ocean were a
matter of planting potatoes, Russia would be a great sea power.

“The born sailor is a being of an order different from ourselves—as
different as a gull from a grouse, a seal from a cat. What, to a
landsman, is a matter of study, memory and calculation, is to him
a matter of intuition. An unstable plane is his natural, normal
and helpful footing. As a gun-pointer he sights his piece not only
consciously with his instruments and his eye, but unconsciously with
that better instrument, the sense of direction—as one plays billiards.
The rolling and pitching of the ships do not spoil his aim; he allows
for them automatically—_feels_ the auspicious instant with the sure
instinct of an expert rifleman breaking bottles in the air. It is
impossible to impart this subtle sense to a farmer’s boy, or to a
salesman in a shop, no matter how young you catch him; he cannot be
made to understand it—cannot even be made to understand that it can
be. For that matter, nobody does understand it.

“I am not unaware, sir, of the ‘modern’ methods of sea-fighting—keeping
at a safe distance from the enemy and pointing the guns by means of
range-finders and other instruments and machines, but nothing that can
be invented can eliminate the ‘personal equation’ in sea-fighting,
any more than in land-fighting parapets, casemates, turrets and other
defensive works can profitably replace the breasts of the soldiers,
or arms of precision take the place of their natural aptitude for
battle with both feet on the ground. I am not unmindful of the time
when the Romans improvised a fleet (constructed on the model of a
wrecked Carthaginian galley) and manning it with landsmen destroyed the
sea-power of Carthage in a single engagement. That exception tests the
rule (_probat regulam_) but the rule stands. Landsmen for soldiers,
sailors for the sea and to the devil with military machinery!

“Before our civil war we had a merchant marine second only to that of
Great Britain. American sails whitened every sea, the stars and stripes
glowed in every port. We were a nation of sailors. Even so long ago
as the war of 1812 we held our own with Great Britain on the ocean,
though beaten everywhere on land by inferior numbers with superior
training. To-day we could not hold our own against any maritime people,
even if we fought with full coal-bunkers near our own shores. The
American behind the gun is no longer a born sailor with the salt of
the sea in every globule of the blood of him. Our fate in encountering
a seagoing people, sailors and fishermen and the sons of sailors and
fishermen, with sea legs, sea eyes and sea souls, would be that which
has befallen inlanders against islanders, from Salamis to Tsu Shima.
The sea would be strewn with a wreckage of American ‘magnificent
fighting-machines.’”

The Timorous Reporter murmured the words “Manila Bay” and “Santiago de
Cuba,” then diffidently lifted his eyes, with a question mark in each,
to the face of his distinguished interlocutor—which darkened with a
smile.

“With regard to Manila,” he said, “I am told that Dewey’s famous
command, ‘You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,’ was not
accurately reported. According to my informant, the Spanish ships
were ingeniously wound with ropes to keep them from falling apart.
What Dewey actually said was this: ‘When you are ready, Gridley, you
may fire at those ropes.’ Anybody can cut a rope with a cannon if not
molested. At Santiago, the Spanish Admiral was ordered not to give
battle, but to escape, and ships cannot run away and fight at the same
time.

“Sir, two naval victories in which the victors lost one man killed
do not supply a reasonable presumption of invincibility. Manila and
Santiago were slaughters, not battles. They are without value.”

The reporter said he thought that they were not altogether worthless
as “horrors of war,” and visibly shuddered. The superior intelligence
flamed and thundered!

“That is all nonsense about ‘the horrors of war,’ in so far as the
detestable phrase implies that they are worse than those of peace; they
are more striking and impressive, that is all. As to the loss of life,
I submit that civilians mostly die some time, and are mourned, too,
quite as feelingly as soldiers; and the kind of death that is inflicted
by war-weapons is distinctly less objectionable than that resulting
from disease. Wars are expensive, doubtless, but somebody gets the
money; it is not thrown into the sea. In point of fact, modern nations
are never so prosperous as in the years immediately succeeding a
great war. I favor anything that will quicken our minds, elevate our
sentiments and stop our secreting selfishness, as, according to that
eminent naturalist, the late William Shakspeare, toads get venom by
sleeping under cold stones. A quarter-century of peace will make a
nation of block-heads and scoundrels. Patriotism is a vice, but it
is a larger vice, and a nobler, than the million petty ones which it
promotes in peace to swallow up in war. In the thunder of guns it
becomes respectable. I favor war, famine, pestilence—anything that will
stop the people from cheating and confine that practice to contractors
and statesmen.

“To return to Russia—”

“Which,” said the reporter, _sotto voce_, “many Russians abroad do not
care to do.”

“You said, I think, that she does not seem to be much of a power on
either sea or land. She was a power in the time of the first Napoleon.
She held out a long time at Sevastopol against the English, the French,
the Turks and the Sardinians. She defeated the Turks at Shipka Pass and
Plevna, and the Turks are the best soldiers in Europe. True, in the
war with Japan, she lost every battle. That was to be expected, for she
was all unready and her armies were outnumbered two to one from the
beginning. No one outside Russia, and few inside, has ever come within
a quarter million of a correct estimate of the Japanese strength. There
were not fewer than seven hundred thousand of these cantankerous little
devils in front of Gunshu Pass.”

“Then they are—in a military sense—‘cantankerous,’” said the reporter.
“That is about the same as saying that they are good soldiers, is it
not?”

“Oh, they fight well enough. Why shouldn’t they? They have something
to fight for; the pride of an honorable history; a government that
does not rob them; a civilization that is to them new and fascinating,
reared, as the superstructure of a glittering temple, upon an elder
one, whose stones were hewn and laid and wrought into beauty by their
forefathers, while ours were chasing one another through marshes with
flint spears. Best of all, they had a sovereign whom they adore as a
deity and love with a passionate personal attachment. What can you
do against such a people as that?—a people in whom patriotism is a
religion—a nation of poets, artists and philosophers, like the ancient
Greeks; of statesmen and warriors, like those of early Rome?”

“If the Japanese are all that you think them,” said the reporter, “how
do you justify your pro-Russian sympathies?”

“It is not the business of a student of military affairs to have
sympathies,” replied the Bald Campaigner, coldly; “but it is precisely
because they are that kind of people that their overthrow is, to
America, a military necessity. They are dangerous neighbors to so
feeble barbarians as we, with a government which all extol and none
respects—a loose unity and no illusions—a slack allegiance and no
consciousness of national life—a bickering aggregation of individuals,
man against man and class against class—a motley crowd of lawless,
turbulent and avaricious ungovernables!”

He paused from exhaustion and mopped his shining pow with his
handkerchief.

“Maybe Americans are like that,” assented the reporter, “but it is said
that we fight pretty well on occasion—in a civil war, for example.”

“Certainly, all Caucasians fight ‘pretty well’ compared with other
Caucasians. The Japs are another breed.”

The Inquiring Mind was convinced, but not silenced. “Suppose,” said he,
“that a collision ever occurs between an American and a Japanese fleet
or army on equal terms, what, in your honest judgment as a military
expert, will be the result?”

“Damn them!” shouted the man of no sympathies, “we’ll wipe them off the
face of the earth!”



                            A JUST DECISION


“Ah, I have long hoped for this,” said the Sentimental Bachelor.

“It is a good while now—I think it must be ever since Adam—that
Tyrant Man has had to pay all too dearly for the favor—and favors—of
the unfair sex. Of course, there is a difference in the value of
the advantages enjoyed. For illustration, there is the good will of
Celeste, of Babette, of Clarisse—best of all, of the incomparable
Clorinda! I say good will, for I speak of that which I myself have had
the supreme distinction to enjoy; and no gentleman, sir, will ever so
far forget himself as to call a lady’s preference for him by a stronger
name. Discretion, sir, discretion—that is what every man of sense and
feeling goes in for.”

The Timorous Reporter signified such approval as was consistent with
the public interest and the prosperity of the press.

“As I was saying, the good will of the admirable Nanette, the most
excellent Lucia—excellent no longer, alas, for she is dead—of the
superb Héloise, and I might, perhaps, add to the list one or two
others, is above price and beyond appraisement. Yet it was not to be
had for nothing; the gods are not so kind. I have suffered, sir, I have
paid, believe me.

“What am I coming to? Why, this, my lad, this. The supreme court of one
of our States has decided that, in proving an intention of marriage on
the part of a male defendant, what the lady plaintiff may have said
to others about it is not competent evidence. ‘Hearsay evidence’?
Why, yes; the honorable court was polite enough to call it so, but,
doubtless, if, with all due respect for the ladies mentioned—Herminia,
Adèle, Demetria and the others—I may venture to say so, the real ground
of exclusion of such evidence is its incredibility. I trust to your
discretion not to report me as uttering that opinion; not for the world
would I wound the sensibilities of the adorable Miranda, most veracious
of her sex.”

The speaker paused, gazing pensively at vacancy as if communing with
the day before yesterday. The reporter endeavored to reveal by his
manner a policy of expectation.

“My dear boy,” resumed the Sentimental Bachelor, “if you aspire to the
good will of a woman, and are marriageable, you should be prepared and
willing to have it believed by all her friends that your intentions
are honorable—yes, sir; you must submit to be placed in that false
position: it is a part of the price. True, you may swear the lady to
secrecy; and Congreve says that no one is so good as a woman to keep a
secret, for, although she is sure to tell it, yet nobody will believe
her. Alas! he underestimated human credulity, which is the eighth
wonder of the world. Beware of human credulity; it is always ready to
believe the worst.

“What’s that? You have had sweethearts that did not say you wanted to
marry them; women friends that did not say you were in love with them?
Fortunate man! But consider how young you are. It is a just inference
that they too are young. Youth is the season of veracity; wait. As
these excellent young ladies (whom Heaven bless) grow older—as they
miss more and more the attentions of men—as they dwell more and more
upon joys of the irrevocable past, they will have a different story to
tell, and right mercifully is it decreed that they shall believe it
themselves. Why, even the once charming Doretta finds, I am told, a
consolation for the horrors of age and whist in the dream of repeated
proposals from me—Meeee! Ah, well, it were inhuman to deny to one
to whom I gave so much the happiness of stating the amount of the
benefaction. Far be it from me to bring down her gray hairs in sorrow
to the truth.

“But, suppose, my dear young friend, that I were wealthy enough to
be sued for breach of promise of marriage—which Heaven forbid! You
see how this righteous decision of that supreme court would remove
from me the temptation and necessity of contradicting a lady. Oh, it
is a great decision! It marks a notable advance in the apprehension
of the underlying motives of human action. For they are human—except
Iphigenia, who is divine. Not so beautiful as Perdita; not so
intelligent as Lorena; not so devoted as Janette; so young as Marie;
so faithful as Theodora—peerless Theodora! But Iphigenia—she has the
cleverness to be so very new! It makes a difference.”

Remarking that Bulwer was a most admirable writer, the Timorous
Reporter took his leave.



                            THE LION’S DEN


“I can not accept the view,” said the Sentimental Bachelor, looking up
from his piano stool, “that because one has a houseful of books and
pictures one is necessarily a lover of literature and art. I have a
few myself—not many; but you will observe that my book-cases have not
glass doors; on the contrary (if you understand the significance of
that phrase), they are beautiful examples of the cabinetmaker’s craft,
harmonizing well with the architectural and color schemes of the rooms
containing them. But the devil a book can you see in them without
opening them.

“Why is that? Because, in the first place, books are not beautiful—at
least none of those within the means of any but a millionaire. Even
the most costly and sumptuous of them are angular, blocklike objects,
displeasing to the eye. Unless bound with special reference to the room
in which they are to turn their backs on you, most of them will be out
of harmony with their environment and with one another.

“Yes, you see here scattered about, mostly on the floor, a few books”
(the Sentimental Bachelor indicated them by a graceful gesture of his
right hand) “that are as unlovely as any. But these are volumes having
for me a peculiar value from pleasant or tender association—just as
any article might have—just, in fact, as that rug has, upon which the
divine Janette has deigned to set her little feet. Ah, Janette the
adorable!—Melissa being dead.

“You dare to think, no doubt, that with glass doors to my book-cases
I should be better able to find readily any particular volume that
I might want. Pardon me, but it is unworthy of you to impute to me
so deep and dark an ignorance. I should be sorry if ever I failed to
put my hand on any desired book in the darkest night. Believe me, my
friend, it is not the book-lover who displays his books in a show-case.

“As to pictures, if I were so unfortunate as to own all the treasures
of the Dresden galleries, you would see no more than one painting in a
room. That is the Japanese way, and the Japanese are the only civilized
people in our modern world; they are born artists all, though some
neglect their mental heritage and go out as cooks. Think of it!—a
people among whom the arranging of three cut flowers in a vase (they
know not the dreadful ‘bouquet’) is an art having its principles and
laws, its learned professors to expound them, its honorable place in
the curriculum of public and private education!

“Trust the Japanese to be always right in a matter of art. His instinct
is as infallible as that of the ancient Greek; and our European
‘schools’ of painting are already greatly indebted to him. It is a
silly new picture in which the Japanese influence can not be traced.
I’m ordering my dependent young brother from Paris to Tokio to study
art—the little rascal!

“One painting in a room fixes attention; two divide it; more than two
disperse it. Than a wall plastered with bad canvases I know of nothing
more distracting and confusing except a wall plastered with good
ones. It is like a swarm of pretty girls, or a table d’hôte dinner in
a country hotel, where all you are to eat is brought in at once and
arranged round your plate. It kills the appetite.

“Why does one do that sort of thing? To impress one’s visitors—to show
off. No, no; it is not because one is fond of paintings and never
tires of them. Be pleased to exercise your faculty of observation. I
passed a few weeks recently at the country house of a friend. Before
I had been half an hour in the place he had taken me through all the
rooms and shown me a hundred of his ‘art treasures’—paintings by famous
‘masters.’ (Maybe I had my own opinion as to that.) For my pleasure?
Why, no; he allowed me less than a half minute to each. Gadzooks! can
a fellow digest a painting that he has _bolted_? No, sir; ’twas for
gratification of his vanity of possession. During the weeks that I
remained in his house I never once caught him, nor any member of his
family, standing before any one of all those pictures, silently ‘taking
it in.’ The purpose of the pictures was to supply an opportunity for
his visitors’ envy and compel their tongues to the service of his ears.

“You observe on my walls here,” the veteran virtuoso continued,
revolving slowly on his pivot, “one water-color and a lot of
trifles—photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, and so forth—most of them
rather bad. The painting itself is none too good; I should not like to
have my taste in such things judged by it. But observe: it is the work
of a young friend, and into every inch of it he has put something of
his heart, for it was done in the hope of pleasing me. The carved oak
frame, too, is one of his own creation, the mat (of copper)—all. Would
the costliest and ugliest of old masters give me as much pleasure? You,
yes; but, dear fellow, you are not considered.

“See that pen-and-ink head—there are better. But it is a first attempt,
done by the uninstructed young girl whose photograph you see alongside.
She is to be a great artist some day, but none of her work will have to
me the interest and value of that.

“Ah, those faded and soiled little photographs—Mary, Hélène, Katy, the
divine Josie and the rest—you need not look at them; they are merely
little soft spots for _my_ eyes to fall upon and rest. Why, sir,
there’s not the most trifling object in this room but has a hundred
tender recollections clinging to it like bats to a stalactite—swarming
about it like bees about Hymettus. Should I replace them with ‘works of
art’ bought in the shops and damnably authenticated?

“This room is for me. I live here, read here, write here, smoke here.
Wherever my eye falls, it rests upon something that starts a train
of thought and emotion infinitely more agreeable, and I believe more
profitable, than any suggested by the work of a hand that I never
grasped, guided by however sure an eye that never looked into mine.
Don’t, I pray you, take the trouble to appear to be interested in these
things, such as a country maiden might decorate her sleeping room
withal. (Ah, happy country maiden, untaught in the black art of showing
off!) Don’t, I beg, give anything here a second glance: ‘there was no
thought of pleasing thee’ when it was put here.

“Come,” concluded the Sentimental Bachelor, taking his hat and stick,
“let us go to the Park. I want to show you the fine Rembrandt that I
presented to the Art Gallery. Celestine adored it.”



                            THE MARCH HARE



                        A FLOURISHING INDUSTRY


The infant industry of buying worthless cattle, inoculating them
with pleuro-pneumonia and tuberculosis, and collecting the indemnity
when they are officially put to death to prevent the spread of the
contagion, is assuming something of the importance and dignity of a
national pursuit. The proprietors of one of the largest contageries on
Long Island report that the outlook is most encouraging; they begin
each fiscal year with a large surplus in their treasury. Some of the
Western companies, too, have been highly prosperous and intend to mark
their gratification by an immediate issue of new shares as a bonus.

The effect of this industry upon pastoral pursuits is wholesome. The
stock ranges of Texas, Wyoming and Montana thrill with a new life,
and it is estimated that their enlargement during the next few years
will bring not less than five million acres of public land into the
service of man and beast. The advantage to manufacturers of barbed-wire
fencing is obvious, while the indirect benefit to agriculture through
the enhanced price of this now indispensable material will supply
the protectionist with a new argument and a peculiar happiness.
Cattle-growing has hitherto been attended with great waste. A large
percentage of the “stock on hand” was unsalable. Failure of the cactus
crop, destitution of water and prevalence of blizzards, together with
such natural ills as cattle flesh is heir to, have frequently so
reduced the physical condition of the herds that not more than a half
would be acceptable to the buyer. The ailing remainder were of little
use. A few of the larger animals could be utilized by preparing them
as skeletons of buffaloes for Eastern museums of natural history,
but the demand was limited: nine in ten were suffered to expire and
become a dead loss. These are now eagerly sought by agents of the
contageries, purchased at good prices, driven by easy stages to the
railways and, arriving at their final destination, duly infected.
They are said to require less infection than they would if they were
in good condition, with what the life insurance companies are pleased
to call a fair “expectation of life.” Some of the breeders prefer to
isolate these failures and do their own infecting; but the tendency
in the cattle trade, as in all others, is toward division of labor.
The regular infectionaries possess superior facilities of inoculation,
and government inspectors prefer to do business at a few great
pleuro-pneumoniacal and tubercular centers rather than make tedious
journeys to distant ranges. The trend of the age is, in fact, toward
centralization.

The effect of the new industry upon commerce cannot be accurately
foreseen, but it is natural to suppose that it will largely increase
the importation of lowgrade cattle from South America. Hitherto it has
not been profitable to import any that were unfit for beef. But if the
_Bos inedibilis_, the milkless crowbait and other varieties “not too
good for human nature’s daily food”—in fact not good enough—can be
laid down in New York or New Orleans at a cost of not more than thirty
dollars each, including the purchase price of ten cents, and inoculated
before they have eaten their heads off, there would seem to be a
reasonable margin of profit in the traffic. If not, the legal allowance
for their condemnation and slaughter can be easily increased by
legislative action. If Congress will do nothing to encourage capital in
that direction the States most benefited by this extension of American
commerce can respond to the demand of the hour with a judicious
system of bounties. Importation of cheap foreign cattle eligible to
pleuro-pneumonia and the junior disorder will provide employment to a
great number of persons who, without apt appropriation’s artful aid,
might languish on farms and in workshops, a burden to the community and
a sore trial to themselves.



                            THE RURAL PRESS


There will be joy in the household of the country editor what time the
rural mind shall no longer crave the unwholesome stimuli provided by
composing accounts of corpulent beetroots, bloated pumpkins, dropsical
melons, aspiring maize, and precocious cabbages. Then the bucolic
journalist shall have surcease of toil, and may go out upon the meads
to frisk with kindred lambs, frolic familiarly with loose-jointed colts
and exchange grave gambolings with solemn cows. Then shall the voice
of the press, no longer attuned to praise of the vegetable kingdom,
find a more humble but not less useful employment in calling the animal
kingdom to the evening meal beneath the sanctum window.

To the overworked editor life will have a fresh zest, a new and
quickening significance. The hills shall seem to hump more greenly up
to a bluer sky, the fields to blush with a tenderer sunshine. He will
go forth at dawn executing countless flip-flaps of gymnastic joy; and
when the white sun shall redden with the blood of dying day, and the
pigs shall set up a fine evening hymn of supplication to the Giver
of All Swill he will be jubilant in the editorial feet, blissfully
conscious that the editorial intellect is a-ripening for the morrow’s
work.

The rural newspaper! We sit with it in hand, running our fingers over
the big, staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano,
drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight
one disports him in the deep void of its nothingness, as who should
swim in air! Here is nothing to startle, nothing to wound. The very
atmosphere is suffused and saturated with “the spirit of the rural
press;” and even one’s dog sits by, slowly dropping the lids over
its great eyes; then lifting them with a jerk, tries to look as if
it were not sleepy in the least degree. A fragrance of plowed fields
comes to one like a benediction. The tinkle of ghostly cowbells falls
drowsily upon the ear. Airy figures of prize esculents float before
the half-shut eyes and vanish before perfect vision can attain to
them. Above and about are the drone of bees and the muffled thunder of
milk-streams shooting into the foaming bucket. The gabble of distant
geese is faintly marked off by the barking of a distant dog. The city,
with all its noises, sinks away, as from one in a balloon, and our
senses swim in the “intense inane” of country languor. We slumber.

God bless the man who invented the country newspaper!—though Sancho
Panza blessed him long ago.



                        “TO ELEVATE THE STAGE”


The existence of a theatrical company, composed entirely of Cambridge
and Harvard _alumni_ who have been in jail strikes the imagination with
a peculiar force. In the theatrical world the ideal condition conceived
by certain social philosophers is being rapidly realized and reduced
to practice. “It does not matter,” say these superior persons, “what
one does; it is only important what one is.” The theater folk have long
been taking that view of things, as is amply attested by the histrionic
careers (for examples) of Mrs. Lily Langtry and Mr. John L. Sullivan.
Managers—and, we may add, the public—do not consider it of the least
importance what Mrs. Langtry _does_ on the stage, nor how she does
it, so long as she _is_ a former favorite of a Prince and a tolerably
fair counterpart of a Jersey cow. And who cares what Mr. Sullivan’s
pronunciation of the word “mother” may be, or what degree of sobriety
he may strive to simulate?—in seeing his performance we derive all our
delight from the consciousness of the great and godlike thing that he
has the goodness to _be_.

It is needless to recall other instances; every playgoer’s memory is
richly stored with them; but this troupe of convicted collegians is
the frankest application of the principle to which we have yet been
treated. At the same time, it opens up “vistas” of possibilities
extending far-and-away beyond what was but yesterday the longest
reach of conjecture. Why should we stop with a troupe of educated
felons? Let us recognize the principle to the full and apply it with
logical heroism, unstayed by considerations of taste and sense. Let us
have theater companies composed of reformed assassins who have been
preachers. A company of deaf mutes whose grandfathers were hanged,
would prove a magnetic “attraction” and play to good houses—that
is to say, they would _be_ to good houses. In a troupe of senators
with warts on their noses the pleasure-shoving public would find an
infinite gratification and delight. It might lack the allurement
of feminine charm, most senators being rather old women, but for
magnificent inaction it would bear the palm. Even better would be a
company of distinguished corpses supporting some such star inactor,
as the mummy of his late Majesty, Rameses II of Egypt. In them the
do-nothing-be-something principle would have its highest, ripest and
richest development. In the broad blaze of their histrionic glory Mrs.
Langtry would pale her uneffectual fire and Mr. Sullivan hide his
diminished head.

From the example of such a company streams of good would radiate in
every direction, with countless ramifications. Not only would it
accomplish the long desired “elevation of the stage” to such a plane
that even the pulpit need not be ashamed to work with it in elicitation
of the human snore, but it would spread the light over other arts and
industries, causing “the dawn of a new era” generally. Even with the
comparatively slow progress we are making now, it is not unreasonable
to hope that eventually Man will cease his fussy activity altogether
and do nothing whatever, each individual of the species becoming a
veritable monument of philosophical inaction, rapt in the contemplation
of his own abstract worth and perhaps taking root where he stands to
survey it.



                               PECTOLITE


This is one of the younger group of minerals: it was discovered
by a German scientist in 1828. For its age it is an exceptionally
interesting stone—if it is a stone. Its most eminent and distinguishing
peculiarity is described as the “property of parting with minute
splinters from its surface upon being handled, these splinters
or spicules piercing the hand, producing a pain similar to that
experienced by contact with a nettle.”

In the mineral kingdom pectolite ought to take high rank, near the very
throne. In its power of annoying man it is a formidable competitor
to several illustrious members of the vegetable kingdom, such as the
nettle, the cactus, the poison ivy and the domestic briar. There
are, indeed, several members of the animal kingdom which hardly
excel it in the power of producing human misery. Considering its
remarkable aptitude in that bad way its rarity is somewhat difficult to
understand, and is perhaps more apparent than real. Professor Hanks
says that previously to its discovery in California it had been found
in only eight places. If upon investigation these should turn out to be
Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, Australia and the two
Polar continents, the unnatural discrepancy between its objectionable
character and its narrow distribution would be explained away, and
pectolite seen to be “in touch” with its sister malevolences, whose
abundance is usually in the direct ratio of their noxiousness to man.

In his efforts to make this uncommon mineral known, advance its
interests and bring it into closer relations with mankind, Professor
Hanks is winning golden opinions from the manufacturer of arsenic, the
promoter of the Canadian thistle, and the local agent of the imported
rattlesnake. The various uses to which it can be put are obvious and
numberless. As a missile in a riot—the impeller wearing a glove,
but the other person having nothing to guard his face and eyes—its
field of usefulness will be wide and fertile. Small fragments of it
attractively displayed here and there about the city will give a rich
return of agony when thoughtlessly picked up. For village sidewalks
inimical to the thin shoe of the period it would be entirely superior
to the knotty plank studded with projecting nail heads. With a view
to these various “uses of adversity,” it would be well for Professor
Hanks to submit careful estimates of the cost of quarrying it and
transporting it to places where it can be made to do the greatest harm
to the greatest number. To assist and further the purposes of Nature,
as manifested in the character of the several agencies and materials
which she employs, is the greatest glory of science. A human being
assailed by all the natural forces, seizing a stone to defend himself
and getting a fistful of pectolitic spiculæ, is a spectacle in which
one can get as near and clear a glimpse of the Great Mystery as in any;
and science is now prepared to supply the stone.



                             LA BOULANGÈRE


A once famous American actress, Miss Mary Anderson—sometimes, I think,
called “Our Mary”—was an accomplished baker. Among her personal
friends, those at least who had the happiness to dine at her home,
she had a distinguished reputation as a bread-maker. She was once
persuaded to make public the prescription that she used, through the
London _Times_, thus materially enlarging her practice by addition of
many new patients. I regret my inability to reproduce the prescription
here for the benefit of such house-keepers as are unfettered by
Colonial tradition—who, not having inherited the New World system from
their great-grandmothers, might be accessible to the light of a later
dispensation. For bread-making is, I think, a progressive science in
which perfection is not attained at a bound by merely “dissolving the
political bands” which connect one country with another.

History is garrulous of our Revolutionary sires: their virtues and
other vices are abundantly extolled; but concerning our Revolutionary
dames the trumpet of fame remains mysteriously and significantly
reticent—a phenomenon not easily accounted for on any hypothesis
which assumes or concedes their worth. Historians, poets and those,
generally, who have possession of the public ear and hold it from
generation to generation, seem to feel that the less said about these
merry old girls the better. I believe the secret of it lies in the
consciousness of the literary class that the mothers of the Republic
made treasonably bad bread, and that their sins of that sort are
being visited upon their children, even to these third and fourth
generations, and (which is worse) practiced by them. No doubt the
success of the Revolutionary War would have been achieved later if
our brave grandfathers had not been fortified in body and spirit by
privation of the domestic loaf of the period, known to us through the
domestic loaf of our own. To immunity from the latter desolating agency
the soldiers on both sides in the more recent and greater conflict were
obviously indebted for the development of that martial spirit which
made them so reluctant to stop fighting and go home. It must be said,
however, in defence of the Bread of Our Union that if one is going to
eat the salt-spangled butter which also appertains to the home of the
brave it really does not greatly matter what one eats it on.

America’s dyspepsia is not entirely the product of the frying-pan,
the pie and the use of the stop-watch at meals. Any wholesome reform
in bread-making as practiced darkly in the secrecy of our kitchens,
will materially mitigate the national disorder; though even bread made
according to the plans and specifications of Our Mary can hardly be
expected to manifest all its virtues if eaten blazing hot. Whatever
may be the outcome of Mistress Mary’s quite contrary way of imparting
her sacred secret to a foreign newspaper and ignoring the press of her
own country—whether anybody now compounds bread after her prescription
or not, or if anybody does, whether anybody else will eat it—this much
was accomplished: she showed that at least one American woman was not
afraid to tell the world and the public prosecutors how she made bread.
As a bread-maker she was indubitably gifted with the divine audacity of
genius.



                           ADVICE TO OLD MEN


It goes without saying that among the elements of success a broad and
liberal total abstinence is chief. The old man who gets drunk before
dinner is born to failure as the sparks fly upward. Diligence in
business is another qualification that needs not be particularly dwelt
upon; the old man who seeks his ease while his young and energetic
employees, trained to habits of industry, are stealing all the profits
of the business will find his finish where he did not lose it. He is
beyond the reach of remonstrance.

Study the rising old man. You will find him invariably distinguished
by seriousness. He is not given to frivolity. He does not play at
football. He does not contribute jokes to the comic papers. He does not
waste his time kissing the girls. The rising old man is all business.
We can all be that way if we are old enough to have no infrangible
habits.

As to manners, and these are of the utmost importance, a deferential
and reverent attitude toward youth has a commercial value that it
would be hard to appraise too highly. Remember, old man, that the youth
whom you employ to-day you may serve to-morrow, if he will have you. It
is worth while to make him admire you, and the best way to do so is to
show him that you respect him. There are certain virtues that win the
admiration of all; let him think that you think that he has them.

A most desirable quality in an old man is modesty. It is not only
valuable as a mental equipment necessary to success, it is right and
just that you should have it. Pray do not forget, in the exultation of
growing old, that age is peculiarly liable to error through the glamour
of experience. To the errors of age and experience are attributable
most of those failures which come to us in the later life. We can not
help being old, but Heaven has not denied us the opportunity to take
counsel of youth and ignorance. Some one has said that the way to
succeed is to think like a philosopher and then act like a fool. The
thinking being needless, a mere intellectual luxury, and therefore a
sinful waste of the time allowed us for another and better purpose,
renounce it. As to action, study the young. Every successful man was
once young.

Do not try to get anything for nothing: when you have obtained a
liberal discount for cash you have done much; do the rest by paying the
cash. An honest old man is the pride and glory of his son.

Dig, save, fast, go as nearly naked as the law allows, and if Heaven
does not reward you with success you will nevertheless have the
satisfaction that comes of the consciousness of being a glittering
example to American age.



                         A DUBIOUS VINDICATION


Hardly any class of persons enjoys complete immunity from injustice
and calumny, even if “armed with the ballot”; but probably no
class has so severely suffered from Slander’s mordant tooth as our
man-eating brethren of that indefinite region known as the “Cannibal
Islands.” Nations which do not eat themselves, and which, with even
greater self-denial, refrain from banqueting on other nations, have
for generations been subjected to a species of criticism that must
be a sore trial to their patience. Every reprobate among us who has
sense enough to push a pencil along the measured mile of a day’s task
in a newspaper office without telling the truth has experienced a
sinful pleasure in representing anthropophagi as persons of imperfect
refinement and ailing morals. They have been censured even, for murder;
though surely it is kinder to take the life of a man whom you set apart
for your dinner than to eat him struggling. It has been said of them
that they are particularly partial to the flesh of missionaries.

It appears that this is not so. The Rev. Mr. Hopkins, of the Methodist
Church, who returned to New York after a residence of fifteen years in
the various islands of the South Pacific, assured his brethren that in
all that period he could not recollect a single instance in which he
was made to feel himself a comestible. He averred that his spiritual
character was everywhere recognized, and so far as he knew he was never
in peril of being put to the tooth.

His testimony, unluckily, has not the value that its obvious sincerity
and truth merit. In point of physical structure he was conspicuously
inedible; so much so, in truth, that an unsympathetic reporter coldly
described him as “fibrous” and declared that in a country where
appetizers are unknown and pepsin a medicine of the future, Mr. Hopkins
could under no circumstances cut any figure as a viand. And this same
writer meaningly inquired of the cartilaginous missionary the present
address of one “Fatty Dawson.”

Fully to understand the withering sarcasm of this inquiry it is
necessary to know that the person whose whereabouts it was desired to
ascertain was a co-worker of Mr. Hopkins in the same missionary field.
His success in spreading the light was such as to attract the notice
of the native king. In the last letter received from Mr. Dawson he
explained that that potentate had just done him the honor to invite him
to dinner.

Mr. Hopkins being a missionary, one naturally prefers his views to
those of anyone who is still in the bonds of iniquity, and moreover,
writes for the newspapers; nevertheless, I do not see that any harm
would come of a plain statement of the facts in the case of the Rev.
Mr. Dawson. He was not eaten by the dusky monarch—in the face of Mr.
Hopkins’ solemn assurance that cannibalism is a myth, it is impossible
to believe that Mr. Dawson was himself the dinner to which he was
invited. That he was eaten by Mr. Hopkins himself is a proposition
so abysmally horrible that none but the hardiest and most impenitent
calumniator would have the depravity to suggest it.



                         THE JAMAICAN MONGOOSE


When man undertakes for some sordid purpose to disturb the balance of
natural forces concerned in the conservation and in the destruction
of life on this planet he is all too likely to err. For example, when
some public-spirited Australian, observing a dearth of donkeys in his
great lone land, thoughtfully imported a shipload of rabbits, believing
that they would grow up with the country, learn to carry loads and
eventually bray, he performed a disservice to his fellow colonists
which they would gladly requite by skinning him alive if they could
lay hands on him. It is well known that our thoughtless extermination
of the American Indian has been followed by an incalculable increase
of the grasshoppers which once served him as food. So strained is
the resulting situation that some of our most prominent seers are
baffled in attempting to forecast the outcome; and it is said that
the Secretary of Agriculture holds that farming on this continent is
doomed unless we take to a grasshopper diet ourselves.

The matter lends itself to facile illustration: one could multiply
instances to infinity. We might cite the Australian ladybird, which
was by twenty well defined and several scientists brought here and
acclimated at great expense to feed upon a certain fruit pest, but
which, so far, has confined its ravages mainly to the fruit.

The latest, and in some ways the most striking, instance of the peril
of making a redistribution of the world’s fauna, is supplied by the
beautiful tropical isle of Jamaica, home of the Demon Rum. It appears
that someone in Jamaica was imperfectly enamored of the native rats,
which are creatures of eminent predacity, intrepid to a degree that
is most disquieting. This person introduced from a foreign land the
mongoose—an animal whose name it seems prudent to give in the singular
number. The mongoose, as is well known, is affected with an objection
to rats compared with which the natural animosity of a dog to another
dog is a mild passion indeed, and that of a collector of customs to
holy water seems hardly more than a slight coolness. Jamaica is now
ratless, but, alas, surpassingly tickful. The ticks have so multiplied
upon the face of the earth that man and beast are in equal danger of
extinction. The people hardly dare venture out-of-doors to plant the
rum vine and help the north-bound steamers to take on monkeys. The
mongoose alone is immune to ticks.

It appears that when this creature had effaced the rats it was itself
threatened with effacement from lack of comestible suited to its
tooth; but instead of wasting its life in repinings and unavailing
regrets—instead of yielding to the insidious importunities of
nostalgia, it fell upon the lizards and banqueted royally if roughly;
and soon the lizards had gone to join the rats in the Unknown. Now,
the Jamaica lizard had for countless ages “wittled free” upon ticks,
maintaining among them a high death-rate with which, apparently, their
own dietetic excesses (for ticks are greatly addicted to the pleasures
of the table) had nothing to do. The lizard abating his ravages,
through being himself abated by the mongoose, the tick holds dominion
by the unchallenged authority of numbers. Man, the whilom tyrant, flees
to his mountain fastnesses, the rum vine withers in the fields and the
north-bound steamer sails monkeyless away. Jamaica’s last state is
worse than her first and almost as bad as ours. She is as yet, however,
spared the last and lowest humiliation that a brave and generous people
can experience; her parasites do not pose as patriots, nor tickle the
vanity of those whom they bleed.


                         Transcriber’s Notes:

  - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
  - Blank pages have been removed.
  - A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
  



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.