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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSfT. 
 

BOOKS AND THINGS 
 
 BY 
 
 PHILIP LITTELL 
 
 m 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 1919 
 

 p v & 
 
 k. 
 
 Copyright, 1919, by 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE. Inc. 
 
 0C1 
 
 THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
 RAHWAY N J 
 
 ©CI. A5 3 5 18 2 
 
TO 
 
 E. P. S. 
 
My thanks are due to the other editors 
 of "The New Republic" for letting me 
 print and reprint the follozving articles 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 sargent's wilson 3 
 
 a little flag 5 
 
 providence the wise 12 
 
 the ideal campaigner 1 9 
 
 when the augurs yawned 26 
 
 " a road to yesterday " 35 
 
 BRYAN 4 2 
 
 SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN 49 
 
 ZEPPELINITIS 57 
 
 VERDUN 64 
 
 HEADMASTERLY 7 1 
 
 DISCLOSURE DAY 80 
 
 HENRY AND EDNA 89 
 
 SAFETY IN NUMBERS Ill 
 
 A DRY DINNER ... . . . . 120 
 
 THE BONDAGE OF SHAW 1 27 
 
 A SCHNITZLER STORY I4 1 
 
 BELOW THE AVERAGE READER 1 48 
 
 REVIEWING RUSSIA 155 
 
 ANNA REVISITED l6o 
 
 TENNYSON 1 67 
 
 BROWNING 173 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD l8o 
 
 SWINBURNE 187 
 
 " THE WAY OF ALL FLESH " 194 
 
 AN IMMORTAL WRITER 201 
 
 LATER GEORGE MOORE ...... ... . 208 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 henry james's quality 215 
 
 " the middle years " 224 
 
 richard the lion-harding 23o 
 
 victor chapman's letters 2^7 
 
 " the spirit of man " 244 
 
 my new ulster 250 
 
 acts of composition ...... 257 
 
 forget it 264 
 
 " LE PETIT PIERRE " . . • .«. ... • • 2jl 
 
BOOKS AND THINGS 
 
SARGENT'S WILSON 
 
 AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM 
 
 HE is leaning forward a little, with an arm 
 on each arm of his chair. Neither hand 
 is quite resigned to the situation, quite given up 
 to the moment. In the left one, especially, we 
 discover an impatience which we find again, 
 somewhat more faded or more under control, 
 in his face. These visitors whom we do not 
 see, whom the painter has put us in the place 
 of, did not this professor understand several 
 minutes ago everything they could have to say 
 of foot than their minds. Now he is ready to 
 have them go, he is more than ready to turn 
 his chair again to the table, where his docu- 
 ments are and his heart is. Matter printed or 
 typewritten is so much more orderly and in- 
 words hot in the mouths of flesh and blood 
 forming, so much less an interruption, than 
 to him? Of course he did. His mind is fleeter 
 intruders. 
 
 What is he professor of? No narrow spe- 
 3 
 
4* Books and Things 
 
 cialty, surely. Those eyes, hard and cold al- 
 though they can stare, on occasion, are evidently 
 accustomed to liberal prospects. A habit of 
 speaking to a listening world, from that part of 
 his intellect which most resembles his heart, has 
 saved his didactic lips from any such look of 
 petulance as blind nature half intended them to 
 wear. Perhaps his specialty is the future. Yes, 
 that must be it. Mr. Sargent has shown us a 
 Professor of the Future, whom a delegation 
 from the present, the coarse present in which 
 things are every day either done or left undone, 
 has interrupted. When the present has picked 
 up its hat and bowed itself out he will be relieved 
 to be left alone again with the future. 
 
 Januaby, 1918. 
 
A LITTLE FLAG 
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON'S speech on Flag 
 Day gave me two surprises. It revealed 
 a likeness I had never suspected between the 
 President's thinking and Mr. G. K. Chesterton's. 
 " There are no days of special patriotism," says 
 the President. " There are no days when you 
 should be more patriotic than other days." A 
 few sentences later the same thought is repeated 
 in a slightly different form : " I am sorry that 
 you do not wear a little flag of the Union every 
 day instead of some days." Clearly the teach- 
 ing of these two passages taken together is that 
 Flag Day should not come once a year, but 
 that every day should be Flag Day. Mr. 
 Chesterton, in an essay called " Some Damnable 
 Errors About Christmas," deals after this fash- 
 ion with the second of the more obvious fallacies 
 which the day has occasioned : " I refer to the 
 belief that ' Christmas comes but once a year.' 
 Perhaps it does, according to the calendar — a 
 quaint and interesting compilation, but of little 
 or no practical value to anybody. It is not the 
 
 5 
 
Books and Things 
 
 calendar, but the spirit of man that regulates 
 the recurrence of feasts and fasts. Spiritually, 
 Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a 
 week. When we have frankly acknowledged 
 this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realize 
 the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it 
 is only every-day things that reveal themselves 
 to us in all their wonder and their splendor. A 
 man who happens one day to be knocked down 
 by a motor-bus merely utters a curse and in- 
 structs his solicitor, but a man who has been 
 knocked down by a motor-bus every day of the 
 year will have begun to feel that he is taking 
 part in an august and soul-cleansing ritual." 
 
 Later in the same essay, involuntarily con- 
 tributed to Mr. Max Beerbohm's " Christmas 
 Garland," Mr. Chesterton says that " what is 
 right as regards Christmas is right as regards 
 all other so-called anniversaries." Whether 
 President Wilson would go as far as this I can- 
 not know until I have collated his speeches on 
 the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, 
 Christmas, Easter Day, Saint Patrick's Day and 
 Memorial Day. This I hope to do when the 
 opportunities have presented themselves. If his 
 thinking prove consistent and if his advice be 
 
A Little Flag J 
 
 followed, the heart of America will lose some of 
 that monotony which hostile critics have im- 
 puted to it. You will readily allow me this 
 prophecy if you suffer me to complete my quo- 
 tation from President Wilson. " I am sorry," 
 he said, " that you do not wear a little flag of 
 the Union every day instead of some days, and 
 I can only ask you, if you lose the physical 
 emblem, to be sure that you wear it in your 
 heart, that the heart of America shall interpret 
 the heart of the world." And so it may come 
 about, if what is right as regards Flag Day is 
 right as regards all other so-called anniver- 
 saries, that you will wear every day in your 
 heart a little flag of the Union, a wreath of holly 
 and a spray of shamrock. Every day instead 
 of some days your heart will hold an Easter 
 Egg in one hand and in the other, unless you 
 incline to a safe and sane Fourth, a fire-cracker. 
 Does a heart so profusely and variously deco- 
 rated seem to you like a heart decorated against 
 itself? No matter. Too quick despairer, be not 
 discouraged. Learn to embellish your heart by 
 adding now and then a fresh little physical 
 emblem to its furniture. 
 
 Surprise number two was the discovery that 
 
8 Books and Things 
 
 I did not really understand President Wilson's 
 meaning. Here, in a writer notably perspicuous, 
 were simple words simply arranged, yet baffling 
 somehow, and so subtly ! This surprise did not 
 stay. I put it to flight by recalling a sentence 
 from William Blake : " Nor is it possible to 
 thought a greater than itself to know." Know- 
 ing, however, that we progress by attempting 
 the impossible, I did not give over the attempt 
 to master the President's thought, but kept on 
 striving, striving, until finally something light- 
 ened the darkness — a suspicion that President 
 Wilson, when he appeared to say he was sorry 
 we Americans did not wear a little flag as fre- 
 quently as we now wear skirts or trousers, 
 didn't intend to be taken literally. What he 
 would have us acquire is the high-motive habit. 
 Many of us go through life without feeling 
 patriotic more than a very few times. It is not 
 patriotism which wars every morning against 
 sluggishness, conquers it and yanks you out of 
 bed. It is not patriotism which at breakfast 
 leads you to reject that extra, ultimate, tor- 
 porific griddle-cake, nor is it patriotism which 
 lands you at the station in time to catch the 
 7:51 for the city. Not by reference to a 
 
A Little Flag 9 
 
 patriotism conscious of itself can we explain Mr. 
 T. Cobb's batting average. 
 
 This condition of things is one that President 
 Wilson would gladly change. For an America 
 in which men do their day's work from many 
 and various and specialized motives he would 
 substitute an America in which work is done 
 from motives fewer and nobler. He believes 
 that work is likely to be better done if the 
 worker's motive is high. In President Wilson's 
 mind human motives are arranged in a hier- 
 archy, with patriotism near the top. To him 
 the world would be not only a more admirable 
 but a more interesting place if all men could 
 acquire the habit of looking about them, select- 
 ing the highest motive in sight, and then acting 
 on it. To his mind there would be something 
 congenial in the spectacle of such order and 
 simplicity and uniform highmindedness. Such a 
 world would at least be very unlike the existing 
 world. It would be a little like a world of 
 Woodrow Wilsons. For President Wilson is 
 one of those exceptional men who act seldom 
 upon impulse and mostly upon high motives 
 carefully chosen. This consciousness of high 
 motives is one explanation of his courage and 
 
io Books and Things 
 
 his tenacity. When you are thoroughly con- 
 vinced that your motives are right it is easier 
 to believe that they must be impelling you along 
 the right track. 
 
 Now, having got what I can out of the Flag 
 Day speech, I wonder how I could ever have 
 thought it just a series of highminded, unmean- 
 ing words. In appearance it is this, to be sure, 
 but in reality it is self-revelation. " Save me, 
 O Lord, from pumping into myself every morn- 
 ing feelings which can in me be sincere only by 
 accident or on a special occasion." The man 
 who made that prayer does not resemble Mr. 
 Wilson. To keep company with high motives 
 is part of the President's daily life. They do 
 not lose their power over him. With them he 
 goes up to the high places where he makes his 
 lonely decisions, and to their voices he listens. 
 Every day he invites them to his table, the same 
 guests always — Patriotism, Humanity, Justice, 
 Duty and the others. Their host knows how to 
 put these abstractions at their ease by making 
 them feel that he is one of themselves. The 
 table talk would have shocked Horace Walpole. 
 Such words as " sacred " and " solemnize " are 
 heard oftener than the taste of the eighteenth. 
 
A Little Flag n 
 
 century would have approved. There is a sud- 
 den hush at the table. The host is speaking, 
 " When I think of the flag," he says, " it seems 
 to me I see alternate stripes of parchment upon 
 which are written the rights of liberty and jus- 
 tice, and stripes of blood spilt to vindicate those 
 rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of 
 the blue serene into which every nation may 
 swim which stands for these great things." 
 Nor do Patriotism, Justice, Humanity and Duty 
 see anything to criticize in their friend's rhetoric. 
 June, 1915. 
 
PROVIDENCE THE WISE 
 
 MOST of the men I know best voted last 
 autumn for President Wilson. Most of 
 them did it after a good deal of hesitation, did 
 it recalcitrantly, biased by reading and meditat- 
 ing the speeches of Mr. Hughes. Nearly all, 
 however, admired Mr. Wilson's addresses of 
 February third and April second, although they 
 would have liked them better yet if the Presi- 
 dent had said " duty " instead of " plain duty," 
 " frankly " instead of " very frankly," and if he 
 had not said " proud punctilio." These excep- 
 tions made, the speeches Mr. Wilson has lately 
 been delivering do not arride these friends of 
 mine, who are punctilious without being proudly 
 punctilious, and meticulous not without being 
 morbidly meticulous. Some of them read him 
 with pain, others with a pleasure not free from 
 malice. 
 
 Attempts to explain their state of mind are 
 all the harder for me because it resembles my 
 own. I am talking, of course, about those men 
 who are in nowise malicious. You suggest, per- 
 
 12 
 
Providence the Wise 13 
 
 haps, that each of them had in childhood an 
 experience which predisposed him to distaste 
 for Mr. Wilson's recent speeches? Yes, that is 
 possible, certainly possible. I should not care, 
 by calling it impossible, to range myself with 
 those who go up and down the world always 
 denying that the improbable has occurred. But 
 is not the matter easier of access on the other 
 side? Instead of trying to guess what Mr. Wil- 
 son's mind is like by exploring their feeling 
 about it, why not try to get at their feeling by 
 taking a look at a bit of his mind? 
 
 Let us choose, for this purpose, a passage 
 where the substance attracts more attention 
 than the words. Or else, if we are so unhappily 
 constituted that such a passage is not so easy 
 to find, let us disregard our sorrow that the 
 President's vocabulary has lost so few female 
 adjectives since the United States went to war, 
 that the adjective is still the enemy of the 
 executive. 
 
 Perhaps this extract will do — from the ad- 
 dress Mr. Wilson made last week to the United 
 Confederate Veterans: "These are days of 
 oblivion as well as of memory; for we are for- 
 getting the things that once held us asunder. 
 
14 Books and Things 
 
 Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing, 
 because we now at last see why this great nation 
 was kept united, for we are beginning to see 
 the great world purpose which it was meant to 
 serve. Many men, I know, particularly of your 
 own generation, have wondered at some of the 
 dealings of Providence, but the wise heart never 
 questions the dealings of Providence, because 
 the great, long plan as it unfolds has a majesty 
 about it and a definiteness of purpose, an eleva- 
 tion of ideal, which we were incapable of con- 
 ceiving as we tried to work things out with our 
 own short sight and weak strength." And 
 again, a few sentences later: " At the day of our 
 greatest division there was one common passion 
 among us, and that was the passion for human 
 freedom. We did not know that God was work- 
 ing out in His own way the method by which 
 we should best serve human freedom — by mak- 
 ing this nation a great, united, indivisible, in- 
 destructible instrument in His hands for the 
 accomplishment of these great things." 
 
 Such a passage is not the work of a mind for 
 which a main attraction in difficult subjects is 
 their difficulty. The doubt Mr. Wilson hoped to 
 soothe is found tossing on its bed, with a tern- 
 
Providence the Wise l£ 
 
 perature as high as ever, when he has finished 
 his lullaby. His words are a soft answer to a 
 hard question. 
 
 Even comparatively simple questions are an- 
 swered here with uncostly ease. Are we quite 
 so certain, if we impute to Providence, as Its 
 motive for deciding our civil war as It decided 
 it, a desire to keep the United States united for 
 military use in the present war, are we quite 
 certain that the means were adapted to this end? 
 Suppose the South had split itself off from the 
 North, suppose each of these two nations, afraid 
 of the other, had treated itself to a large stand- 
 ing army. Suppose, finally, that the passion for 
 making and keeping the world safe for democ- 
 racy had burst upon these two nations at about 
 the same time, and had risen high enough to 
 wash each beyond fear of the other, and had 
 swept both into this war. Might not the result 
 have been that the southern states and the 
 northern states would be less unready to-day for 
 war than the United States is? This is not a 
 certainty. Of course it isn't. It is a doubt 
 which the President has called into being by his 
 own freedom from doubt. 
 
 Our fathers have told us that some minds seek 
 
Books and Things 
 
 by preference the central difficulty of every sub- 
 ject they attack. Other minds decline to see even 
 the difficulties that are posted conspicuously 
 upon the subject's circumference, like sentinels 
 on its outer walls. We should have to put Mr. 
 Wilson into this second class, I am afraid, if 
 we were to judge him by nothing but what he 
 said to the Confederate Veterans about Provi- 
 dence. 
 
 Don't question the dealings of Providence, he 
 advised the Confederate Veterans. Wait until 
 you can see in these dealings majesty, elevation 
 of ideal, definiteness of purpose. Then approve. 
 " The wise heart never questions the dealings of 
 Providence." 
 
 But this advice, as I discover by trying to fol- 
 low it, makes me the judge of an ideal's eleva- 
 tion and the definiteness of a purpose, me the 
 appraiser of majesty. I may not like such an 
 arrangement. I may happen to require, no 
 matter how well I think of myself, a criterion 
 more objective than my uncertain and fitful 
 power to recognize these things when I see 
 them. As a judge of God's purposes I leave 
 something to be desired. Had I been address- 
 ing the Confederate Veterans, say in late 1914 
 
Providence the Wise 17 
 
 or early 191 5, I might have said to them, out of 
 my blindness: " God kept the United States one 
 nation so that it might serve, throughout this 
 world upheaval with whose causes we have no 
 concern, to remind the warring nations how 
 beautiful and lofty that nation is which pre- 
 serves and values the blessings of peace. By 
 God's help united we stand," so I might have 
 told my hearers, " and, in strict accordance with 
 His design, united we stand out of this war." 
 And to-day, seeing my error, now when the 
 great, long plan has been further unfolded, I 
 should perhaps be regretting that I had so pub- 
 licly misjudged the purposes of God. 
 
 President Wilson seems to imply that our 
 later estimates of the dealings of Providence 
 are always sounder than our earlier estimates. 
 This, we may remember, was almost Monsieur 
 d'Astarac's opinion of Providence's estimates of 
 Itself. On an island in the Seine, one moonlit 
 evening, he said to Jaques Tournebroche, who 
 had left La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque to 
 enter his service : 
 
 " One cannot reproach Jehovah with having 
 deceived himself as to the quality of his work. 
 Although he saw that it was good, at the very 
 
1 8 Books and Things 
 
 first and in the ardor of composition, he was not 
 slow to realize his mistake, and the Bible is 
 filled with expressions of his dissatisfaction, 
 which amounted often to ill-humor and even at 
 times to anger. Never did artisan treat the 
 products of his industry with more disgust and 
 aversion. He even thought of destroying them, 
 and as a matter of fact he did drown all except 
 a few." 
 June, 19*7. 
 
THE IDEAL CAMPAIGNER 
 
 NEITHER from his rather unusual name, 
 which is Mullinub, nor from his good 
 average face, which is red and round and opti- 
 mistic, would you be likely to guess his tastes, 
 which are all for cubism in plastic art, and in 
 verse for Mallarme and Edward Lear. 
 
 So you will readily understand that I, who 
 have long known his likings, was surprised when 
 he greeted me the other day with these words: 
 " This campaign that Hughes is making is 
 rather disappointing." Shielding my eyes from 
 the pictures which ruin his walls I determined 
 to improve the occasion. In a man like Mul- 
 linub serious interests should be encouraged. 
 
 " Ycu say well," I began. " There has been 
 no disappointment like Mr. Hughes's campaign 
 in my time. The hope which I took with me to 
 his notification meeting died there before the 
 evening was over. It did not want to die. Fed 
 on rumors and hearsay for dessert, with faith 
 and my desires as its staple food, it had grown 
 
 19 
 
20 Books and Things 
 
 marvelously throughout its short life. It was 
 conceived when Mr. Hughes's success at Chi- 
 cago began to look certain, it was born on the 
 day of his nomination, it died before he had 
 finished his first speech. For I had hoped that 
 Mr. Hughes, supplied by God or nature with a 
 stronger brain than any other Republican pos- 
 sibility except Mr. Root, would tell me quite 
 plainly what ought to have been the conduct 
 of the United States since the outbreak of the 
 war, would outline in large firm strokes an 
 American policy, would separate the risks 
 avoided by such a policy from those other risks 
 which he would be willing to face and for which 
 it was our business to prepare. 
 
 " Yes, I acknowledge that I had such a hope. 
 I did imagine once upon a time that Mr. 
 Hughes was a stilled fountain of pure wisdom, 
 eager for a chance to play. Like many hun- 
 dred thousand Americans I had been perplexed 
 in the extreme by the war. I longed for a leader 
 who could see our American goal, our way to 
 it, and the difficulties and dangers on our way. 
 Well, Mr. Hughes has been doing his best to 
 convince us all that such a picture had not the 
 merit of likeness. It was the work of a painter 
 
The Ideal Campaigner 21 
 
 who had dipped his brush in his wishes. Call 
 no man wise until he has broken silence." 
 
 Mullinub's face, while I was speaking my 
 piece, changed from surprise, which it expresses 
 easily, to disappointment, which it expresses 
 with effort and in spite of obstacles. 
 
 " I don't understand what you're driving at," 
 he said. " What do you expect from a cam- 
 paign, anyway ? " 
 
 " As a citizen," I answered with dignity, " I 
 either want a campaign to result in the doing 
 of certain things or else I want it to teach me 
 what things I want done." 
 
 " Oh," said Mullinub. " I get you. So you 
 are still at that stage of development? Perhaps 
 I was just as bad before I grew up. Nowadays 
 I am interested in campaigning as a fine art. 
 Absolute music, absolute painting, absolute 
 poetry, absolute campaigning — these are the 
 things I go in for. In each of these arts I seek 
 the master who can reduce the irrelevant and 
 impertinent interest, the illustrative, represen- 
 tative, informing, practical element, to a mini- 
 mum. The greatest master would abolish it 
 altogether. 
 
 " It was years ago that I had my first glimpse 
 
22 Books and Things 
 
 of an ideal toward which many candidates 
 strove but which no candidate ever quite at- 
 tained. It was then that I conceived my white 
 and pure and stainless ideal, then that I first 
 imagined a candidate who would take the stump 
 and stay on it without saying anything about 
 any subject upon which his opinion could con- 
 ceivably be an occasion of curiosity to any son 
 or daughter of woman. 
 
 " Mr. McKinley in his first campaign might 
 have reached this ideal. I still believe he was 
 capable, if only he had had the right trainers 
 and backers, of penetrating deep into the 
 autumn months of 1896 without uttering the 
 word gold — of avoiding this word for as many 
 weeks as Mr. Hughes succeeded in avoiding the 
 word Lusitania. But it was not to be. The 
 gods couldn't see it. Mr. McKinley's trainers 
 and backers would not let him be silent. He 
 passed into the White House with one great 
 possibility of his nature unfulfilled. 
 
 " But at Carnegie Hall, where I went sadly, 
 reluctantly, in obedience to major force, I was 
 thrilled by Mr. Hughes's speech. Perhaps I had 
 found my absolute campaigner after all these 
 years of waiting. With trembling hands I took 
 
The Ideal Campaigner 23 
 
 out my watch and timed the speaker. Half an 
 hour of Mexico, untainted by any attempt at a 
 clear statement of what he would have done if 
 he had been President. Glorious! Ten minutes 
 about the European war, and never a ray of 
 light. Superb! My heart beat wildly. Perhaps 
 here, before my eyes, where they had never ex- 
 pected to find him, was a candidate who could go 
 through a campaign without saying anything at 
 all! 
 
 " It seemed too good to be true and it was 
 too good to be quite true. At the very end of 
 the evening came his fall. He spoke of woman 
 suffrage in words which though not unfor- 
 givably clear could nevertheless mean only one 
 thing. Too bad, too bad. And he might so 
 easily have said even upon this subject some- 
 thing that would not have damaged his record 
 for noncommittalness. He might have said, pre- 
 serving the same attitude toward woman suf- 
 frage that he has taken and kept toward so 
 many other questions, that women were en- 
 titled both to all their existing legal rights and 
 also to such other rights as might hereafter be 
 given them by either state or federal action. 
 
 "In what Mr. Hughes has said about the 
 
24 Books and Things 
 
 tariff he has been equally untrue to his highest 
 or most noncommittal self. And he could so 
 easily have been true. He had only to say that 
 our tariff laws ought to be framed with wisdom 
 and enforced with firmness, to repeat this over 
 and over, and to say no more about it. 
 
 " Still, although he has not attained my ideal, 
 his silence upon the important questions of the 
 campaign has been gratifying, very gratifying. 
 Perhaps he comes as near to being the ideal 
 campaigner, the candidate who says exactly 
 nothing, as imperfect man can come in this 
 imperfect world. I do not count, as things 
 which spoil the technique of silence, what Mr. 
 Hughes has said about President Wilson's ap- 
 pointments to the civil and diplomatic service. 
 While the European war is on, while so many 
 of my inartistic and practical fellow-countrymen 
 are both dissatisfied with our national conduct 
 and unable to say what it ought to have been, 
 discussion of the Durand case, like discussion of 
 the Brown, Jones and Robinson cases, is really 
 a form of silence." 
 
 "Then why are you disappointed?" I asked. 
 " He has had least to say about the most impor- 
 tant subjects." 
 
The Ideal Campaigner 25 
 
 " Because of his slip about the Lusitania. He 
 ought not to have been so definite. He spoke 
 against his will, I admit, and after a wonderful 
 delay, beautifully sustained. But I hope he 
 won't do it again. Somebody in the crowd that 
 heard him is said to have shouted ' you said 
 something! ' These words must have made him 
 realize, in bitterness, that he had fallen short of 
 his ideal." 
 
 October, 1916. 
 
WHEN THE AUGURS YAWNED 
 
 BEING now an old man, and unlikely to live 
 much longer in this world, I think fit to 
 set down before I die certain things which took 
 place forty years ago, in the autumn of 1916, 
 and of which I am the only surviving witness. 
 
 My readers may recall that year, by the help 
 of any standard work of reference, as the date 
 of a presidential election in this country, the 
 candidates being a Mr. Wilson, the then incum- 
 bent, and a Mr. Hughes. Until the middle of 
 October the campaign had been an affair of 
 good, average momentousness. Each candidate 
 had been trotting with great decency round and 
 round his appointed track. Mr. Wilson's gait 
 was fluent and graceful. Mr. Hughes moved 
 more stiffly and brought his feet down a little 
 harder. 
 
 At that time, long before the pure candidate 
 law was enacted or even thought of, any candi- 
 date was legally free to say that he contained 
 nothing but undiluted Americanism, and each 
 
 26 
 
When the Augurs Yawned 27 
 
 did say so several times. By October such asser- 
 tions had ceased to thrill and astonish the elec- 
 torate. I would not, however, wish to convey 
 the impression that the campaign consisted ex- 
 clusively of repetitions of their faith in Ameri- 
 canism by Mr. Hughes and Mr. Wilson. Mr. 
 Hughes was fond of exciting his hearers by 
 telling them it was not good for a government 
 to vacillate in its policy, and that it was good for 
 a government both in policy and administration 
 to be adequate, consistent and firm. Mr. Wil- 
 son was fond of promising that he would omit 
 no word, and it was currently believed that 
 among the words he was least in danger of 
 omitting were humanity, justice, sacred, solemn 
 and very. 
 
 Well, the campaign ran along, not very fast, 
 until about the middle of October, when some- 
 thing happened which convinced everybody 
 that each of the two candidates had gone clean 
 off his head. 
 
 Mr. Wilson, in a speech delivered at — the 
 name of the town escapes me, but it was within 
 a day's journey of the Mississippi River — Mr. 
 Wilson up and admitted that his administration 
 had made a mistake or two. To be specific, 
 
28 Books and Things 
 
 says he, I have made mistakes. To be more 
 specific, he says, after I saw that ad that the 
 German Embassy put in the papers, I wish I 
 had held the Lusitania at her pier until I had 
 asked the German Embassy what about it. To 
 keep on being specific, he says, I now think 
 that piece I spoke about being too proud to 
 fight was in the circumstances a damned silly 
 thing to say. I ought to have known how peo- 
 ple would take it. This is wisdom after the 
 event, if you like, but it is better to be wise after 
 the event than to be foolish all the time. 
 
 This was bad enough, of course. No candi- 
 date in the United States, since the time when 
 Endicott Winthrop Adams first ran for reelection 
 as hog-reeve in the suburbs of Plymouth, Mass., 
 had ever admitted that he did wrong. And this 
 was only half the scandal. On the very night 
 when Mr. Wilson touched off this bomb, Mr. 
 Hughes, speaking at another town within a 
 day's journey of the Mississippi, up and admits 
 that Mr. Wilson since he took office had once 
 or twice spoken and acted like a grown man in 
 his right mind. And anyhow, Mr. Hughes says 
 in substance, the President has had one hell of 
 a problem on his hands. " I am not prepared 
 
When the Augurs Yawned 29 
 
 to deny," he says in substance and In part, 
 " that if Mr. Wilson had done just after the 
 Lusitania what he did just after the Sussex, and 
 if the result had been a state of war between us 
 and Germany, I am, I say, in a condition of un- 
 preparedness to deny that the great undiluted 
 mass of the American people, barring a few 
 Easterners who live near the effete, patrician 
 sea-coast, might not have liked it so well as 
 they like what has actually occurred. Peace 
 with honor was the first demand of the great 
 American nation, but most of us, if we couldn't 
 have peace with honor, were willing to compro- 
 mise on peace with Germany." 
 
 Men who are still alive remember the pande- 
 monium or row that came next. The campaign 
 stopped as if it had been shot. For twenty-four 
 hours the candidates could not move hand, 
 foot or eyelid. They had to be dug out of the 
 landslide of protesting telegrams with steam- 
 shovels. 
 
 These telegrams taught Mr. Hughes and Mr. 
 Wilson a thing or two. From that momentous 
 moment neither of them had a good word for 
 the other. Each candidate did his duty in that 
 station of life into which it had pleased his con- 
 
30 Books and Things 
 
 vention to call him. Each said just what he 
 ought to say, which was what everybody knew 
 he would say and had said before. 
 
 This ancient history is old. The ancient his- 
 tory I am now about to reveal is new. 
 
 Perhaps you noticed that Mr. Hughes made 
 his break within a day's journey of the Missis- 
 sippi, and Mr. Wilson the same, but you did 
 not notice, because I did not tell you, that these 
 two towns were the same distance from the 
 same place on the Mississippi, viz. : Prairie du 
 Chien, Wisconsin. I know, for I had a shack 
 on an island half way between Prairie du Chien 
 and the Iowa coast over opposite. 
 
 Well, about a week before the big scandal I 
 heard a motorboat ticking toward my island, 
 with me alone on it, and I went down to the 
 shore, where two gentlemen were disembarking. 
 " Mr. Paley," says one of them, " meet Mr. 
 Herbert Parsons, if I have the name right," and 
 then the other says, " Mr. Paley, I don't think 
 you've met Colonel House." And then the two 
 of them, as we walked up to my place, said 
 could they have the loan of my shack one night 
 next week for a great public purpose? 
 
 What purpose? says I, and then it all came 
 
When the Augurs Yawned 31 
 
 out. The campaign was slowing up, and these 
 two had got together and decided that if the 
 candidates could meet secretly, face to face, and 
 properly dislike each other's faces, the words 
 they would afterward say would put life and 
 speed and ginger into the campaign. So I 
 named my price for the loan of the shack and 
 the thing was fixed up. 
 
 At length the fatal night arrived. First a 
 boat came over from the Iowa shore, grated on 
 the gravel beach, and out stepped Mr. Wilson. 
 Then came a boat from the Wisconsin shore, 
 grated, etc., and out got Mr. Hughes, with an 
 American flag in the buttonhole of his cutaway. 
 He carried no other weapons. Neither did Mr. 
 Wilson. 
 
 The boatmen stayed by their respective 
 boats and the candidates met in the main hall 
 of the shack, fourteen by twelve. I withdrew 
 to an adjoining room and listened through the 
 wall and looked. 
 
 Mr. Wilson led off. " I see," he says to Mr. 
 Hughes, after smiling once at him, " that you 
 are wearing a little flag of the Union in your 
 buttonhole, and I can only ask you, if you lose 
 this little physical emblem, to be sure that you 
 
32 Books and Things 
 
 wear it in your heart, that the heart of America 
 shall interpret the heart of the world." 
 
 Mr. Hughes looked a little surprised, but he 
 was at no loss for an answer. " We want 
 America first in the mind and heart of every 
 one in this land," he says. " When I say I am 
 an American citizen I ought to say the proudest 
 thing that any man can say in this world. 
 There is one other thought I want to leave 
 with you, and it is this: We are going to see 
 that that is done which we are entitled to have 
 done. There is one other thought I want to 
 leave with you until called for, and it is this. 
 Wherever " — and he glanced reverently down at 
 his buttonhole — "wherever there is an Ameri- 
 can flag there is a shrine." 
 
 Mr. Wilson followed the direction of Mr. 
 Hughes's eyes. " When I think of the flag," 
 says he, "it seems to me I see alternate stripes 
 of parchment on which are written the rights 
 of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood spilt 
 to vindicate those rights." 
 
 " I dare say," says Mr. Hughes, " but I want 
 to see splendid policies in this country. There 
 is no such thing as prosperity or success for any 
 particular class. We are not laborers or capi- 
 
When the Augurs Yawned 33 
 
 talists in this country. Fellow-citizen, we are 
 fellow-citizens." 
 
 For about half an hour I looked and listened, 
 and then voices, loud at first, got lower and 
 lower. When silence fell I stole in to investi- 
 gate. By saying to each other, the two of them 
 in a room, the very things they had been saying 
 at each other in public, each had put the other 
 to sleep and it was my turn. 
 
 When at last the renewed sound of their 
 voices woke me up again I couldn't quite catch 
 their drift. The candidates seemed to have 
 agreed that perhaps they were boring the 
 voters, and that something must be done. If 
 the words of each produced sleep in the other 
 how could the voters be expected to stay awake? 
 Then Mr. Wilson said something about augurs 
 who laughed being better than augurs who 
 yawned and were the cause of yawning. Sud- 
 denly both men jumped up. A light played all 
 over Mr. Wilson's face and over those parts of 
 Mr. Hughes's where there was room. " Let's 
 try saying what we think," they shouted to- 
 gether. " That'll shake 'em up." . . . 
 
 It did shake 'em up, as I have told you, and 
 as the historians have recorded the scandal. 
 
34 Books and Things 
 
 From the row caused by Mr. Wilson's and Mr. 
 Hughes's simultaneous bursts of candor, and 
 from the things said in that row, I gathered at 
 the time that if both kept on saying what they 
 really thought neither of them could be elected. 
 Nobody would have been elected President. 
 Fortunately they stopped speaking their minds 
 and somebody was elected, if I recollect rightly. 
 But I am an old man, with an untrustworthy 
 memory, so perhaps you had better consult a 
 work of reference. 
 August, 1916. 
 
" A ROAD TO YESTERDAY " 
 
 MORE by design than by accident, a few 
 seasons ago, I missed seeing " The Road 
 to Yesterday." No play, so my argument ran, 
 can live up to such a good title. What ought 
 to be fanciful and irresponsible will probably be 
 sentimental and coldly ingenious. Instead of fol- 
 lowing a by-path into forgotten memories, in- 
 stead of hearing whispers from the dawn of life, 
 I shall find myself personally conducted along 
 a highroad into a prettified epoch labelled, 
 somewhat arbitrarily, the past. 
 
 Whether I did well to stay away is more than 
 I know, for no one has told me. But ever since 
 the play left New York I've been rather hoping 
 I might chance upon some such road — upon any 
 road to yesterday — before old age closed all 
 roads to to-morrow; and hoping, until just the 
 other day, in vain. Last week I visited yester- 
 day, not quite as I had intended, not casually, 
 but by going deliberately to the Cleveland 
 Memorial Meeting at the New Amsterdam 
 Theatre. The past accumulated about me as 
 
 35 
 
36 Books and Things 
 
 the audience gathered. It was not such a pret- 
 tified past as I had been afraid of. These men 
 and women were mostly of my own or of a 
 greater age. They looked high-minded, self- 
 respecting, grave, rather drab. They resem- 
 bled, if I may raise, for a moment, a disused 
 phrase from the dead, those best thinkers who 
 so abounded in 1884. From their faces you 
 guessed that their minds were coeval with the 
 mind of George William Curtis. 
 
 The first of the three speakers whom Mr. 
 Parker introduced was exactly the right man to 
 talk to such an audience. So much was plain 
 before Governor Harmon said a word, and his 
 speech cut the impression deeper. He was 
 thinking not of himself at all, but solely of the 
 dead, of the friend he had loved, of the Presi- 
 dent who deserved well of both party and coun- 
 try, of Mr. Cleveland as " a commanding and 
 permanent world-figure," destined as time went 
 on to appear " more clearly and sharply, like a 
 mountain seen at a distance after the clouds 
 have rolled away." Like the other speakers, 
 Governor Harmon was more concerned with the 
 size of Mr. Cleveland's character than with its 
 contours. His speech was a little dull, a little 
 
"A Road to Yesterday" 37 
 
 like a catalogue, recited with piety and feeling, 
 of dried issues and closed questions, a little 
 unreal although quite sincere in its forgetfulness 
 of the fact that there will be many competitors 
 for the attention of posterity. 
 
 To convince some of us and to remind others 
 that Mr. Cleveland was a brave man, wise and 
 ruggedly honest — one felt this to be the lonely 
 motive of Governor Harmon's speech. No sense 
 that his words interested you could tempt him 
 to say more than he had come from Ohio to 
 say, no sense that he was not interesting could 
 have made him say less. The other two speakers 
 struck me as not so single-minded. Their wish 
 to do Mr. Cleveland honor was obvious enough, 
 but Mr. McAdoo, not the former Secretary of 
 the Treasury but the chief city magistrate of 
 New York, was as obviously a gifted speech- 
 maker enjoying himself, willing to go on and 
 on, not quite willing to stop, taking too ap- 
 parent a pleasure in his own unconcern and 
 geniality. 
 
 General Leonard Wood's speech left an im- 
 pression not so easy to describe. His voice, 
 heard just after Mr. McAdoo's and before we 
 had had time to forget Governor Harmon's, 
 
38 Books and Things 
 
 sounded very New England. It betrayed a 
 youth spent among cultivated persons. His 
 accent, which he learned early and uncon- 
 sciously, and which is quite natural to him, 
 seemed on this occasion too refined to be quite 
 natural. He struck me as conscious of this re- 
 finement, as rather disliking it, as rather afraid 
 that it might be a handicap, and as having made 
 a decision. I could not help imagining General 
 Wood as having said to himself, once upon a 
 time: "There is nothing to be done about my 
 accent. To make it less refined, to try in any 
 way to correct its New Englandism, would be 
 affectation. But I am a soldier as well as a 
 New Englander. May not a soldierly curtness 
 of style lessen the prejudice caused by those 
 marks which my early advantages have left on 
 my accent?" Probably General Wood never 
 said anything like this to himself. I am only 
 supposing, and I put down my guess only be- 
 cause it helps me to explain what I felt while 
 listening to his speech, namely, that his was one 
 of the best essays in military curtness, one of 
 the best deliberate imitations of curtness, that 
 I had ever heard. 
 
 Of the three speakers General Wood seemed 
 
"A Road to Yesterday" 39 
 
 the least disinterested. He too admired Presi- 
 dent Cleveland, but a wish to do President 
 Cleveland honor was far from being his sole 
 motive. It was accompanied by the obvious, 
 the altogether too obvious, wish to do Presi- 
 dent Wilson harm. Dislike of President Wil- 
 son, determination to seize all the good chances 
 to score off him, dictated too many of General 
 Wood's short, jabbing phrases. Once at least 
 his ill-will toward the living incited him to the 
 oddest mispraise of the dead. President Cleve- 
 land, he told us, " was not an adept in the art 
 of verbal massage. He went straight to the 
 point." When General Wood thought of this 
 last sentence he was not thinking of Mr. Cleve- 
 land at all, for Mr. Cleveland found it very hard, 
 whenever he took a pen in his hand, to go 
 straight to the point. He hit off, it is true, a 
 few quotable phrases, but they are very few. 
 For the most part his writing is bad. It is 
 solemn, longwinded, inexpressive, padded with 
 the unhappiest circumlocutions. Neither think- 
 ing nor writing came easy to Mr. Cleveland. 
 His excellence lay elsewhere — in making deci- 
 sions and sticking to them. 
 
 All observers would agree, I suppose, if they 
 
40 Books and Things 
 
 were asked to go over the list of Presidents since 
 Lincoln, and to pick out the three who had put 
 into action as President the strongest wills, in 
 choosing Cleveland, Roosevelt and Wilson. Yet 
 you cannot say that the style of any of the three 
 is a strong man's style. None is rich in " rugged 
 maxims hewn from life." President Roosevelt 
 wrote and spoke like a strong man now and 
 again, in spots, but in the mass his style is too 
 wordy, too prolix, too desperately emphatic to 
 be strong. He found expression as much too 
 easy as President Cleveland found it impossible. 
 Something said of another writer by Mr. Charles 
 Whibley is true of President Roosevelt — he 
 seldom " used a sentence if a page would do as 
 well." President Wilson is a conscious artist, 
 in words — which of course President Roosevelt 
 and President Cleveland were not — but strength 
 is not one of the marks at which his art aims. 
 His style is too gracefully conscious of his audi- 
 ence for strength, too sunnily persuasive, too 
 nicely lubricated, too smooth. 
 
 The ideal manner for strong-willed Presidents 
 is still to seek. And for presidential candidates 
 who intend to be strong. Were I a Republican, 
 a soldier, and a man with a grievance, and if I 
 
"A Road to Yesterday" 41 
 
 thought of having a presidential nomination 
 thrust upon me, I believe I'd try to forget my 
 grievance and not to remember too interrupt- 
 edly, when it came to fashioning my mere 
 style, that I was a soldier. Soldierly curtness is 
 admirable in the Duke of Wellington, to whom 
 it came natural, but the imitation article runs 
 a risk of sounding like General Leonard Wood. 
 March, 1919. 
 
BRYAN 
 
 EVERY man, people say, gets the inter- 
 viewer he deserves. It is not true. Few- 
 notables have any such luck. In my whole life 
 I've read the perfect interview just once. This 
 was in January, 1895, not long after the first 
 performance of " An Ideal Husband," when the 
 London " Sketch " published Gilbert Burgess's 
 interview with Oscar Wilde. Mr. Burgess was 
 a man who knew the difference between ques- 
 tions and questions. He asked the right ones: 
 
 " What are the exact relations between literature 
 and the drama? " 
 
 " Exquisitely accidental. That is why I think them 
 so necessary." 
 
 " And the exact relation between the actor and the 
 dramatist? " 
 
 Mr. Wilde looked at me with a serious expression 
 which changed almost immediately into a smile, as he 
 replied, " Usually a little strained." 
 
 " But surely you regard the actor as a creative 
 artist?" 
 
 " Yes," replied Mr. Wilde with a touch of pathos in 
 his voice, " terribly creative — terribly creative ! " 
 
 The interview is republished in the volume 
 called " Decorative Art in America " (Bren- 
 
 42 
 
Bryan 43 
 
 tano's, 1906), and is still as fresh as ever, after 
 twenty years. I turned back to it the other day, 
 after reading here and there in two small blue 
 volumes published in 1909, " Speeches of 
 William Jennings Bryan, Revised and Arranged 
 by Himself," and wondering whether Mr. Bryan 
 would ever fall into the ideal interviewer's 
 hands. You, for example, could not interview 
 Mr. Bryan properly, nor could I. We should 
 feel both supercilious and intimidated. The man 
 for the job is somebody who could mediate 
 fearlessly between the remote Bryan period and 
 the present time. Does such a man exist? By 
 accident I have hit upon the right party — 
 Hector Malone. Of Hector his creator has 
 written, in the stage directions to " Man and 
 Superman," that " the engaging freshness of his 
 personality and the dumbfoundering staleness 
 of his culture make it extremely difficult to de- 
 cide whether he is worth knowing; for whilst 
 his company is undeniably pleasant and enliven- 
 ing, there is intellectually nothing new to be got 
 out of him." You already perceive a certain 
 affinity between Hector Malone and Mr. Bryan. 
 Now for their unlikeness : When Hector "finds 
 people chattering harmlessly about Anatole 
 
44 Books and Things 
 
 France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with 
 Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast 
 Table, and even Macaulay." 
 
 It is an affair of proportion. As Nietzsche 
 and Anatole France are to Macaulay, Matthew 
 Arnold and the Autocrat, so, in the scale of 
 modernity, are these authors to those with 
 whom Mr. Bryan does his devastating. Mr. 
 Bryan's culture would seem about as dumb- 
 founderingly stale to Hector Malone as Hec- 
 tor's does to a generation fed on Anatole and 
 Nietzsche. Hector is too modern and sophisti- 
 cated to quote Gray's " Elegy," "The Deserted 
 Village," Tom Moore and William Cullen 
 Bryant. He knows that people don't do such 
 things. But Mr. Bryan does them, and adds 
 other incredibilities. Like Tennyson's brook, 
 Demosthenes has said, Rollin tells us, Muelbach 
 relates an incident, as Plutarch would say — here 
 they are, and more of the same in these two 
 blue volumes. Looking backward, Mr. Bryan 
 quotes " breathes there a man with soul so 
 dead " and " truth crushed to earth." Looking 
 forward, he says that after Alexander and Na- 
 poleon " are forgotten, and their achievements 
 
Bryan 45 
 
 disappear in the cycle's sweep of years, children 
 will still lisp the name of Jefferson." 
 
 The earliest of these speeches and lectures is 
 dated 1881 and the latest 1909. In reality all of 
 them have the same age. They all taste of 
 " das Ewig-gestrige, das Flache." In 1904 Mr. 
 Bryan gives " the reasons which lead me to be- 
 lieve that Christ has fully earned the right to 
 be called The Prince of Peace," and meditates 
 thus upon eggs : " The egg is the most universal 
 of foods and its use dates from the beginning, 
 but what is more mysterious than an egg? 
 . . . We eat eggs, but we cannot explain an 
 egg." From its context in a lecture on " Man," 
 delivered at the Nebraska State University in 
 1905, and also at Illinois College, I take this: 
 " Ask the mother who holds in her arms her 
 boy, what her ideal is concerning him and she 
 will tell you that she desires that his heart may 
 be so pure that it could be laid upon a pillow 
 and not leave a stain; that his ambition may be 
 so holy that it could be whispered in an angel's 
 ear. . . . 
 
 If there is already too much superciliousness 
 in the world such passages do harm. They do 
 
46 Books and Things 
 
 good if there is not superciliousness enough. 
 In either case they do good in their context. 
 They and their context have helped thousands 
 upon thousands of Chautauquan early risers to 
 be cheerful and industrious and unselfish and. 
 kind. These speeches reveal an incomparable 
 mental unpreparedness to deal with their grave 
 subjects, with the resurrection of the body, the 
 atonement, miracles, inventions, evolution, faith, 
 the soul, the secret of life. With an easy, happy 
 flow the make-believe thought comes out in 
 sincere and shallow sentences, which make one 
 respect Mr. Bryan's good intentions, and ad- 
 mire his sweetness and good will. Thousands 
 of good men and women have grown better on 
 this thin food. Blessed are those who mean 
 well, for they shall be spared the labor of 
 thought. 
 
 It sounds patronizing, my attitude, and it is. 
 Although you and I can no more write signifi- 
 cantly of life or death than Mr. Bryan can, yet 
 we have a superficial sophistication, we have 
 acquired a suspicion that twaddle exists and 
 may be distinguished from its opposite. There- 
 fore do we smile complacently, in our offensive 
 
Bryan 47 
 
 way, when Mr. Bryan sets forth " the reasons 
 which lead me to believe that Christ has fully 
 earned the right to be called The Prince of 
 Peace." Little as we patronized him in 1896, 
 how can we help patronizing Mr. Bryan now 
 when we find him patronizing Christ? 
 
 Chronic good will, courage, a capacity for 
 sudden formidableness, an early perception of 
 important discontents, sympathy with the un- 
 privileged average — in this mixture, I suppose, 
 we must seek the explanation of his hold upon 
 his followers. His size and importance were 
 measured at the Baltimore convention in 1912, 
 and again in the following spring, when Presi- 
 dent Wilson, afraid to leave him outside and 
 hostile, turned him into a third-rate secretary 
 of state and a useful backer of presidential legis- 
 lation. One likes to imagine him sitting in the 
 state department, mellowed by his popularity, 
 set free from old jealousies, showing an unex- 
 pected capacity for team play, frock-coatedly 
 glad-handing and kind-wording a hundred callers 
 a day, always glib and sunny and sincere. Is he 
 a shade more acquisitive than you'd think to find 
 such a very popular hero? Perhaps. Is he, for 
 
48 Books and Things 
 
 a man with exactly his reputation, a little too 
 smooth, too unrugged, too deficient in homely 
 humor? Why not? In every reputation, how- 
 ever explicable, there is a residuum of mystery. 
 " What," as Mr. Bryan himself says, " is more 
 mysterious than an egg?" 
 December, 1914. 
 
SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN 
 
 SOMEWHERE in Heaven. January i, 1918 
 (delayed in transmission). This afternoon 
 your correspondent finally succeeded, by meth- 
 ods which if divulged would be widely imitated, 
 in obtaining a pass admitting him to the throne 
 room. It is a modern and commodious apart- 
 ment, with walls on three sides, and a door 
 at one end. Opposite the door is the great 
 white throne, which would perhaps appear 
 monotonous to our terrestrial taste were it not 
 for the sapphires which relieve the whiteness. 
 The fourth wall is missing, thus affording an 
 uninterrupted outlook upon space. By glancing 
 downward and to the left, any one seated on 
 the throne may obtain a commanding view of 
 the created universe. Before the ceremony of 
 the day began I had an opportunity, of which 
 I did not hesitate to avail myself freely, to sur- 
 vey from this infinite height the various worlds 
 below, as they went circling their suns and 
 spinning, with a more private motion, each upon 
 its own little axis. Turning again to the room 
 
 49 
 
^O Books and Things 
 
 after mastering this prospect, I noticed that ex- 
 cept for the throne itself the only furniture was 
 a gramophone, standing near the middle of the 
 floor in a case of jasper. 
 
 Conversation with my guide was at this 
 point rendered impossible by the opening of the 
 door, and the entrance of a select yet represen- 
 tative delegation of the heavenly host, which for 
 the most part dispersed itself about the room. 
 One angel, however, took his stand near the 
 gramophone and immediately busied himself 
 with its mechanism. My guide, in answer to my 
 discreet inquiry who this might be, looked sur- 
 prised. " The Victor Recording Angel, of 
 course," he whispered. "But hush! The cere- 
 mony begins." Turning toward the throne, 
 which had been vacant a moment before, I saw 
 the Lord of Creation seated upon it. I had not 
 seen Him come in. Suddenly He was there. 
 
 After a little preliminary and melodious 
 praise there was a short silence, which was 
 broken by the Lord of Creation. " From all 
 these competing spheres," He said, with a large 
 gesture toward the universe beneath, " I can, 
 by the aid of my all-seeing eye, select instantane- 
 ously, if I choose to do so, the successful candi- , 
 
Somewhere in Heaven jji 
 
 date. For the moment I do not choose, prefer- 
 ring rather to subject each world in turn to an 
 august scrutiny. By such concessions, made to 
 the prejudices which flourish down there, does 
 intuitive omniscience condescend to dress itself 
 in the garments of that thing which perishable 
 minds call reasoned judgment." He paused, 
 and, after peering down on Creation a while, 
 resumed the golden thread of his discourse: 
 " This formality over, for by what other name 
 shall we call a series of acts of which the only 
 purpose can be to tell the Lord of Creation that 
 which He knew already, and has known since 
 the beginning of years, I proceed to deliver 
 judgment. That one," He continued, pointing 
 with an inerrant ringer, " the one upon which 
 the fruit of the tree of knowledge is science, and 
 upon which for three years and a half the main 
 business of science has been destruction and 
 death, that is the worst world in the world." 
 
 At this point a lively little fellow, whom I had 
 not noticed among those present, stepped for- 
 ward into the vacant space near the throne. He 
 was dressed in red, wore horns of an old- 
 fashioned cut, and seemed eager to put in his 
 word. He spoke vehemently with a strong 
 
$2 Books and Things 
 
 German accent, about man, for whom he made 
 the following apology : 
 
 Ein wenig besser wiird' er leben 
 
 Hattst du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts 
 
 nicht gegeben ; 
 Er nennt's Vernunft und brauchst's allein 
 Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein. 
 
 Upon the face of the Lord of Creation I 
 seemed to detect an expression of extreme 
 weariness, such as we see upon human faces 
 when a story is related which was old when all 
 its hearers were young. But the Lord, however 
 bored He may have been, did not lay courtesy 
 of manner aside. " It is well said, Mephis- 
 topheles," He began, while the little fellow 
 glowed with pleasure, and even sent off a few 
 sparks of the same. " It is well said. I remem- 
 ber thinking so the first time you said it, about 
 a hundred years ago." When the laughter had 
 subsided the Lord went on, in a sterner tone: 
 " This transfer of hell to earth has not taught 
 Mephistopheles any new wisdom. He learns 
 nothing and forgets nothing — least of all his own 
 words." 
 
 " Speaking of words," the Lord resumed, 
 after watching Mephistopheles take refuge 
 
Somewhere in Heaven 53 
 
 where the heavenly host was densest, " speaking 
 of words reminds me." And He signaled to 
 the Victor Recording Angel, at whose bidding 
 the gramophone began its labors. The records 
 seemed to have been exposed wherever and 
 whenever, in the year 1917, human ineptitude 
 and foolishness had spoken, yet this self-indict- 
 ment of the human race, however painful to 
 your and its representative, seemed not at all 
 to touch the Lord of Creation. He listened 
 tolerantly at first, as one accustomed to this sort 
 of thing, and after a little His attention wan- 
 dered. But on a sudden it came back. His 
 countenance darkened and He said impera- 
 tively: "Repeat the last record." 
 
 These were the words uttered by the gramo- 
 phone, whose German accent I thought posi- 
 tively indecent: "The year 1917 with its great 
 battles has proved that the German people 
 has in the Lord of Creation an unconditional 
 and avowed ally, on whom it can absolutely 
 rely." 
 
 The heavenly host shuddered at the blas- 
 phemy and stood at gaze. "Who said this?" 
 asked the Lord of Creation in a dangerous 
 voice. " The Emperor William, Sire, in a 
 
54 Books and Things 
 
 speech to his second army on the French front, 
 Saturday, December 22, 1917." 
 
 Mephistopheles, perceiving a chance still fur- 
 ther to incense the Lord, came forward and 
 raised his voice : " William's words, Sire, and it 
 was very nice of him to express such an opinion, 
 I must say." And he added, in what seems to 
 be his favorite language : 
 
 Es ist gar hiibsch von einem grossen Herrn 
 
 So menschlich von dem Gotte selbst zu sprechen. 
 
 On the Lord's cheek the flush of rage o'er- 
 came the ashen hue of age. " And this of me? " 
 He said. " Before the year 1918 is a year old 
 — but I forget myself. Being slow to anger I 
 will postpone my wrath until I have explained. 
 
 " Each man upon earth I have condemned to 
 be born in another's pain and to die in his own. 
 This statement is not literally true, but it is 
 rhetorically, I think, effective, besides being part 
 of that system which I have followed in the 
 natural world, where, in the laws of nature, 
 which are my laws, I have put the case against 
 my character for mercifulness more powerfully 
 than any of my critics has ever put it. I send 
 misery and destruction and death upon the just 
 
Somewhere in Heaven 55 
 
 and the unjust. Men are at liberty to draw 
 from this fact whatever inference they please, 
 but woe unto those who draw the wrong 
 inference. 
 
 " William has drawn the wrong inference. 
 He has inferred that I am on his side. For 
 years he has shown an increasing inclination to 
 add a fourth party to a perfectly good Trinity. 
 His words either mean that he is increasingly 
 unable to distinguish between himself and me, 
 or they mean nothing. This likeness does not 
 exist. My worst enemies, even when they 
 called me cruel, have seen nothing in my words 
 which resemble either William's egotistic bluster 
 or his arrogant whine. 
 
 " Let me quote an author who wrote in that 
 language which is so often heard on the lips 
 of Mephistopheles. It was Schopenhauer who 
 said that the best man is he who makes least 
 distinction between himself and other men. Pos- 
 sibly. But the assertion is by no means so in- 
 disputably true as this — that the worst and 
 maddest man is he who sees the least difference 
 between himself and the Lord of Creation." 
 
 He stopped for a moment, and then added, in 
 a voice as clear as a winter sky, at sunset after 
 
56 Books and Things 
 
 a cloudless day, " William's punishment shall be 
 to see himself, "before he dies, as I see him. If 
 he can then perceive any likeness between him 
 and me, I shall be surprised. And this, as you 
 all know, would for me be a new experience." 
 January, 1918. 
 
ZEPPELINITIS 
 
 MUCH reading of interviews with returning 
 travellers who had almost seen Zeppelins 
 over London, and of wireless messages from 
 other travellers who had come even nearer see- 
 ing the great sight, had made me, I suppose, 
 morbidly desirous of escape from a city where 
 other such travellers were presumably at large. 
 However that may be, when Mrs. Watkin asked 
 me to spend Sunday at her place in the country, 
 I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last 
 I had visited her house she worshipped success 
 in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few 
 successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful 
 persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic 
 was easy to understand. " Every great statue," 
 she said, " is set up in a public place. Every 
 great picture brings a high price. Every great 
 book has a large sale. That is what greatness 
 in art means." Her own brand of talk was not 
 in conflict with what she would have called her 
 then creed. She never said a thing was very 
 black. She neyer said it was as black as the ace 
 
 57 
 
58 Books and Things 
 
 of spades. She always said it was as black as 
 the proverbial ace of spades. Once I ventured 
 to insinuate that perhaps it would be more nobly- 
 new to say " as black as the proverbial ace of 
 proverbial spades," but the suggestion left her 
 at peace with her custom. Well, when I got to 
 her house last week, and had a chance to scruti- 
 nize the others, they did not look as if she had 
 chosen them after any particular pattern. 
 
 Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess 
 the model from which Mrs. Watkin had striven 
 to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing 
 the conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a 
 large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman, who said 
 little and seemed never to have heard any of the 
 things I usually say when dining out, and who 
 I dare swear would have looked gratefully sur- 
 prised had I confided to her my discovery that 
 in the beginning God created the heaven and 
 the earth. Before we were far gone with food 
 the attention of this tactful person was torn 
 from me by our hostess, whose voice was heard 
 above the other voices: " Oh, Mr. Sheer, do tell 
 us your experience. I want all our friends to 
 hear it." Mr. Sheer, identifiable by the throat- 
 
Zeppelinitis 59 
 
 clearing look which suffused his bleached, con- 
 servative face, was not deaf to her appeal. He 
 had just returned from London, where he had 
 been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and al- 
 though he had not himself been so fortunate as 
 to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest 
 witness of the sporting fortitude with which 
 London endured that visitation, the Zeppelin- 
 in-chief had actually been visible to the brother 
 of his daughter's governess. " At the noise of 
 guns," said Mr. Sheer, " we all left the res- 
 taurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward, George Moore, Asquith, Miss Pank- 
 hurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, 
 where it was the work of a moment for me to 
 climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained a nearer 
 view of what was going on overhead. Nothing 
 there but blackness." Instinctively I glanced at 
 Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the passage of 
 words like " as the proverbial ace of spades " 
 was clearly to be seen. " Of course," Mr. 
 Sheer went on, " I couldn't indefinitely hold my 
 coign of vantage, which I relinquished in favor 
 of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her laugh- 
 ing request George Moore and I gave a leg up. 
 She remained there a few moments, one foot on 
 
60 Books and Things 
 
 my shoulder and one on Sir Edward Carson's 
 — she is not a light woman — and then we helped 
 her down, Asquith and I. When I got back to 
 my lodgings in Half-Moon Street I found that 
 the governess's brother, who had been lucky 
 enough to see a Zeppelin, had gone home. I 
 shall not soon forget my experience." This nar- 
 rative was wonderful to my left-hand neighbor. 
 It made her feel as if she had really been there 
 and seen it all with her own eyes. 
 
 Mr. Mullinger, who was the next speaker on 
 Mrs. Watkin's list, and who had returned from 
 Europe on the same boat with Mr. Sheer, had 
 had a different experience. On the evening of 
 the raid he was in a box at the theatre where 
 Guitry, who had run over from Paris, was ap- 
 pearing in the title role of Phedre, when the 
 noise of firing was heard above the alexandrines 
 of Racine. "With great presence of mind," so 
 Mr. Mullinger told us, " Guitry came down 
 stage, right, and said in quizzical tone to us: 
 ' Eh bien, chere petite folic et vieux marchcur, 
 just run up to the roof, will you please, and tell 
 us what it's all about, don't you know.' The 
 Princess and I stood up and answered in the 
 
Zeppelinitis 61 
 
 same tone, ' Right-o, mon viea.v' and were 
 aboard the lift in no time. From the roof we 
 could see nothing, and as it was raining and we 
 had no umbrellas, we of course didn't stay. 
 When we got back I stepped to the front of 
 the box and said : ' The Princess and Mr. Mul- 
 linger beg to report that on the roof it is rain- 
 ing rain.' The words were nothing, if you like, 
 but I spoke them just like that, with a twinkle 
 in my eye, and perhaps it was that twinkle 
 which reassured the house and started a roar of 
 laughter. The performance went on as if noth- 
 ing remarkable had happened. Wonderfully 
 poised, the English." And this narrative, too, 
 was so fortunate as to satisfy my left-hand 
 neighbor. It made her feel as if she had been 
 there herself, and heard all these wonderful 
 things with her own ears. 
 
 After that, until near the end of dinner, it was 
 all Zeppelins, and I hope I convey to every one 
 within sound of my voice something of my own 
 patriotic pride in a country whose natives when 
 abroad among foreigners consort so freely and 
 easily with the greatest of these. No discordant 
 note was heard until the very finish, when young 
 
62 Books and Things 
 
 Puttins, who as everybody knows has not been 
 further from New York than Asbury Park all 
 summer, told us that on the night of the raid 
 he too had been in London, where his only club 
 was the Athenaeum. When the alarm was 
 given he was in the Athenaeum pool with Mr. 
 Hall Caine, in whose company it has for years 
 been his custom to take a good-night swim. 
 " Imagine my alarm," young Puttins continued, 
 " when I saw emerging from the surface of the 
 waters, and not five yards away from the per- 
 son of my revered master, a slender object 
 which I at once recognized as a miniature peri- 
 scope. I shouted to my companion. In vain. 
 Too late. A slim fountain spurted fountain-high 
 above the pool, a dull report was heard, and the 
 next instant Mr. Hall Caine had turned turtle 
 and was sinking rapidly by the bow. When 
 dressed I hastened to notify the authorities. 
 The pool was drained by noon of the next day 
 but one. We found nothing except, near the 
 bottom of the pool, the commencement of a 
 tunnel large enough for the ingress and egress 
 of one of those tiny submersibles the credit for 
 inventing which neither Mr. Henry Ford nor 
 Professor Parker ever tires of giving the other. 
 
Zeppelinitis 63 
 
 I have since had reason to believe that not one 
 swimming-pool in Great Britain is secure 
 against visits from these miniature pests. In- 
 deed, I may say, without naming any names," 
 . . . but at this moment Mrs. Watkin inter- 
 rupted young Puttins by taking the ladies away. 
 She looked black as the proverbial. 
 October, 191 5. 
 
VERDUN 
 
 DURING the past week many of us have 
 waited breathlessly for news from Ver- 
 dun. The possibility that this time a German 
 army would be thrust deep into the side of 
 France has had fear's power to shake us. Al- 
 though we wish the Allies to succeed, and 
 although we are not blind to the harm their 
 cause will suffer if the Germans break the 
 French line, yet this larger anxiety has been for 
 the moment put aside by an intenser anxiety 
 for France herself, so exposed and so resolute. 
 We love France as if the country were a per- 
 son. You may tell us that to care so much 
 where knowledge is so slight is to be senti- 
 mental and unrealistic. That may be true. But 
 realism is only one need of the spirit. It is not 
 the sole need. If some of us are right in think- 
 ing we have a liking for realism, and if we do 
 not choose to be realistic about France, then it 
 is as plain as platitude that the causes of this 
 choice lie deep, that we make it because we are 
 grateful for pleasures we have really had. Our 
 
 64 
 
Verdun 65 
 
 acquaintance with France and the French is im- 
 perfect and superficial. Our ignorance is great. 
 But objects quite as imperfectly understood 
 have inspired some of the most genuine affec- 
 tions in history. 
 
 No man understands friendship who can ex- 
 plain his choice of friends on merely rational 
 grounds. It is just as hard to explain one's 
 liking for French landscape, which may easily 
 seem insipid to eyes blinded by delight in the 
 gorgeous improbability of the tropics, and in 
 which you miss that sense of something over, 
 of acreage to spare, often given by landscape 
 in the United States. Yet a few springs ago, 
 while we were travelling south from Paris, I 
 wondered how anybody could fail to enjoy a 
 landscape so accessible to man. We went at a 
 gentle pace, according to modern notions, 
 through miles of faint greens turning vivider, 
 following the river along shaded roads, down 
 wide valleys cultivated everywhere, giving one a 
 feeling that everything had long been put to 
 human uses. Everywhere was the touch of 
 orderly, diligent, waste-hating French hands. 
 Then came a welcome breath of the north be- 
 
66 Books and Things 
 
 fore the real south, when we looked at the high- 
 lying spring snows on the mountains about 
 Grenoble. Through the colored windings of a 
 gorge with no one in it we came out upon windy 
 Provence, into a country of plain and low hills 
 as fine as etching. After all this wind the still- 
 ness was very still at Valescure, where we woke 
 up one morning with the Mediterranean light 
 in our eyes. 
 
 In almost all this landscape, on the way we 
 had taken from Paris to the Cote d'Azur, there 
 was an economy, a terseness, that made one think 
 of an orderly mind. Knowing so little French, 
 one saw, in the people along the route, who are 
 so different here from there to anybody who 
 quite understands, only the traits common to 
 nearly all, the faces alert with something which 
 is at first almost suspicion, which changes easily 
 into a self-respecting courtesy, and which takes 
 equality as a pleasant matter of course. Being 
 on the move all day, however, and mostly shut 
 up through all this French scenery to the sound 
 of our own voices, one didn't hear enough 
 French, enough of that voluble speech in which 
 every sentence is somehow concise. Perhaps 
 
Verdun 67 
 
 this was why our journey, lying mostly through 
 such accessible landscape, left an impression of 
 the inaccessibility of France? This illusion did 
 not survive a return to Paris, where French 
 speech flooded in again as one did the usual 
 pleasant things. It is because one understands 
 French so ill, and speaks it worse, that the 
 French seem inaccessible when one is among 
 them, remote in their long tradition and their 
 present habit. In the country one is brought 
 to think of this tradition by the many signs of 
 that long patience which has had its way with 
 the soil. Here in Paris it is the older streets, 
 the narrow passages below crenellated towers, 
 that waken sleeping memories, that give one a 
 sense of tradition, of time, of a country which 
 has been great for so many years. 
 
 The interest on these visits to France, al- 
 though when I am there I am conscious of the 
 isolating power of an inaccurate ear and a 
 stumbling tongue, is paid when I get home 
 again and take up a French book. I hear 
 French voices as I read, and some of them are 
 so kind as to speak now and then with a French 
 accent. My eye remembers too, after its fash- 
 
68 Books and Things 
 
 ion, and my pleasure in reading is heightened by 
 this presence of a visible and audible world. 
 The very journey which made me realize the 
 inaccessibility of France now makes French 
 books more accessible than they had been. 
 Somewhere in this universe I sit and read. 
 What is this universe? " C'est une sphere 
 infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonference 
 nulle part." To say with a talker's ease things 
 as difficult as thought — what an art of prose! 
 To give to calculated order, to hard intellectual 
 structure, such an air of naturalness, almost of 
 improvisation! To confine a richness of varied 
 elements into sentences as simple as poverty! 
 With a casual hand to place each of these sen- 
 tences where it can look backward and forward ! 
 Here are closeness with ease, wit with profun- 
 dity, gaiety that diffuses light. How lucid Latin 
 lucidity is, and how Latin! By its side our 
 English prose looks turbid and slipshod. 
 
 A bookish pleasure, people may say who 
 insist upon a distinction between literature and 
 life. But even when we are tasting, smelling, 
 touching the most real of real worlds, our life 
 is only something that goes on inside us. It 
 
Verdun 69 
 
 does not require that the stimuli we are respond- 
 ing to should have animal or vegetable life of 
 their own. Life can be better measured by the 
 intensity of that process which is going on inside 
 the man or woman who is doing the living. 
 Often for days on end I am asleep in life and 
 only wake up when I begin to read. Some- 
 times I am exhausted by the society of persons 
 who think they can open their closed minds by 
 taking them to walk through a museum of mod- 
 ern topics. After such an experience it is a 
 relief to read Montaigne, to remember that 
 nobody, in any of the three centuries since his 
 time, has had a mind more free, to feel a deep 
 gratitude to the nation of whose free spirit his 
 genius is the most complete expression. 
 
 Free minds are not possible to most of us, but 
 a belief in their existence is possible, and it was 
 from France that some of us first got this belief. 
 From France, too, we first learned, although 
 never before so solidly as in the past year and 
 a half, that qualities we had been taught in 
 youth to look upon as mutually destructive, 
 could exist side by side in one nation, that the 
 light hand might be strong, and the laboring 
 
70 Books and Things 
 
 mind take its ease. Of France we may know 
 little, yet our affection is real. It springs from 
 gratitude for qualities we wish the world to 
 keep. Gratitude is at the bottom of the anxiety 
 we have felt, for a week past, while listening for 
 news from Verdun. 
 March, 1916. 
 
HEADMASTERLY 
 
 OF course it could not have been the faculty 
 supper, the headmaster repeated to him- 
 self, that was keeping him awake. Half a dozen 
 oysters, a Welsh rabbit, a bottle of stout — there 
 was nothing on this list to bring insomnia upon 
 a man who was in the prime of life, who had 
 ridden ten miles and played two games of 
 squash that afternoon, and who had been 
 notably abstinent at dinner. For tea he had 
 had one cup, rather weak, and half a crumpet, 
 with butter on it and cinnamon. Yes, and a 
 little sugar, the finest muscle stimulant in the 
 world. Luncheon? — but that was before his 
 afternoon's exercise and could not be counted 
 against him. 
 
 In general the headmaster was not given to 
 explaining a wakeful night by physical causes. 
 Had he been a bachelor he would never even 
 have considered what he ate or drank as pos- 
 sibly responsible for his sleeplessness. His habit 
 was to look higher, to scrutinize the spiritual 
 
 7i 
 
72 Books and Things 
 
 sources of unrest. But Isabel, one of the most 
 loyal women on God's footstool, had a prosaic 
 earthly way of trying to relate indisposition of 
 every kind to diet. Perhaps her only fault. It 
 was because of Isabel that the headmaster re- 
 viewed the three meals he had had since 
 luncheon, and felt appreciably comforted by 
 their obvious blamelessness. 
 
 This time, moreover, he had an obviously 
 spiritual cause for lying awake. Although he 
 had dined out he had returned to the school 
 immediately dinner was over, in order not to 
 break his pleasant custom of reading aloud, on 
 Saturday evenings, to such boys as voluntarily 
 came to his study to listen, one of our greater 
 masterpieces of English. Of late he had been 
 reading Shakespeare, upon whom he was to 
 deliver an address next week before a teachers' 
 association. " The Relation of the Historical 
 Plays to Adolescence," he thought he should call 
 it. Last night, being unable to find the depend- 
 able Rolfe, and trusting to his familiarity with 
 the danger signals, he had essayed the first part 
 of Henry IV in an unexpurgated edition. With 
 disastrous results. His retreat had not been al- 
 together seemly. Few of his hearers knew that 
 
Headmasterly 73 
 
 his inadvertence was due not to unfamiliarity 
 with the play, but solely to the grave problem 
 which obsessed him. 
 
 Young Wicks was the problem. The head- 
 master sat up and looked out of his window. 
 His bedroom was in the tower of the oldest 
 building in school, and gave him a plunging 
 view downhill to the river. The high falls, 
 dividing the fresh water from the salt, were hid- 
 den by a knoll, but he could hear them. His 
 eyes followed the broad stream, visible here 
 and there in clearings under the moon, as it 
 travelled to the sea ten miles away, and the town. 
 Yes, the school was too near the town nowa- 
 days, unquestionably too near. 
 
 But for the town he should not have been 
 constrained to get rid of the boy Wicks. But 
 for the town Wicks might never have gone 
 wrong, might have enjoyed the full school 
 course of Christian and manly influence. Not 
 that Wicks was an unmanly boy, exactly. He 
 played games well, although showing little in- 
 terest in the discipline so essential to team work. 
 What he preferred was to roam the country by 
 himself, or with one or two companions, climb- 
 ing trees, scaling cliffs, shooting rabbits with 
 
74 Books and Things 
 
 a smuggled twenty-two, trespassing wherever 
 trespassers were least welcome. 
 
 Things such as these might have been over- 
 looked, had in fact been overlooked, so likable 
 was the boy Wicks, all last year. The head- 
 master had cautioned him several times, but 
 had not been able to decide upon expulsion. 
 He had been reluctant to blast the boy's 
 future. 
 
 But last week had come the discovery. Wicks, 
 who would do none of his lessons except his- 
 tory, had paid no attention when called upon to 
 construe his Ovid. He had not heard. He was 
 absorbed in a private occupation of his own. 
 Strange to say, he was writing. The Latin mas- 
 ter, who also trained the eleven and was dis- 
 gusted at Wicks's frivolous attitude toward foot- 
 ball, had bidden Wicks hand up what he was 
 writing. The Latin master was amazed. Wicks 
 had been writing a drinking song. 
 
 Then the whole story came out. The Latin 
 master made a search of Wicks's belongings. 
 He found two notebooks crammed with the 
 most damning evidence against the boy, whose 
 neglect of his studies was explained. Here were 
 songs about the country near the school, about 
 
Headmasterly 7£ 
 
 animals and birds, songs that sounded muffled 
 in snow, songs in which spring woke up and 
 brooks and rivers pelted towards the sea. No 
 great harm here, though the boy might have 
 been better employed. But the other things! 
 Stories that Wicks must have picked up on the 
 docks of the town, when the ships came to port, 
 and that were filled with sailors' talk, stories in 
 which the characters talked like the mill opera- 
 tives — why, the boy must have known short- 
 hand, though he said he didn't and was usually 
 truthful. He must have spent hours in the very 
 lowest company. Worse still, he evidently had 
 not been satisfied with what he saw and heard 
 on the docks, he must have made friends with 
 common sailors and gone with them to the 
 vilest places, for there were songs of such gross- 
 ness that the headmaster could not imagine they 
 would be tolerated except by drunken sailors, 
 navvies and unfortunate females. 
 
 Worst of all, these songs — which Wicks said 
 he had not heard anywhere, they had just come 
 into his head — were jolly in a queer uncon- 
 cerned way. Of course the headmaster had not 
 laughed when he read them, or came anywhere 
 near laughing. The only time he had even 
 
j6 Books and Things 
 
 smiled was at a speech in verse which Wicks 
 had put into the mouth of the Latin master, 
 and in which tackling a dummy had been made 
 to seem part of the Christian life. 
 
 There was a profusion and variety about 
 Wicks's output that were merely astounding. 
 How did the boy find time? He neglected his 
 lessons shamefully, but even so — ? Upon the 
 reading of Wicks's complete works the head- 
 master had expended the leisure of four or five 
 days. More than his leisure, in fact. And he 
 had set aside just this time for the composition 
 of " The Historical Plays in Relation to 
 Adolescence." 
 
 Wicks had not had much to say for himself. 
 " I really have no case, sir," he had replied to 
 searching questions. " Hadn't we better just call 
 the whole thing off? " In the end, however, he 
 had confessed everything — how he let himself 
 out of his dormitory by a water pipe and 
 shinned up again before daybreak — everything 
 except the name of the chauffeur whose em- 
 ployer's motor he borrowed for his nocturnal 
 visits to the town. Not more than a dozen 
 times in all. Yes, he had been two or three 
 times to disorderly houses with sailor friends, 
 
He ad masterly yy 
 
 but he had gone only to hear the talk, he had 
 never done anything worse than to drink a 
 bottle or so of beer. As for his writings, Wicks 
 said he had been so surprised to find the world 
 was like that that he had felt he must get things 
 down in black and white; and sometimes, when 
 he had a glimpse of a sailor's life, or a loose 
 woman's, he couldn't help trying to guess what 
 the rest of the story was like, and what kind of 
 people they were anyway. Hence the stories 
 and the dialogued scenes. 
 
 Wicks made no objection when the head- 
 master told him he must go. He did, however, 
 showing his first signs of hesitation, ask whether 
 it might not be possible to give Wicks senior a 
 fictitious account of things. " I suppose you 
 couldn't say I had failed to keep up with my 
 form, sir? Or that I had brought beer to chapel 
 or something? " He was a surprising boy. Was 
 he afraid to have his father know the truth? 
 Not exactly that. He did not mind his father 
 knowing he had gone to the town at night. 
 " But I'm afraid he might burn my stuff, sir," 
 and Wicks pointed to his manuscript. " Couldn't 
 you keep it all for me until the storm blows 
 over at home? I really think I am making some- 
 
yS Books and Things 
 
 thing out of it. Half of this is only first or sec- 
 ond draft. I wish you could, sir." 
 
 And the headmaster, although Mr. Wicks de- 
 served better treatment, having given a lectern 
 to the school last term, had agreed to say noth- 
 ing about young Wicks's literary efforts. He 
 had solaced his conscience by announcing that 
 he should keep the manuscripts for the present. 
 Whether he should ever return them was 
 another question, he added, but young Wicks 
 did not look at all disappointed. 
 
 " My boy," the headmaster had said in con- 
 clusion, " wherever you go, do not neglect your 
 studies. You have a certain literary gift. Do 
 not let it ever be said of you by the critics that 
 you have small Latin and less Greek." And the 
 headmaster had not neglected the inevitable 
 question: "Why did you do this? Were you 
 not happy in school? " He was thinking, when 
 he went to sleep at last, of Wicks's answer: " I 
 don't know, sir. There were lots of things I 
 liked here, but it all seemed so darned orderly 
 and harmless." 
 
 The headmaster was wakened by Isabel's tap- 
 ping on his door. She too had had a bad night. 
 The Shakespeare incident had troubled her. 
 
Headmasterly 79 
 
 " And I've been thinking. James, dear, couldn't 
 you say something like this to the teachers' 
 association — make them realize how different 
 the works of Shakespeare would have been if he 
 had only gone to a good Church school? " But 
 James answered, with an expression of counte- 
 nance rather puzzling to Isabel, that he didn't 
 see how he could. 
 November, 1918. 
 
DISCLOSURE DAY 
 
 A FEW months before Joseph Usher's 
 thirteenth birthday his mother informed 
 his father that the time was approaching when 
 they must tell Joe. Dick Usher made no objec- 
 tion. He had never approved Maria's policy of 
 reticence. " Why," he often said to her, for a 
 year or two after she had announced her policy, 
 "why can't you let Joe hear these things 
 naturally, from other boys, the way I did?" 
 And Maria, whose character had the merit of 
 firmness, did not answer more than two or three 
 times. So long as Dick carried out her wishes 
 she respected his freedom not to understand her 
 reasons. 
 
 There were a good many things poor Dick 
 did not understand. Maria had explained to 
 him, once or twice, why they went to live in 
 the country a few years after Joe's birth, why 
 Joe was to have tutors until he went to board- 
 ing, school, why he was to be kept from con- 
 tamination by other boys until he was twelve 
 or thirteen. But Dick never got Maria's idea 
 
 80 
 
Disclosure Day 8 1 
 
 through his head. She put words he did not 
 know into sentences he could seldom listen to 
 the whole of. 
 
 Little by little, however, Dick had come to 
 the conclusion that Maria's system was not 
 doing Joe much harm. Although Joe liked to 
 study he had neither the excessive egotism nor 
 the excessive shyness nor the excessive cheek 
 which sometimes afflict a solitary child. He 
 was quite at home in a catboat and on a horse. 
 Both with gun and rifle he was a fair shot. He 
 could already putt more consistently than his 
 father. His instructor in boxing was more than 
 satisfied. And Dick, without having betrayed 
 all his hope to anybody, was persuaded that Joe 
 was a natural volleyer. 
 
 Maria never suspected Dick's critical attitude. 
 She had not time for such things. But his ap- 
 proval of her decision to tell Joe was too facile 
 to satisfy her. It provoked her to something 
 she called discussion. She told Dick that the 
 interval between Disclosure Day and the open- 
 ing of school must be neither too long nor too 
 short. It must, in fact, be of exactly the right 
 length. To send Joe forth into the herd before 
 he had grown accustomed to his burden of 
 
82 Books and Things 
 
 knowledge would be an injustice to a sensitive 
 boy. Nature must be given adequate time in 
 which to efface the stigmata of initiation. On 
 the other hand, the body of fresh knowledge 
 must still be vivid enough in the boy's mind 
 for him to distinguish, upon his arrival at the 
 school, between accessions to this knowledge 
 and mere repetitions. 
 
 " Our experiment," Maria concluded, " will be 
 a failure, or perhaps I should rather say its suc- 
 cess will be gravely compromised, unless it be 
 made in conditions which will constitute it a 
 distinctly fruitful approach to that gregarious 
 life which Joe is about to enter." 
 
 Now this was the kind of sentence that Dick 
 could never attend to. It put him to sleep. But 
 its successor woke him. " However," Maria 
 was saying, " we can discuss the date on our 
 way to California." Dick did not want to go 
 to California. Again and again he had given 
 Maria all sorts of good reasons for not going. 
 He had kept from her nothing but the truth — 
 that he wanted to be at home this spring, he 
 wanted to ride with Joe through the woods on 
 lengthening afternoons, to walk with him be- 
 fore the roads got dusty. Summer? Yes, they'd 
 
Disclosure Day 83 
 
 have the summer together, many summers, but 
 this was the last spring. Of course there was 
 no good saying things like this to Maria. 
 
 This threatened discussion, as it happened, 
 never took place. A letter from Dr. Claxton, 
 headmaster of the school for which Joe had been 
 put down, said a vacancy had unexpectedly oc- 
 curred. He gave his reasons for thinking they 
 might wish to send Joseph to St. Peter's at the 
 conclusion of the Easter holidays. The date 
 was only a fortnight off, yet Maria, notwith- 
 standing the fact that the picking and choosing 
 of Disclosure Day was thus taken out of her 
 hands, at once accepted Dr. Claxton's offer. 
 Dick wondered why. He had even a hazy feel- 
 ing that Maria wanted to deprive him of his 
 unspoken argument against the trip to Cali- 
 fornia. 
 
 Having dreaded Disclosure Day, on the few 
 occasions when he thought of it at all, Dick was 
 not pleased to find that it had arrived. " By 
 our methods of introducing the subject," Maria 
 assured him, " we can fix its exact importance 
 in Joe's mind. You, as his father, must tell him, 
 very seriously and very frankly, that he has 
 hitherto lived in an ignorance which, most 
 
84 Books and Things 
 
 formative until now, must now be brought to an 
 end. When you are certain that his attention 
 has been arrested you may give him the books. 
 Here they are. I regret my inability to be with 
 you. I shall return from town in time for 
 dinner." 
 
 As soon as Maria was safely on her way to 
 the station Dick summoned Joe to the library. 
 The summons was an undignified whistle. 
 
 " I say, Joe," he began, " here's something I 
 don't think you've read and that you might 
 have a look at. They're yours if you like 
 em. 
 
 Maria never succeeded, not even after the 
 fatal fruit of Disclosure Day had ripened, in 
 obtaining from Dick any save the cloudiest ac- 
 count of this interview. She never discovered 
 that Dick and Joe had spent the whole of Dis- 
 closure Day together, reading the enlightening 
 books aloud and laughing. 
 
 No bad news reached the Ushers until the 
 middle of June, when they stopped at St. 
 Peter's, a week before school closed, on their 
 way home from California. Even then Dr. 
 Claxton was most kind. Joseph, he said, was 
 a good boy. He was a manly little fellow. He 
 
Disclosure Day 85 
 
 had a natural batting eye and his throwing to 
 bases was unusually accurate for one so young. 
 He was a promising candidate for the choir. 
 Nevertheless, and Dr. Claxton came now to the 
 most painful part of his duty, he must ask them 
 to withdraw Joseph from St. Peter's. 
 
 It took Maria and Dr. Claxton some little 
 time to understand each other. She was slow 
 to realize that Joe's fault was the habit of writ- 
 ing jokes on slips of paper and passing them 
 about in study hours. Little by little he had 
 demoralized his whole form. Almost all the 
 boys kept one eye on Joe, waiting and watch- 
 ing for him to start a joke on its rounds, ready 
 to laugh even before the joke was made known. 
 Dr. Claxton had never seen a boy who knew 
 by heart so many of the world's oldest sto- 
 ries. Study in the first form had ceased to 
 be. 
 
 At this point Maria suggested to Dick that 
 he had an engagement to play squash with the 
 mathematics master. Alone with Dr. Claxton 
 she told him about Disclosure Day. Her mar- 
 ried life, she said, and she spoke in the strictest 
 confidence, had been impaired by her husband's 
 inclination to tell stories and repeat jokes. She 
 
86 Books and Things 
 
 had determined that her son should never be- 
 come a similar thorn in the flesh of his com- 
 panions. Therefore she had done her utmost 
 to keep him from knowing that there was such 
 a thing as a pleasantry or an anecdote in the 
 world. She had persuaded her husband, not 
 without difficulty, to cooperate by abstinence 
 from jesting. On Disclosure Day three care- 
 fully selected jest books had been put in 
 Joseph's hands. After he had read them, just 
 before he came to St. Peter's, she had told him 
 that the contents of these books were secrets 
 known to all, and that he must take all other 
 boys' knowledge for granted. She did not 
 comprehend how the result could have de- 
 parted so widely from her justifiable expecta- 
 tions. 
 
 To Maria's extreme surprise it was Dick who 
 found a way out of their predicament. Al- 
 though Dr. Claxton averred that neither sua- 
 sion nor threats had any power over Joe, Dick 
 succeeded in inducing the Doctor to give the 
 boy one more chance in the autumn. Stranger 
 still, beyond saying that he had persuaded one 
 of the masters to tutor Joe throughout August, 
 Dick would give no account of his plan. After 
 
Disclosure Day 87 
 
 fifteen years of married life he had made a dec- 
 laration of independence. 
 
 Once at home again, however, Dick consented 
 to explain. His idea had come to him when he 
 saw the effect of St. Peter's upon Joe, whose 
 eagerness to study had completely disappeared. 
 Dick had gone to every class-room and picked 
 out the likeliest master, Mr. Harold Winship. 
 
 " I hate to spoil Joe's August," he said. " But 
 I guess it's the only way." He undid several 
 parcels and showed Maria more jestbooks than 
 she had supposed the world could contain. 
 "Joe has got to study these," he went on. 
 " And I've outlined a course for him and the 
 tutor. Like this." 
 
 Maria read the paper Dick put under her 
 eyes: "The jests of Western Europe, with spe- 
 cial attention to their relative longevity. Mon- 
 day, Wednesday and Friday, 9-1 1. The mor- 
 phology of pleasantry, considered in relation to 
 the anecdotes of (a) dominant and (b) subject 
 races. Tuesday and Thursday, 9-1 1, with a 
 third period at the pleasure of the instructor. 
 Laboratory and field work, Saturday, 9-12." 
 
 Maria's eyes grew wet as Dick unfolded his 
 plans. " Richard," she said, " I have done you 
 
88 Books and Things 
 
 an injustice. But are you sure Mr. Winship will 
 understand? " 
 
 " He won't have to," Diok answered. " Win- 
 ship believes in mental discipline. He can kill 
 anybody's interest in anything while you wait." 
 
 June, 1918. 
 
HENRY AND EDNA 
 I 
 
 OWING to the recent death of Edna's 
 father, the wedding was to be quieter 
 than Edna's mother would have liked it. When 
 the two women were alone they spoke of the 
 wedding as something whose quietness had to 
 be borne with and forgiven. Edna's mother 
 spoke in the same strain even when Henry W. 
 Henry was with them. Although he regretted 
 her tone, having liked Edna's father, Henry 
 nevertheless listened with an air of slight con- 
 tinual deference. He had been brought up to 
 show respect for age. 
 
 Sitting alone in his rooms, though never in 
 more than one at a time, Henry regretted the 
 antenuptial fuss, the acknowledgment of gifts, 
 the passionate distracted shopping. He won- 
 dered how his wedding could have sounded any 
 louder if it hadn't been muffled in bereavement. 
 The noise of its approach was discordant. 
 These should have been still and listening 
 
 89 
 
go Books and Things 
 
 weeks, he felt, and dove-colored by thoughts of 
 sweet and serious change. He determined to 
 do something which would make his feeling 
 plain. It was a worthy feeling. Something so 
 new that it had never been done, or not done 
 for years. He consulted the liberal education 
 to which so many young men of ample means 
 are somewhat exposed. He seemed to remem- 
 ber that wedding songs were formerly com- 
 manded by the great. He knew a poet with a 
 number in the telephone book, called him up 
 and ordered a wedding song. 
 
 When the poet came, by appointment, he 
 bore a lute in his hand, and began to sing the 
 song he had written. This conduct was so sur- 
 prising to Henry that at first he did not under- 
 stand the words. Nor was his surprise less 
 when he began to hear them. It was a song 
 all of echoes, like the old songs in old books, 
 telling how the maidens first undressed the 
 bride, and then said good-by to her who would 
 not wake again a maid, but would rise with a 
 new and nobler name. And in the song one 
 prayed that the night might abide, and morn- 
 ing be long in coming. 
 
 Henry did not care for this song, which 
 
Henry and Edna Q 1 
 
 seemed to unshadow his domestic life, to pour 
 an incurious bright light upon him and Edna. 
 
 Again the poet came, bringing this time a 
 song made out of dreams. The strangest shapes 
 of grotesque or very awful dreams, dreams 
 which even to himself Henry had not told, 
 which he hoped he had forgotten, whose re- 
 motest relevance to his marriage he had denied 
 with outraged self-respect, dreams he had been 
 afraid to look at — these the poet seized and re- 
 lated to one another and made into a prelude 
 to marriage, the fulfilment of dreams. The poet 
 remembered what he couldn't possibly have 
 known. He remembered dreams that Edna, 
 who was well brought up, never, never could 
 have had. 
 
 Henry was shocked by this song, which 
 dragged sinister and absurd things from their 
 corners into the light and studied them with 
 curious eyes. 
 
 When the poet came for the third time he 
 brought a song which no poet wrote, most 
 surely, but some man of figures with a turn for 
 scansion and rhyme. This man treated Henry 
 and Edna as if they were quite ordinary people, 
 obedient to statistical laws that govern the 
 
92 Books and Things 
 
 herd. He reminded them that the shadow of 
 divorce, though it fell across their wedded life, 
 was no thicker than the shadow of a tall blade 
 of grass, and that the rest of their future was 
 sunlit. He explained this by addressing Henry 
 and Edna in the cheerfullest stanza of his song: 
 
 Your chance of staying wedded until death 
 Dissolve this holy union and ideal, 
 Endowed with riches personal and real, 
 Is twelve to one, the statistician saith. 
 
 Not even the poet seemed certain of this 
 song's acceptance, for he brought with him a 
 fourth, which sang minutely of announced en- 
 gagements in the papers, of invitations to be 
 addressed and stamped and posted, of the trous- 
 seau, its items, and of those present. It was a 
 bleak picture of the actual life Henry W. Henry 
 was nowadays obliged to share as often as he 
 went to Edna's. It smelled of details. 
 
 Henry saw there really wasn't any use. The 
 poet didn't appear to get the idea. Henry told 
 the poet so. But the poet, quite uncowed, re- 
 buked Henry, whom he accused of rejecting an 
 Elizabethan marriage song, a Freudian dream 
 poem, a poem which faithfully estimated Mr. 
 and Mrs. Henry's chance of keeping out of the 
 
Henry and Edna 93 
 
 divorce court, and a poem descriptive of the 
 life Henry wasn't ashamed to be living. Neither 
 tradition, nor dreams scientifically expounded, 
 nor the dangers and banalities of real life, 
 would Henry have. What was his idea? 
 
 Henry couldn't exactly put it into words, 
 though the poet assured him that words, if the 
 idea were to be communicated at all, must be 
 the medium employed. The original idea was 
 by now obscured. Henry knew, of course, 
 though he didn't say, that he loved Edna with a 
 simple, manly love, the love of a strong man for 
 a nice girl, but different. He wanted to sacri- 
 fice himself for her, and protect her, and put 
 his arm round her waist, and pay her bills. He 
 saw her in white, with a long white veil, stand- 
 ing by his side at the altar. He heard her say 
 " I do." He saw a house on the southern slope 
 of a hill, and a dining-room, and Edna's face 
 across the breakfast table. He saw a sitting- 
 room in autumn, lamps lighted, a temperate fire 
 of logs, with Edna making tea after their brisk 
 gallop. He saw days farther off, and children 
 learning outdoor games under his tuition. Fear- 
 fully he half saw her wondering eyes newly 
 awake, in earliest light, before daybreak, But 
 
94 Books and Things 
 
 i , — _ — __ 1 
 
 at this he shied away. He never forgot what 
 he had been taught, that it is unlovely to fore- 
 see what it will be lovely to know some day, and 
 through golden years to remember. His im- 
 agination walked the near future like a sedate 
 cat on a table, steering clear of fragile things. 
 May, 191 5. 
 
 II 
 
 From the terrace below, where Audrey 
 Henry, aged seven, was playing with Cyril 
 Packard Henry, aged five, came a noise of pro- 
 test, followed by silence. 
 
 Henry W. Henry laid his paper on the break- 
 fast table and looked at his watch. "Almost 
 six minutes past nine," he said, speaking in a 
 perfectly just voice. " This is the third suc- 
 cessive morning that Miss Rankin has been late 
 in beginning the children's lessons." 
 
 Edna, after giving her husband one of those 
 culpably indifferent smiles which proved that 
 she had not been paying attention, went on with 
 her letters. Henry noticed that she had spilled 
 minute portions of soft-boiled egg on its shell. 
 He frowned slightly. 
 
 " This must be meant for you," said Edna, 
 
Henry and Edna 95 
 
 stretching her arm far across the table to give 
 him a letter. Although it was an appeal from 
 one of his favorite charities, the Friendless 
 Foundlings' Friendly Country Home, whose di- 
 rectors invited him, in view of this and in view 
 of that, to increase his generous annual sub- 
 scription, Henry gave the invitation only part 
 of his mind. Something he had read in his 
 paper troubled him. He looked speculatively at 
 Edna. What was the most delicate method of 
 introducing such a delicate subject to the purest 
 of women? 
 
 " My dear," he said at last, " when you have 
 finished the perusal of your mail be so good as 
 to read with attention the passage I have 
 marked, thus." While speaking he got up, 
 walked round the table and spread the paper 
 flat beside Edna's plate. Through eight years 
 of married life he had tried in this way to com- 
 municate to Edna his dislike of reaching and 
 stretching. 
 
 Not until Edna had read her last letter, and 
 had spilled a little more egg, on her plate this 
 time, did she turn to the passage her husband 
 had marked. It narrated a distressing incident. 
 At a public meeting in New York, attended 
 
96 Books and Things 
 
 largely by women in humble circumstances, 
 resolutions had been adopted in favor of repeal- 
 ing all laws which restrained persons who knew 
 how to limit the number of their offspring from 
 spreading their knowledge. Nor was this the 
 gravest aspect of the affair. Not content with 
 urging the repeal of these laws, a performance 
 which in itself admitted that such laws were 
 in existence, one of the women speakers had 
 gone to a few among the audience, whispering 
 to women of the poorer sort precisely what the 
 law forbade them to learn. 
 
 " Well? " asked Henry W. Henry. 
 
 But Edna, without any pretense of transition, 
 had turned again to her letters: "By the way, 
 Henry, the Wilburs can come to us the first 
 week in July. Milly writes that it's the only 
 week they are free. So I'm afraid we shall have 
 to put off your sister till the end of August. Do 
 you mind? " 
 
 Henry could not very well object. He knew 
 exactly how large the house was, and why. 
 Eight years ago, when making plans which gave 
 a room to each of two future children, he had 
 perhaps had the surprising number of his rela- 
 tives in mind when he directed his architect to 
 
Henry and Edna 97 
 
 put in only one guest room. Even if he had felt 
 disposed to object Henry would not have chosen 
 the present moment for so doing. A more seri- 
 ous subject engrossed him. 
 
 " My dear," he began again, " I fear that last 
 night's events in New York have not made upon 
 you the impression I had looked for. I regard 
 this woman's conduct as ominous. One mo- 
 ment! Permit me to finish, if you don't mind. 
 Incidents of this kind are becoming more and 
 more frequent. If something is not done in pro- 
 test we shall before long find, forsooth, that the 
 size of families has become a matter almost de- 
 terminable by the will of the parents. Now, I 
 am not speaking lightly. What I am about to 
 suggest is the result of thought. It is not the 
 result of anything but thought. I have given 
 this matter a constantly increasing attention for 
 months. I think we should take a stand. To 
 do so is, as I conceive it, our duty." 
 
 Edna gave Henry W. Henry a look which 
 might have disconcerted a man less conscious 
 of rectitude. 
 
 "We take a stand?" she said. "Audrey is 
 seven, Cyril five. How can we?" 
 
 Henry's face went a little pale. " It had not 
 
98 Books and Things 
 
 occurred to me, I own, that you would look at 
 this question from a personal standpoint, al- 
 though I am not unaware that your sex has from 
 time to time been accused of preferring the per- 
 sonal approach to social problems. Let us leave 
 you and me out of it, I beg you. My idea is to 
 discontinue my subscription to sundry other 
 good works, including the Friendless Found- 
 lings' Friendly Country Home, and to send a 
 check to the association which is fighting the 
 repeal of these wholesome laws. I shall be glad 
 of your permission to send that check in the 
 names of Mr. and Mrs. Henry W. Henry." 
 
 Edna was near the window, watching a gleam 
 of river at the valley bottom. " Audrey seven, 
 Cyril five," she repeated, and added, in a gentle 
 tone: "Wouldn't that check be the least little 
 mite hypocritical?" 
 
 There was irritation in Henry's answer. " My 
 dear, the information which you and I, since 
 you compel me to think of ourselves, know how 
 to make a moral use of, will, if widely dis- 
 seminated, encourage not only childless mar- 
 riages, which are seldom happy, but also 
 irregular and I fear temporary unions. My 
 knowledge brings with it no temptation to un- 
 
Henry and Edna 99 
 
 faithfulness. Are you tempted because of your 
 knowledge that sin may be committed with 
 impunity? My tongue stumbles at such a ques- 
 tion. But we must not think only of ourselves. 
 Other persons, less fortunate in their early edu- 
 cation than we, will, if these laws are repealed, 
 rush headlong into all sorts of illicit relations. 
 This world will not punish their sin, which in 
 fact will, it is but too probable, be known only 
 to God. The relation between man and woman 
 is one as to which God has said ' Are you willing 
 to pay the price, which is children?' That is 
 the test." 
 
 " But not for us, apparently," said Edna. 
 Henry did not seem to hear her. " I feel so 
 strongly on this point," he went on, " that I 
 would rather forever forego the advantage of 
 my knowledge than have it get into the wrong 
 hands by being spread broadcast." 
 
 Edna put a hand on his shoulder. " Henry," 
 she said, " I do not want any more children. 
 We have money enough, I know, but have we 
 time? Could I see as much of Audrey and 
 Cyril as I do now if we had had a child every 
 two years? I don't think so." 
 
 Henry, flushed now and breathing hard, did 
 
ioo Books and Things 
 
 not waver: " There are other ways of living up 
 to our principles than by having children." 
 
 Edna's answer was a stare of innocent inquiry. 
 When she understood she kissed the top of 
 Henry W. Henry's head. " Don't be silly." 
 She spoke lightly. " I'm off to the school room." 
 
 " Wait! " Henry's voice was loud and stern. 
 " I am intensely in earnest. Rather than not 
 take the stand I propose to take I would set an 
 example to all mankind by living a life of — 
 of " 
 
 " By living as we did before we were mar- 
 ried?" Edna had these lapses into crudity. 
 Henry had noticed them before. " Besides," she 
 continued, " what in the world do you mean by 
 an example to mankind? Suppose you do carry 
 out your program? How is anybody going 
 to know that we aren't still living exactly as we 
 have lived since Cyril was born? You wouldn't 
 tell people, would you? " 
 
 She was gone, and Henry W. Henry, in the 
 silence which fell upon him, remembered with 
 annoyance that before marriage Edna had never 
 betrayed her tendency to argue. 
 
 Nevertheless, there was a certain awkward 
 force in what she had said about example. If 
 
Henry and Edna 101 
 
 no one except God knew of the Henry W. 
 Henrys' self-control how could they be described 
 as setting an example to any one else? Might 
 it not be better to show the world one family, at 
 least, that could afford to let Nature send as 
 many little ones as she chose? The words 
 " could afford to " grated unpleasantly on 
 Henry's inward ear. He had not meant to use 
 them. 
 
 Henry reread the appeal from the Friendless 
 Foundlings' Friendly Country Home. Then he 
 went to his library, taking his letters with him. 
 In leaving the library door a little ajar he had 
 of course a purpose. One rule of the household 
 was that Audrey and Cyril, if the library door 
 were not shut, might always interrupt Papa for 
 the purpose of asking a sensible question. It 
 was in the spirit of this rule that Henry, al- 
 though he had in general no liking for texts on 
 walls, had caused one framed text to be hung 
 above the library fireplace. 
 
 As the familiar words now caught Henry's 
 eye they suddenly acquired a new meaning. 
 How strange that this meaning should hitherto 
 have escaped him ! How could he have failed to 
 see in them a divine command? 
 
102 Books and Things 
 
 "That settles it," said Henry. After all, no 
 act can be an example unless it be publicly- 
 known. He really had no choice. 
 
 Sitting down at his desk he wrote, in a spirit 
 of obedience and self-renunciation, first a letter 
 to the Friendless Foundlings' Friendly Country 
 Home, saying that unexpected expenses con- 
 strained him to withhold the contribution he had 
 so much enjoyed making in happier years; and 
 secondly, a letter to his architect in New York, 
 asking for an estimate of the cost of making a 
 small addition to the country house of the 
 Henry W, Henrys. 
 
 April, 1916. 
 
 Ill 
 
 That night Henry W. Henry lay sleepless for 
 a time that he reckoned by hours. Edna, to be 
 sure, had seemed to put her question without 
 any will to annoy. She had had the dutiful air 
 of a wife who seeks light and turns auto- 
 matically to its source. Yet eleven years of mar- 
 ried life had taught Henry to suspect that no 
 question could be innocent which he could not 
 answer. He stayed awake to nurse his irrita- 
 tion. As the night grew older the rising wind, 
 
Henry and Edna 103 
 
 which threatened to tear the curtains off their 
 rods, sounded more and more sinister. 
 
 Uneasily, restlessly, turning every few min- 
 utes in his bed, angry with Edna because she 
 slept without stirring, Henry subjected the 
 events of the day to what he called a dispas- 
 sionate review. No, it was not true that he had 
 chosen for the ceremony an afternoon when 
 Edna would be away. Had he not been wait- 
 ing, merely and justifiably waiting, for weather 
 that promised a rainy night and safety from fly- 
 ing sparks? Had not his judgment, upon this as 
 upon so many other occasions, proved sound? 
 Already the rain was beginning. The ceremony 
 had happened to coincide with Edna's absence 
 from home. That was all. 
 
 The ceremony itself had been well managed. 
 That, at least, Henry W. Henry could truth- 
 fully say. With his own hands, assisted by the 
 willing hands of Audrey Henry, aged nine, and 
 Cyril Packard Henry, aged seven, he had laid 
 a small bonfire in a spot previously chosen, at 
 a safe distance from the barn, the garage and 
 the house. Thither the children had trundled 
 in their wheel-barrows those books which Henry 
 had taken from their shelves, caused to be piled 
 
104 Books and Things 
 
 in two piles, one on the library and one on the 
 school room floor, had surveyed once more in a 
 judicial spirit, and had doomed. Meanwhile 
 Miss Rankin had put Raymond Ellerton Henry, 
 aged one, into his baby-carriage and wheeled 
 him to the place of ceremonial execution. 
 
 To the speech with which the proceedings 
 began, and in which he had tried to make the 
 children grasp the fundamental reasons for the 
 step he and they were about to take, Henry W. 
 Henry looked back with self-respect. Here and 
 there he had said things a little beyond Audrey 
 and Cyril, but he had done so intentionally, 
 knowing that what they did not understand they 
 would nevertheless remember, that later in life 
 they would make the wisdom he had lent them 
 their very own. And his speech had had the 
 supreme merit of clearness. Even Miss Rankin, 
 who, though a good governess, sometimes 
 looked inattentive when Henry talked, had been 
 impressed. As for Raymond, too immature to 
 react except by pointing at the bonfire and 
 crowing, one might at least hope that the scene 
 would not be quite wasted upon him. Earliest 
 memories were often the deepest and most 
 formative. 
 
Henry and Edna 105 
 
 With soberness and gravity, in a style not 
 uninfluenced, Henry W. Henry ventured to 
 hope, by a perusal of opinions handed down 
 from the bench, he had explained why the 
 library in the library and the library in the 
 school room must be purged by the burning of 
 these German books. German literature, he had 
 said, might, if one considered the subject in its 
 larger aspects, be divided into two parts. There 
 was what might be called an idyllic literature, 
 which was designed chiefly for youth, and which 
 by its pictures of humble folk, of toy-makers, 
 wood-cutters, gnomes and peasants, gave a 
 false and lying idea of German life and the Ger- 
 man mind. In fact, there was only one form 
 of hypocrisy to which these writers had not 
 resorted, and that was because the notion of 
 fair play was so inconceivable to them that they 
 had never even thought of pretending that any 
 one in Germany ever attempted to teach boys 
 to play fair. Was this literature of lies fit to 
 live? Should these pictures of a good Germany, 
 of a land where simple people were addicted to 
 simple peaceful pleasures, be suffered to poison 
 young and credulous minds? 
 
 So dramatic was Henry's pause, and so com- 
 
106 Books and Things 
 
 pelling, that both Audrey and Cyril, although 
 nobody had coached them, answered " no " al- 
 most simultaneously. 
 
 Proceeding to the other division of German 
 literature, taking literature, as he believed he 
 had already remarked, in its widest sense, pro- 
 ceeding to the propagandist books addressed 
 chiefly to those of somewhat riper years, Henry 
 asked whether a systematic attempt to make the 
 world German in thought, as a preliminary step 
 to the accomplishment of the odious design of 
 making it German in fact, could be tolerated in 
 a republic? The Germans were such poor psy- 
 chologists, when it came to dealing with other 
 nations, that everything they said produced an 
 effect the exact opposite of that which they in- 
 tended, yet even the Germans could not be so 
 ignorant of other men's minds as to suppose 
 that this systematic attempt to corrupt them 
 would be long endured. 
 
 After the speech came the rest of the cere- 
 mony. Audrey and Cyril committed the as- 
 sembled books one by one to the flames. Upon 
 the whole they did their part in the right spirit, 
 although Audrey once or twice betrayed an un- 
 becoming exultation, and although Cyril, when 
 
Henry and Edna 107 
 
 " Struwelpeter " burst into flames, gave one 
 mournful misplaced howl. Henry was quick to 
 repress these manifestations. He reminded the 
 children that a just sentence gains in dignity 
 if executed without passion and without 
 tears. 
 
 Not until the last book had been executed did 
 Edna arrive. She was in her riding habit, her 
 cheeks glowed, she walked swiftly. " I saw 
 your smoke from the stable," she said. " O 
 children, what a nice bonfire." 
 
 Even the children, so it seemed to Henry in 
 retrospect, had heard this as a wrong note. Yet 
 he could not help observing signs of relief, as 
 if from a tension almost too august, in the eager- 
 ness with which they had turned to their mother 
 and bewildered her with explanations. 
 
 At first Edna had not understood. For a 
 while it had seemed to Henry that she would 
 never understand. At last, when what had hap- 
 pened had become clear to her, she looked 
 quickly at Henry W. Henry and away again. 
 The look was the brush of a bird's wing, no 
 more, yet Henry felt that Edna was ashamed. 
 She stared hard at the skyline, her face changed, 
 she began to laugh and stopped short. Then 
 
108 Books and Things 
 
 i— — ■ 
 
 she had kissed Audrey and Cyril, suddenly, had 
 snatched Raymond Ellerton out of his carriage 
 and borne him away to the house. 
 
 Henry W. Henry's recollections, while he lay 
 awake and resented Edna's sleep and quietness, 
 did not stop at this point. He remembered her 
 visit to the school room, where he was certain 
 she had stood and looked at the empty half- 
 shelf. He knew her posture, for he had found 
 her standing and staring in the library, where 
 nearly two shelves were empty. And he remem- 
 bered how she had said nothing, not even when 
 they were motoring home alone after dinner, 
 about the event of the day. 
 
 It was Henry himself who broke this silence, 
 while they were undressing. He told Edna all 
 about it. He explained that the reason he had 
 given for not riding with her that afternoon was 
 his real reason. And Edna, after saying there 
 were some things she had rather not talk about, 
 had talked easily and pleasantly enough about 
 other things. Only after she had got into bed 
 did she advert to the subject. 
 
 " Henry," she said, " I have been trying to 
 understand. I almost do. Except one thing. 
 Why do we Americans have to treat German 
 
Henry and Edna 109 
 
 books in a way that French or English people 
 would think silly? " 
 
 This was the question which kept Henry 
 sleepless. Oddly enough, he had not been able 
 to think of the right answer. 
 
 But night is a bringer of sleep and of answers 
 with sleep. In the earliest dawn Henry woke 
 suddenly. His heart was beating fast. The 
 waking and the excitement were effects of one 
 cause, a Thought. His answer had come to 
 him. 
 
 " Edna," he said, and touched her shoulder. 
 "Are you asleep, my dear?" Edna moved a 
 little, and said, "Well?" 
 
 " I have been thinking over your question, 
 my dear, the answer to which, I cannot quite 
 see why, did not immediately suggest itself. We 
 must bear in mind that nature, which, never 
 repeats herself, has given to each nation its own 
 characteristics. Ours is an idealism that I hope 
 I am entitled to call lofty. Just as our American 
 conversation is purer than, I am told, the con- 
 versation of the corresponding upper classes in 
 England, so our literature is purer than, I am 
 told, the literature of France. You will have, 
 I presume, no difficulty in following me when 
 
no Books and Things 
 
 I say that we have here a symbolism of which 
 the significance can hardly be overestimated. 
 As our ideal of purity in speech is higher than 
 the French or the English ideal, so our ideal of 
 patriotism is so much more exalted that we 
 burn those German books which they still keep, 
 I trust unread, upon their shelves." 
 
 A long pause followed this speech. Henry 
 W. Henry himself broke the silence. " May I 
 hope that you have grasped my explanation 
 sufficiently to acknowledge its conclusiveness? 
 . . . My dear Edna, you don't mean to tell me 
 that you are asleep? " 
 
 But apparently, to judge from the regularity 
 of her breathing, this was precisely what Edna 
 did mean to tell her husband. The rain was 
 over, the winds were laid. In the quiet of the 
 early morning, too early for the noise of birds, 
 Henry lay and meditated upon the beautiful 
 completeness of his answer to Edna. 
 June, 1918. 
 
SAFETY IN NUMBERS 
 
 NOT until close upon John Florian's death 
 did his friends get a clue to his deport- 
 ment, courteous always, yet as preoccupied as 
 that of an inventor on the brink of discovery. 
 We all noticed this, of course, as we had noticed 
 his aversion from women's society, in which he 
 would have been so well fitted to gain pleasure 
 by pleasing. He was commonly understood to 
 be a married man, although no one knew 
 whether it was by death or otherwise that he 
 had lost his wife. A portrait in his library, 
 painted years ago in a rather niggling manner, 
 and with that air of beting a good likeness which 
 is so unmistakable when you haven't seen the 
 original, represented a woman with abundant 
 bright hair, untroubled shallow baby-blue eyes, 
 and matchless placidity. It was this air of 
 placidity, more than anything else, which fixed 
 your attention and stuck in your memory. But 
 John Florian, who retained at fifty-five his for- 
 midable gift for preventing indiscreet questions, 
 never said who the lady was. 
 
 in 
 
H2 Books and Things 
 
 t. ■ — — — ■ — ■ — — ■ — 
 
 Never, I mean, until that day, the last time 
 I saw him alive, when he honored me with his 
 confidence. Not until after his funeral did I 
 learn, through a series of those cautious moves 
 by which everybody tries to find out how much 
 everybody else knows, that Mr. Florian had re- 
 peated, substantially without variation, in the 
 closing weeks of his illness, to pretty much any 
 one who dropped in, the following story. 
 
 Having married, at the age of twenty-nine, a 
 lady some seven years his junior, Florian with- 
 drew to a castle long in the possession of his 
 mother's family, and lying in the foothills of the 
 range which separates the valley of Aosta from 
 the great plain on which Turin sits exposed. 
 Here he busied himself for a year or so with 
 the management of his maternal estate, with 
 genealogical research, and with occasional stiff 
 climbs in the neighboring Graians. Nor did this 
 methodical and secluded life appear distasteful 
 to Violet Florian, who filled her hours with min- 
 istrations among the poor of the neighborhood, 
 and also with needlework, in which she attained 
 a proficiency not surpassed in her husband's 
 experience by any amateur. Although their 
 marriage was childless, a great grief to them 
 
Safety in Numbers 113 
 
 both, she bore her part in their joint barrenness 
 without complaint. 
 
 Something, however, of monotony must have 
 oppressed her serene spirit, as the sequel may- 
 show. At the end of the second year of their 
 marriage Florian was summoned to the United 
 States by the illness of his father, a native of 
 that country. He was a little surprised when, 
 his stay being cut short by the sudden release 
 of his parent, he was on the point of embark- 
 ing for Italy, to learn by letter from his wife 
 that she had filled the castle with young people, 
 three unmarried maidens and four bachelors, 
 whose names were Francois, Ugo, Leiboldt and 
 Keith-Keith. The names of the women were 
 also given, but these are not germane to our 
 narrative. 
 
 As a result of this letter Florian sailed with- 
 out cabling to his wife. This omission, due in 
 the first instance to displeasure, changed color 
 during the voyage and presented itself as a 
 charming desire to give Violet a charming sur- 
 prise. Florian's excitement rose as he neared 
 home. So eager was he to arrive that he set 
 out from Turin immediately upon reaching that 
 city, although the chance was small of attaining 
 
H4 Books and Things 
 
 the castle before all its denizens were in bed. 
 Perceiving the hopelessness of his undertaking, 
 and desiring now to retard his arrival until day- 
 light, Florian dismissed his conveyance at a 
 distance of several miles from the castle, and 
 made his way thither on foot. 
 
 Just before dawn he caught sight of home. 
 There in the fading moonlight stood his castle, 
 not quite half a mile distant, separated from 
 him by a wild gorge. At once his eyes sought 
 the wing where his wife lay, and fastened them- 
 selves upon her very windows. Imagine his 
 amazement, nay, his consternation, upon seeing 
 one of these open, and the figure of a man climb 
 out. In the same window appeared, at almost 
 the same moment, the face of a woman with 
 abundant bright hair unloosed in the moon- 
 light. There was an embrace of farewell, the 
 man's figure climbed down the rough stones, 
 ran swiftly along the castle wall, opened with 
 precaution a door into the furthermost wing, 
 and disappeared. 
 
 Even for so good a cragsman as John Florian 
 it took time to climb into and out of the gorge. 
 More than half an hour must have passed be- 
 fore the lightest sleeper among his servants let 
 
Safety in Numbers li£ 
 
 him into the castle, and answered his cautious 
 questions. Francois, Ugo, Leiboldt and Keith- 
 Keith were all lodged in the wing into which 
 one of them had disappeared. But which one? 
 Exploration of the wing revealed nothing. 
 Every door yielded to Florian's pressure. In 
 each of four rooms he found a bachelor asleep. 
 But already, in Florian's mind, a plan was 
 forming which he resolved to perfect and exe- 
 cute. In his own room, alone, he thought and 
 thought. 
 
 John Florian's arrival did not expel his wife's 
 guests. They were to have gone in any event 
 on the following morning, when the men were 
 leaving before daybreak for a brief hunting ex- 
 pedition in the Graians. Violet Florian greeted 
 her husband with placid joy. She commended 
 his unannounced arrival, calling it the sign of 
 a charming desire to give her a charming sur- 
 prise. 
 
 That night, when the women had gone to 
 bed, and the men were gathered at evening's 
 end in the great hall, smoking and talking over 
 the morrow's expedition, its difficulties and 
 other delights, Florian told a story. " In this 
 hall," he began, " a few hundred years ago, one 
 
n6 Books and Things 
 
 of my ancestors did a queer thing. He had dis- 
 covered that one of his guests was his wife's 
 lover. He did not know which one. So he 
 called his guests together, just as you are here 
 now, and told them what he knew and did not 
 know. ' I give the lover a fortnight,' my 
 ancestor said. ' If he be dead at the end of that 
 time I shall never reproach my wife, never tell 
 her what I know. But if, at the end of the fort- 
 night, the lover be alive, I shall kill my wife.' 
 My ancestor was a man of violence, and of his 
 word." " And the end of the story? " asked one 
 of the guests — no matter which one. Florian 
 took out his watch. "The end of the story? 
 Oh, it's too late for that now. Or too early." 
 
 Having said so much, and broken up the com- 
 pany, Florian went to his wife's room and 
 found her sleeping. She did not wake until the 
 sun was high and the men were long gone. 
 
 A week later an acquaintance brought bad 
 news. Frangois, seeking to regain his own 
 country by a dangerous pass from Italy into 
 Savoy, had been found dead at the foot of a 
 precipice. He had not taken a guide. Florian 
 trembled when he entered his wife's sitting- 
 room. There she was, at a window that looked 
 
Safety in Numbers 1 17 
 
 down the valley toward the great plain, bent 
 over her needlework. She and Franqois ! Had 
 it been any of the others, Florian thought, he 
 could better have borne the blow. While he 
 told her that placid face was almost disturbed, 
 and when he had finished she spoke in accents 
 of unaffected regret: "I am so sorry. Such a 
 nice boy." 
 
 So the suicide was the accident it seemed. 
 Not Francois after all. And a kindness for 
 Francois entered Florian's heart. The next day 
 he learned that Ugo, swimming in the Mediter- 
 ranean off Ventimiglia, had been drowned. He 
 was swimming alone. Again did Florian fear- 
 fully break the news to his wife, and again did 
 Violet pause in her needlework to say : " I am so 
 sorry. Such a nice boy." 
 
 " Believe me or not as you please," so Mr. 
 Florian continued his narrative, " but before the 
 fortnight was over Keith-Keith, who had made 
 his way back to England, was killed in the 
 hunting-field. He too was alone when the acci- 
 dent occurred. My wife bore the news of his 
 death as she had borne the news of the earlier 
 accidents. Leiboldt was therefore the man. 
 Would he perhaps hear what accidents had done 
 
1 1 8 Books and Things 
 
 for him? Would he take advantage of them to 
 shirk suicide? You may imagine with what 
 anxiety I asked myself these questions, with 
 what relief I learned, on the last day of the fort- 
 night, that Leiboldt had died from poison in his 
 native beer, at his native city of Munich. 
 
 " I was certain, of course, that at the an- 
 nouncement of Leiboldt's death my wife would 
 break down. But she did not, and it was I who 
 swooned when I heard her say, in accents of 
 unaffected regret: 'Our guests were not lucky, 
 were they? Such nice boys.' Yes, my mind 
 was affected by these singular events and her 
 singular attitude toward them. For the months 
 when I was not myself she tended me with a 
 skill equalled only by her devotion. Whether 
 in my delirium I made her acquainted with the 
 truth I never discovered. The subject is one 
 we never referred to. I kept the promise I had 
 made her lover or lovers. I had, indeed, no op- 
 portunity of' breaking it. For upon my restora- 
 tion to health Violet disappeared. In what part 
 of the world she now plies her needle I have 
 not been able to ascertain. 
 
 " Perhaps I have not pressed my search very 
 zealously. My life has been very full without 
 
Safety in Numbers 119 
 
 her. Daily have I tried to determine the per- 
 centage of suicides among those four deaths. 
 I refer to the deaths of Frangois, Ugo, Leiboldt 
 and Keith-Keith." 
 July, 1915. 
 
A DRY DINNER 
 
 OF all popular ' errors I take this to be the 
 greatest and most gratuitous, namely, 
 that it is darkest just before dawn. On the con- 
 trary, observation and introspection have con- 
 vinced me that it is darkest just before dinner. 
 I refer to spiritual darkness. How often in old 
 days have I surveyed my evening clothes, taste- 
 fully disposed by Heber, my man, and how often 
 have I loathed the sight! How often have I 
 shrunk from getting into that creaking shirt, 
 tying that silly white tie, sullying the purity of 
 one white waistcoat more! Don't misunder- 
 stand me. I yield to none in my liking for con- 
 spicuous waste, but what sense is there in waste 
 that is not conspicuous? Often and often I have 
 revolted against being an expensively clean unit 
 lost in an expensively clean crowd. Even when 
 I had bought and paid for my seat at a public 
 dinner I have often torn up my ticket, bade 
 Heber put back my things, and dined at home 
 on a chop and a glass of sherry. 
 
 That was in the old days. Since July I, 1919, 
 120 
 
A Dry Dinner r I2I 
 
 my habits have changed. About five of a winter 
 day I return to my rooms, where I often ob- 
 serve with sorrow that I am dining out, in pub- 
 lic, with speeches. I don't have to look at my 
 engagement pad. A glance at the corner of the 
 library breaks the news. Bishop has laid out 
 gin, both vermouths, whisky, soda, has he? 
 That means a public dinner, and I spend a happy 
 hour or two with these restoratives. By the 
 time it's time to dress, my native manly distaste 
 for public dinners is obscured, my inhibitive 
 powers are low, my evening clothes are a sug- 
 gestion I can't resist, and soon I am in a taxi, 
 holding my meal ticket in my hand. Heber puts 
 it there. He also tells the chauffeur where to 
 go. At this hour such details have usually 
 escaped me. 
 
 In its early stages a post-July-1919 dinner is 
 not so bad. Instead of that numbness here, that 
 forced cordiality there, one finds on all sides 
 a sincere friendliness. Everybody has been 
 spending his late afternoon as I've spent 
 mine. Everybody is communicative and witty. 
 Everybody's hand is glad. Everybody rejoices 
 to be one of those present and almost nobody 
 knows why we are present. Are we met to 
 
122 Books and Things 
 
 honor some genius whose mechanical inventions 
 have not lightened the labor of a single human 
 being? Some poet whose mother bore him in 
 the New England desert a hundred years ago? 
 Some captain of industry who would rather not 
 die at all than die rich? Nobody can answer. 
 The early stages of the dinner pass in friendly 
 rivalry. We all try to guess why we are here. 
 Yes, and even in its later stages the post-July- 
 1919 dinner has a certain superiority. The 
 alcoholic mist is lifting instead of settling by 
 speech-time. The silence of the hearers is 
 natural, not artificial and reluctant, as it was in 
 the old days. Speaking for myself and for 
 others, I know we are never quieter than when 
 we are sobering up. Perhaps the reason I never 
 liked public dinners, old style, is that I was never 
 in condition to hear accurately what the speak- 
 ers were saying. Under the new system I don't 
 quite get the earlier performers, which is just 
 as well, but by the time the guest of the evening 
 is on his legs I'd rather listen than talk. The 
 other night, for example, at what I finally dis- 
 covered to be a literary dinner, I heard a speech 
 which I should have been sorry to miss. Here 
 it is: 
 
A Dry Dinner 1 23 
 
 Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Sitting 
 here this evening, and listening to the speakers 
 who have praised, in words more eloquent than 
 any I may hope to find, him whom to do honor 
 to whom we have come together to honor, the 
 thought has been born in me, I would say borne 
 in on me, that were he with us today he would 
 be exactly one hundred years young. [Ap- 
 plause]. This, if I may say so, is perhaps the 
 peculiar charm of all centenaries, that they deal 
 fearlessly yet at the same time accurately in 
 round numbers, in numbers as round as that 
 world across one of the unfooted seas of which 
 I have voyaged to meet you tonight. For many 
 years now it has been a laudable practice, in 
 that country which I have been all the prouder 
 to call mine since I have seen face to face this 
 country of which it is one of the parents, for 
 many years it has been the practice, when we 
 celebrate the centenary of one of those immortal 
 dead who live again in minds made absent by 
 their presence, to invite some American so- 
 journer in our midst to bear with us the burden 
 and heat of the birthday. [Laughter and ap- 
 plause]. Among my earliest adult memories 
 was the tears to which an American Ambas- 
 
124 Books and Things 
 
 sador moved me, one unforgettable evening at 
 King's Sutton, by his pathetic eulogy of the 
 melodious inspirer of Coleridge, William Lisle 
 Bowles. [Cheers]. There is thus a fitting reci- 
 procity, there is that another which one good 
 turn has been said to deserve, in the events 
 which have sent an Englishman among you 
 to lay his wreath on the bier of one whom you 
 must know, I know, yet better than I, although 
 my own youth was nourished on the pages of 
 Henry Russell Whittier. [Prolonged applause]. 
 Not unadvisedly did I speak just now, when I 
 said, in what may have seemed a conventionally 
 modest phrase, that England is only one of 
 America's parents. To be both parents is a 
 privilege rarely reserved for one mortal or for 
 one country. England has counted for much in 
 the nativity of America, no country more. Yet 
 she did not alone work that miracle which is the 
 United States. No, my friends, no. Your na- 
 tional pedigree must read, when the final 
 column is added and the last tide has turned, 
 the United States of America, by England, out 
 of the virgin wilderness. [Tumult and shout- 
 ing]. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, one hundred and 
 
A Dry Dinner 12^ 
 
 twenty years ago these two lands, America and 
 England, stood aloof, the scars remaining, like 
 cliffs which had been rent asunder. How he 
 whose day is today would have marvelled at the 
 change! The healing lapse of time, busily knit- 
 ting a bridge across that chasm, has united the 
 two Anglo-Saxon countries with hooks of steel. 
 This fact, for fact it is, would to James Green- 
 leaf Longfellow's contemporaries have seemed a 
 vision more wonderful than his own Sir Laun- 
 fal's; worthy to be immortalized after the good 
 old epic fashion in the verse of his own Evange- 
 line, than which there are in English no collec- 
 tion of hexameters of equal length, save pos- 
 sibly that made in the Bothie of Tober-Na- 
 Vuolich by the late Arthur Hugh Clough. 
 [Loud laughter]. United the two nations stand 
 today, united by blood, by a common past, by a 
 yet more common future. Maud Muller her- 
 self, in her own immortal phrase, would have 
 cherished the mere wish for such an union as 
 " a wish that she hardly dared to own." 
 [Prolonged cheers. Cries of "Maud! Maud! 
 Maud!"]. Ladies and gentlemen, not as a 
 stranger, but as an Englishman and a brother, 
 I ask you to join me in drinking a cup of ginger 
 
126 Books and Things 
 
 ale to the memory of one who had as much love 
 for both our countries as many of us have for 
 either, to the memory of John Wadsworth 
 Lowell. [Cheer upon cheer]. 
 
 A speech like that is an inspiration. I 
 remember using some such phrase to one of 
 my neighbors, before our gathering dispersed. 
 
 " Blodgett," said I, " such a speech is more 
 than an event. It is an inspiration." Those 
 were my very words. 
 
 April, 1919. 
 
THE BONDAGE OF SHAW 
 
 JUST as Synge makes the ordinary run of 
 contemporary plays sound poor in speech, as 
 Chekhov makes them look too tidily arranged, 
 as Hauptmann shows up their author's failure 
 to compose them with anything deeper than 
 ingenuity, so Shaw makes them appear unintel- 
 ligent, the work of specialists in theatricals, of 
 men without ideas. 
 
 At the theatre, watching a farce, one often 
 guesses that its point of departure was found 
 by answering a question like this: In precisely 
 what circumstances would an almost normal 
 person refrain from telling something which 
 even an idiot, were the circumstances ever so 
 little different, would have stopped the play by 
 telling at once? 
 
 Mr. Shaw needs none of these doctored situa- 
 tions to start his farces with. They get under 
 way as simply as his comedies, move at the 
 same pace, and pursue the same end. You can- 
 not, in fact, divide his plays into comedy and 
 farce. All of them, one with a thicker and 
 
 127 
 
128 Books and Things 
 
 another with a thinner veil over its serious pur- 
 pose, seek to destroy illusion. 
 
 Of course all comedies try more or less to do 
 this, and the better they succeed the better they 
 satisfy the classic idea of comedy. But the 
 scope of comedy is so wide that the illusions may 
 be anything you please. In Miss Austen, for 
 example, they are Emma's illusions as to the 
 feeling of one individual towards another. The 
 mistakes corrected by Moliere are graver, more 
 anti-social, matter more to the community. Yet 
 Moliere keeps always a faith in the old wisdom 
 of the world. The self-deceptions he exposes 
 are tried before judges assumed to be compe- 
 tent, before a society whose general good sense 
 is taken for granted. Mr. Shaw denies the 
 existence of any such common sense. He is 
 forever telling contemporary society the bad 
 news that illusion is part of its structure. The 
 self-deceiver he assaults and exposes is society 
 itself. 
 
 No wonder such a radical fighter puzzled us 
 all at first. His appearance in our meaningless 
 theatre was more surprising than the first ap- 
 pearance, about eighteen-eighty-something, of 
 grape fruit on our tables, many sizes larger than 
 
The Bondage of Sha<w< 129 
 
 our familiar breakfast dishes, and how much 
 more pungent. Nowadays all grape fruit tastes 
 alike. So with Mr. Shaw's plays. They are as 
 pungent as ever, they are larger than of old, 
 but they are no longer new. His late plays are 
 not newer than his earliest. His originality is 
 not a plant of slow growth. Seldom has an 
 artist-philosopher, coming so early into his for- 
 tune of convictions, reached the age of sixty 
 with fewer losses of conviction, fewer gains, so 
 little change in the nature of his investments. 
 He believes what he believed and feels what he 
 felt. Hence his uniformity. None of his plays 
 differs from another in tone so widely as " The 
 Master Builder " differs from " An Enemy of So- 
 ciety," or in doctrine so widely as " Une Visite 
 de Noces " differs from " La Femme de Claude." 
 Shaw's is the work of a witty and pugnacious 
 demonstrator, never depressed by the brutality 
 and injustice all about him, always impatient of 
 the lying done in their defense, enjoying 
 mightily his attacks on these lies. 
 
 Dumas fils had an even greater talent than 
 Mr. Shaw's for preaching from the stage, but 
 his propaganda was immensely less important. 
 In " Une Visite de Noces," and everywhere else, 
 
130 Books and Things 
 
 his attention is fixed upon some variety of love. 
 Mr. Shaw looks further afield, knows ever so 
 much more, thinks ever so much more, pays at- 
 tention to more parts of life. He has examined 
 war, property, education, marriage, home life, 
 romantic love, as they exist in the British world, 
 and he sees that they are bad. His method of 
 proceeding against them is not to turn a full 
 stream of anger directly upon these institutions 
 themselves. His weapon is not anger against 
 things and facts. It is impatience with the ro- 
 mantic idealism which keeps evil alive by seeing 
 things and facts as they are not and by telling 
 lies about them. War, for example, is hateful to 
 Mr. Shaw, but his way of getting rid of it is by 
 exposing and ridiculing the stuff and nonsense 
 talked about military glory. So strong is his 
 preference for taking this way that sometimes 
 one suspects him of detesting conventional no- 
 tions of military glory more cordially than he 
 detests the realities of war. 
 
 Pestilent archaic institutions are the objects 
 of his attack, but its method is such that he 
 seems to be giving most of his attention to the 
 flattering reflection of these institutions in the 
 conventional idealizing mind. He is much less 
 
The Bondage of Shaw 131 
 
 a realistic describer and exhibitor than a 
 preacher of the realistic habit. Learn to see 
 things realistically, great things and small, and 
 the future will be better than the present. 
 Once the tribe of romantic liars has been exter- 
 minated there will be no war in the world, no 
 profiteering, no parasites living in idleness. 
 Home life will be better and there will be less 
 of it. 
 
 Shaw the propagandist, the physician to an 
 ailing society, is so effectively in earnest that 
 everybody who can take his medicine at all 
 comes sooner or later to take it seriously. Most 
 of us pass through several stages. At first we 
 are puzzled and amused by these plays, in 
 which the speeches glitter like razors after a 
 Cakewalk, and the mots d'auteur are brilliant as 
 poppies in the wheat. Then it disconcerts us 
 to discover that this paradoxist means bodily 
 harm to the existing order. Next we are ex- 
 hilarated and stimulated and compelled almost 
 to think for ourselves by his doctrine, so lucid 
 and emphatic and cocksure. It is at a later 
 stage, when we are trying to escape from the 
 prison of Mr. Shaw's common sense, that we 
 take him most seriously. 
 
132 Books and Things 
 
 It is all very well, we say at this stage, to talk 
 against illusions, but are not some illusions 
 necessary? George Meredith has shown us 
 
 Yonder midnight ocean's force. 
 Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
 To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! 
 
 If the warrior horse were realists, if they fore- 
 saw the inevitable faintness and thinness of any 
 line they could rationally hope to throw, with 
 all their ramping, wouldn't they ramp less, and 
 the line on the shore be even thinner and 
 fainter? Illusions do harm, we admit, yet it is 
 by illusion's help that the world does its work. 
 Would not the sanest ambitions dwindle, and 
 the highest hopes fail, if the extent of their 
 future satisfaction could be accurately known? 
 
 That way of escaping Mr. Shaw's influence is 
 possible, no doubt, but not for a convert whose 
 mind he has ever thoroughly won. For Mr. 
 Shaw believes the world can get along without 
 any man's best if he be such a weakling that 
 he cannot do his best without telling himself 
 lies. One of these days the world will be manned 
 by a tough-minded realistic crew, whose labor 
 will be none the less diligent because they di- 
 rect it to strictly attainable ends. And even 
 
The Bondage of Shaw 133 
 
 after illusion has gone instinct and impulse will 
 remain. At present married life is made worse 
 than it need be by the romantic idealism of men 
 and women who expect to find it better than 
 it can be. But a more rational expectation, a 
 clear foresight, will not weaken the instinct 
 which brings men and women together. Ex- 
 pecting less happiness in marriage than they 
 now foolishly expect, they will gain a solider 
 happiness than they can have now. The artistic 
 impulse, again, is so inextinguishable that 
 artists will keep pegging away after they have 
 scrapped all their illusions. A painter can stick 
 to his work though he has no hope of beating 
 Velasquez. He paints to make his picture rep- 
 resent what he has seen as he has seen it. So 
 with " the instinct of workmanship " wherever 
 found, and it will be found in abundance. 
 
 But if we yield the point, if we grant the 
 truth of all that Mr. Shaw teaches us about illu- 
 sions, if we concede that all are harmful, that 
 none is necessary, are we condemned never to 
 loosen his grip upon us? At least we can try. 
 To see mankind as divisible into realists and 
 romantic idealists, we may say, is only one way 
 of seeing the world. Turn from Mr. Shaw, for 
 
134 Books and Things 
 
 whom it is the only way of seeing things as 
 they are, to whatever life we happen to know. 
 No attempt to separate people into realists and 
 romantic idealists can long survive contact with 
 miscellaneous experience. Most of the men and 
 women one sees do not spend most of their 
 time in realizing Mr. Shaw's ideals of realism 
 or romantic idealism. They are quite as sig- 
 nificantly classifiable upon other systems. They 
 are not easily classifiable upon any. If we keep 
 his classification in mind long enough, until it 
 looks as strange as a familiar word repeated 
 over and over, it will at last appear arbitrary. 
 Imagine a sculptor who should begin each of his 
 portrait busts with a determination to have the 
 look of it tell us whether the sitter did or did 
 not believe that land ought to be taxed to its 
 full rental value. An exaggeration? Of course. 
 But what of? Of just the impression left on me 
 when I try to remember Mr. Shaw's plays as 
 a whole. 
 
 A self-conscious passion for seeing things 
 realistically, or as they are, is a blood relation 
 of its caricature, the passion for seeing things 
 as other people don't. And this, again, is no dis- 
 tant relative of the passion for denying what 
 
The Bondage of Shaw 135 
 
 other people see, even when they see truly. 
 Take physical courage, for example, which Mr. 
 Shaw dislikes and denies because it is, after all, 
 the one best bet of the romantic idealists who 
 have invented the myth of military glory. This 
 dislike appears again in his fondness for putting 
 fear, physical fear, upon the stage. Take for 
 another example love, the spring in which rivers 
 of romantic lies have their source. Except as 
 pure life-force, Mr. Shaw has a poor opinion of 
 love. He would resent the behavior of Sir 
 Samuel Romilly, whose wife's death drove him 
 to suicide at the age of sixty-one, because such 
 doings are evidence of a kind not, I admit, very 
 abundant, but still evidence, that passionate love 
 may survive twenty years of marriage. Friend- 
 ship, too, with its irrational loyalties and its odor 
 of good old times, has been the occasion of the 
 Lord knows how much romantic idealism. 
 Hence, in all Mr. Shaw's plays, so far as I can 
 remember, no representation of friendship on 
 the best terms, between equals. Together with 
 human relations at their intensest and most dis- 
 interested, as in friendship and love, he excludes 
 human beings at the full tide of their energy. 
 So much lying has been done about great men 
 
136 Books and Things 
 
 that he is impatient of greatness. Julius Caesar 
 is not greater than John Tanner or Andrew 
 Undershaft. Vivie Warren seems almost as 
 great a man as Napoleon. 
 
 This denial of the exceptional, this dislike and 
 distrust of it, what are they in Mr. Shaw, but 
 the other side of affirmation that society must 
 be turned into a happier place for average men 
 and women? He is at his most modern in his 
 effort to overthrow all those institutions which 
 keep the poor dependent upon the idle or the 
 active rich, and in his warfare against the ro- 
 mantic lies which sicken and divide all selves 
 except the callous and the blind. His concern 
 for mankind, for a world exempt from tyranny, 
 brutality, unearned leisure, intimidation, for a 
 world in which no man's will is the slave of 
 another man's, and which is filled with men and 
 women who had rather forfeit their respecta- 
 bility than their self-respect, who are neither 
 afraid without cause nor afraid, when there is 
 cause, of being afraid — all this progeny of 
 aspirations is the issue of Mr. Shaw's modern 
 democratic passion. 
 
 A modern passion he does not feel is the pas- 
 sion for observing and representing the greatest 
 
The Bondage of Shaw 137 
 
 possible amount of human nature, just because 
 it is human nature. He is almost a stranger 
 to that omnivorous curiosity, so widespread 
 nowadays among novelists, historians and psy- 
 chologists, which is eager to contradict or 
 verify what our fathers have told us about man, 
 to make discoveries, to treat nothing as 
 negligible if it be human. Such a disinterested 
 curiosity would perhaps be an encumbrance to 
 an artist as bent on changing our minds as Mr. 
 Shaw is. Accordingly we find his gift of sharp 
 observation used for the most part upon men 
 and women when they are in contact with 
 romantic idealism, either as its destroyers or its 
 victims, and especially at the moment of their 
 conversion to realism. He has some observa- 
 tion to spare for them at other moments, but 
 unless you remember his purpose, his central 
 drive, you cannot help wondering why he has 
 not more. 
 
 " Philosophy serves culture," said Pater, " not 
 by the fancied gift of abstract or transcendental 
 knowledge, but by suggesting questions which 
 help one to detect the passion, and strangeness 
 and dramatic contrasts of life." This is not the 
 kind of philosophy people have in mind when 
 
138 Books and Things 
 
 they excuse Mr. Shaw's narrowed gaze by call- 
 ing him an artist-philosopher. Artist-reformer 
 would be nearer the truth, and the distinction 
 between him and the mere artist would remain. 
 The mere artist, whom you may call either a 
 convictionless or a disinterested artist, just as 
 you please, is known by his eagerness to look 
 again and again at the world with fresh eyes. 
 He values life more for its variety and its 
 capability of surprising him than for its con- 
 formity with his previous reports upon it. The 
 artist is known by what he omits, the artist- 
 philosopher by what he omits to observe. His 
 subconscious tells him either that his philosophy 
 would be different if he observed more, or 
 else that he would have no end of trouble try- 
 ing to squeeze his new material into his old 
 system. In this his subconscious does the 
 artist-philosopher a good turn. We forgive 
 Mr. Shaw the hardness and fastness of his con- 
 clusions because we know he has observed 
 nothing, literally nothing, that is inconsistent 
 with them. We should never forgive him if he 
 saw all life, and saw it merely as all raw premise 
 for his finished conclusion-product. 
 
 It is by never forgetting Mr. Shaw is an artist- 
 
The Bondage of Shaw< 139 
 
 philosopher that we escape from his bondage. 
 An artist-philosopher is a system-maker, and no 
 system can be true. But even when we are 
 equipped with this knowledge escape from him 
 is not easy. His hold upon us is tenacious. He 
 relaxes our will to get away. As a mere artist 
 his power is not easy to resist. One of the 
 greatest masters of clear statement that have 
 ever lived, a humorist of the first rank, one of 
 the great wits of the world, he knows how to 
 use his wit and humor and clearness to serve 
 his own will, the will to make us disbelieve. A 
 while ago I spoke of his mots d'auteur, but 
 really all his plays are mots d'auteur, spoken 
 with a practical object. Will the next century 
 read and see his plays? I have not the slightest 
 idea. No words of mine, gentle reader, and 
 a fortiori no words of yours, can tell how little 
 we know about the tastes of our successors. 
 But I am willing to bet, if they do read him, 
 that they will find singularly little to skip. 
 
 Mr. Shaw's destiny is an odd one. All his 
 articulate life he has been telling what he took 
 to be subversive and unpleasant truths. His 
 reward has been money, a reputation for bril- 
 liancy, few converts. Then the war came. He 
 
140 Books and Things 
 
 did as he had always done, said what he had 
 always said, and with the same fresh wit and 
 energy. This time, at last, he roused thousands 
 and thousands to fury. So his chance has come 
 for showing, now that he is about sixty years 
 old, the courage he would have shown all along, 
 if he had had the chance. 
 April, 1917. 
 
A SCHNITZLER STORY 
 
 BE careful what you desire in youth, said 
 Goethe, for in old age you will get it. Be 
 still more careful, so one thinks after reading 
 Arthur Schnitzler's " Frau Beate und ihr Sohn," 
 what you desire to-day unconsciously, for to- 
 morrow you may get it, and the price you pay 
 for it will be the defeat and ruin of everything 
 you consciously desired. Our morality having 
 taught us that certain desires are not to be 
 acknowledged, even to ourselves, we keep them 
 in our unconsciousness, where they lie in am- 
 bush. A morality less superstitious, to which 
 ends mattered more than means, would have 
 bidden us do our utmost to become conscious 
 of the ambushed desire, to avow the unavow- 
 able, to give the nameless its exactest name. 
 Some of the worst moral defeats are victories 
 of the unconscious over the conscious. Moral 
 victories, no less than mental, may be the 
 reward of men and women who have taught 
 things hidden in their unconsciousness to serve 
 ends their will has consciously chosen. 
 
 141 
 
142 Books and Things 
 
 Although " Frau Beate und ihr Sohn," which 
 I read for the first time the other day, is 
 Schnitzler's newest book, it is already a year 
 or more old. It is a story about as long as 
 " Sterben," one of his earliest masterpieces. 
 Sophocles, when he treated the Oedipus and 
 Jocasta story, hid from them the fact that they 
 were mother and son. Schnitzler keeps nothing 
 from Beate and her son Hugo but the fact that 
 they are in love. This they do not learn until 
 the very end, when it is revealed to them in 
 darkness and flame, terribly, though not at the 
 same moment, nor by quite the same means. 
 Slowly, by slight suggestion after slighter, you 
 grow aware of the passion Beate is still uncon- 
 scious of. She tragically misinterprets her feel- 
 ing and her son's. Accompanying this central 
 misinterpretation, playing into it, disengaging 
 themselves from it, joining it again, lesser mis- 
 interpretations are born and live and are lost. 
 When the number of Beate's desirers increases 
 about her, she in good faith explains the in- 
 crease by some peculiarity in the air of an 
 unusual autumn. She does not know the cause 
 is a longing she has, which looks out of her 
 eyes and makes her gestures subtly obedient to 
 
A Schnitzler Story 143 
 
 its rhythm. She Imputes her own state of 
 mind, not knowing it for hers, and her imputa- 
 tions turn into realities. A desire she was 
 unconscious of, which she would have done her 
 best to extirpate if only she had become con- 
 scious of it early enough, which every other 
 feeling in her would have fought against if it 
 had come earlier into the light of consciousness, 
 fulfils her tragedy. 
 
 In 1902, when Schnitzler's " Lebendige 
 Stunden " had just been given at the Carl- 
 Theater in Vienna, Hermann Bahr wrote: 
 " Aber nun kommt das Publikum und verlangt, 
 dass wir ihm sagen sollen, was der Dichter denn 
 mit diesen Stiicken sagen will. Darauf ist zu 
 antworten : Wenn wir es konnten, ware er 
 keiner." A year later, when a revival of these 
 one-act plays gave Bahr a chance to return to 
 the subject, he quoted Hebbel : " Wehe dem 
 Dichter, dessen Werk" man im gemeinen Ver- 
 tande kopieren kann. Er ist entweder nichts 
 der hat wenigstens nichts gemacht." Any- 
 thing by Schnitzler that I read for the first time, 
 whether novel, shorter story or play, gives me 
 the feeling which Hebbel and Bahr have put 
 
144 Books and Things 
 
 into words. In Schnitzler the language is 
 nearly always quite simple. Impossible not to 
 understand, except when your German fails 
 you, what he is saying at any given moment. 
 Equally impossible not to feel, when you have 
 shut the book and are marvelling at the easy 
 path he has made for you through such intri- 
 cate ravines, that you have seen the beginnings 
 of many other paths, leading toward darker 
 strangenesses. You have been in the deep 
 woods, along the borderland between conscious 
 and unconscious. From little clearings you 
 have looked into darker regions where the light 
 is drowned. You have been listening to fainter 
 sounds between the louder. 
 
 A book like " Frau Beate," if we let it alone 
 in our minds for a while after reading it, 
 sharpens our observation of the contrast and 
 cooperation, in ourselves and in other people, 
 of conscious motives with unconscious. Hap- 
 pily for the world most of the unconscious mo- 
 tives we catch in the act are inadequate to 
 tragedy. They are small things. They lead the 
 egotist to talk of himself while believing that 
 autobiography is only a by-product of his talk; 
 
A Schnitzler Story 145 
 
 lead him to judge others by what they have 
 done and himself by what he is going to do one 
 of these days; lead him to warm himself before 
 praise from persons whose facility in praising 
 he has often laughed at; lead him to assume 
 that friends have him in mind when they are 
 really thinking only of God. It is not often, 
 however, that Schnitzler gives us anything so 
 explicit to take with us from his world to ours. 
 Seldom does he allow us to see the comedy in 
 mortal things as a complement of their tragedy. 
 In many of his books comedy and tragedy are 
 perceived at almost the same moment. 
 
 Nobody puts his tragic touches and his comic 
 touches nearer together than Schnitzler. No- 
 body is abler to keep the one kind from lessen- 
 ing the feeling created by the other. For 
 examples of this art we must go not to " Frau 
 Beate," but to some of his plays, say to 
 " Komtesse Mizzi." It begins when Count 
 Arpad, an elderly man, is losing by her mar- 
 riage his mistress, an actress he has been living 
 with for seventeen years. Count Arpad is very 
 diverting, yet Schnitzler never lets us see him 
 as merely absurd. Mizzi, the Count's daughter, 
 
146 Books and Things 
 
 is thirty-seven. With her entrance into the 
 story we begin to see, past the adroit and amus- 
 ing dialogue, a tragic background. Eighteen 
 years ago Mizzi and Prince Egon were lovers. 
 We see the hunting lodge, " forgotten in a 
 forest glade and secret from the eyes of all," 
 where their boy was born. Prince Egon's wife 
 was alive then, and the secret was well kept. 
 But at what a cost! Mizzi was willing to run 
 away with Egon, but he would not. And be- 
 cause her boy was taken from her, in spite of 
 all she was ready to do to keep him, she has 
 refused to see him in these seventeen years. He 
 thinks his mother is dead. To-day, without 
 warning, Egon brings the boy to see Mizzi. 
 
 We should all know what to expect from 
 such a situation, provided we did not know 
 Schnitzler. Either the present would turn as 
 tragic as the past, or else we should have a final 
 scene of forgiving and forgetting. What we do 
 see is naturally neither. The amusing dialogue 
 goes on, more amusing than ever, quicker with 
 comedy, and the tragic . background that lies 
 beyond it, in the past, takes more and more 
 significant possession of our imagination. One 
 
A Schnitzler Story 147 
 
 who had read an outline of " Komtesse Mizzi," 
 and who didn't otherwise know the play, would 
 say it ended happily; for Mizzi is so unwilling 
 to be separated from her son that she is willing 
 even to marry his father. But readers or 
 hearers of the play are not so deceived. 
 Schnitzler has drawn away too many curtains. 
 He leaves us wondering what a happiness can 
 be like which is shared by a man and woman 
 who know each other too well. 
 March, 1915. 
 
BELOW THE AVERAGE READER 
 
 ALTHOUGH I have often travelled in the 
 same train with you, and have sought 
 you carefully, I am not even now certain that I 
 know you by sight. Not in the exalted chair 
 which should be yours, but undistinguished, un- 
 remarked, you sit obscured by your compan- 
 ions. Publishers and novelists and critics may 
 think they have found you at last, and resolve 
 to keep you under surveillance, yet every year 
 brings its evidence that their eyes were upon 
 the wrong woman. For you, madam, are the 
 average reader. Upon you depends the fate of 
 every novel. To your hands the future of the 
 American novel, for better, for worse, has been 
 entrusted. If you say, let there be lightness, 
 light books will be written. If you yearn for 
 a tragic novelist, some obliging American 
 mother, hailing from Germany, perhaps, or 
 Russia or Scandinavia, will before long give 
 him birth. 
 
 148 
 
Below the Average Reader 149 
 
 You do not, I regret to notice, appear to 
 realize the responsibilities of your position. 
 You are accused, sometimes contemptuously 
 and highbrowedly, sometimes with hottest fury, 
 of putting your powers to the poorest uses. 
 Much you care. No fury, though hot as molten 
 metal, can touch you, and to be highbrow- 
 beaten you wholly refuse. At this moment, 
 where a chivalrous volunteer is hurrying to your 
 defense, you take no interest in my approach. 
 It matters nothing to you whether I deny that 
 your preference for happy endings is dictatorial, 
 or admit this and affirm that your dictation does 
 no great harm. 
 
 In life, which has sometimes been contrasted 
 with literature, this liking for happy endings is 
 one of the most innocent of your many inno- 
 cencies. One day this autumn, when you were 
 forced to change cars at a small place in the 
 country, you stood on the station platform and 
 watched your abandoned train pull out. Be- 
 hind you there came a hurry of feet. An 
 average man, whom you did not know from 
 Adam, dashed by you in pursuit of that reced- 
 ing train. Would he make it? Would he lose 
 
I£0 Books and Things 
 
 it? You stood and watched, rather tensely 
 rooting for that unknown man. His past might 
 have been scarlet. His heart might be black. 
 In some city up the line there might be a hun- 
 dred guiltless men against whom your train- 
 chaser had been concocting an after dinner 
 speech, and who would be happier and not un- 
 wiser if he lost his train. You, while watching 
 him sprint, thought of none of these things. 
 You wished that man well. When he had 
 swung aboard the last car you turned away, 
 relaxed, relieved, nor did you stop to con- 
 sider how utterly the desire for a happy end- 
 ing, that well-known tyrant, had held you in 
 thrall. 
 
 The scene changes. Winter in town. You 
 look down from your high-built room upon the 
 glaring street, where the lights bewilder and 
 blind. Two illuminated surface monsters are 
 clanging towards one another, each on its ap- 
 pointed track. A woman, any woman, frail if 
 you compare her to either of the oncoming 
 cars, tries to cross the street ahead of both. 
 Will she be caught and dragged and mangled 
 under your eyes? No, not she. The poor 
 
Below the Average Reader 151 
 
 creature has done the impossible, she has gained 
 the sidewalk unharmed, and you, the spectator, 
 thank whatever gods you believe in. For you 
 the incident has had a happy ending. And for 
 her, too, although she may finish her evening 
 near the radiator, opposite some sedentary, 
 taciturn monogamist who is as sleepy as your 
 own husband. 
 
 This is the kind of happy ending that you 
 desire when you sit down to read. But people 
 mistake when they say that because you have 
 this desire they can tell what you think about 
 life, the world, the soul. They can tell nothing 
 of the sort. Yours is a case where a great deal 
 of wish may imply very little opinion. You, 
 who share Sir George Croft's " honest belief 
 that things are making for good on the whole," 
 have a weakness for happy endings, and so have 
 I, though I'm not quite certain what things are 
 making for. You would like happy endings no 
 less if your beliefs were as vague as mine, and 
 I should like them no more if my optimism were 
 as symmetrical as yours. A liking for them is 
 found among persons who see life pink, who see 
 it black, who see it gray, and also among per- 
 sons who don't see it. 
 
152 Books and Things 
 
 As you have already begun to suspect, if you 
 have kindly read as far as this, I don't quarrel 
 with your preference for happy endings. If you 
 insisted upon unhappy endings you might tempt 
 our novelists and publishers to quite as conven- 
 tional a routine. And a tragedy which is 
 tragedy only in intention, which supplies an 
 abundance of death or other calamity while 
 omitting all tragic feeling, is less excusable, in 
 my eyes, than the staple foolish happy-ender. 
 My quarrel is with your desire to have that 
 man-who-caught-the-train youngish, resource- 
 ful, bold, and in love; with your desire to have 
 that woman-who-wasn't-run-over young, in love, 
 self-sacrificing and devoted to an ailing mother. 
 I suspect you, besides, of not considering love 
 curiously enough. Richard Wagner was more 
 exacting. He said that only the love of the 
 strong for the strong was love, and he made a 
 list of the imitations — such as the love of the 
 strong for the weak, of the weak for the weak, 
 of the weak for the strong. He called for what 
 he deemed the real thing, and would accept no 
 inferior substitute. Aren't you perhaps a little 
 too ready to accept anything that's labelled love 
 and anything that's labelled happiness? 
 
Below the Average Reader 153 
 
 One of these days, when I unfold my morn- 
 ing paper and learn from the help-wanted 
 column that the position of creator is vacant, I 
 shall apply for the job. Not long after organiz- 
 ing my staff I shall set about re-creating the 
 average reader. To me this shall be as near a 
 concern as the ordering of my food. Under my 
 altering hand she shall lose a little of her fond- 
 ness for meeting standardized feeling in new 
 settings. She shall be pleased to meet new 
 feeling in settings new or old. She will enjoy 
 watching the oldest feelings in the world turn, 
 as she sees them through the novelist's observ- 
 ing and self-observing eye, to newness. Books 
 which not only talk about love, but which con- 
 sider and communicate it, shall be dear to her; 
 books where — as in Mr. Galsworthy's " The 
 Dark Flower " — love itself is the subject, and 
 where the lover is, and is meant to be, only a 
 glass into which life pours different-colored 
 passions. 
 
 But the average reader, when these and other 
 alterations had been completed, would still re- 
 tain many of her existing traits. Although she 
 would demand strangeness in her novels, al- 
 
i £4 Books and Things 
 
 though she would insist upon having her manly- 
 men less like one another than they have been 
 in the past, I should not insist upon her fore- 
 going her attachment to manly men, womanly 
 women, self-abnegators, high ideals and ele- 
 mental feelings. I shouldn't even require of her 
 a suspicious attitude toward big subjects. By 
 letting her keep these preferences I should hope 
 to avoid the weakness of re-creating her in my 
 own image, a weakness which has cramped more 
 than one creator's style. 
 December, 1914. 
 
REVIEWING RUSSIA 
 
 HOW does one set about writing the his- 
 tory of a literature? One way is to take 
 any language you know and read its literature 
 chronologically. Through absorbed eager hours, 
 critically detached hours, hours of boredom, you 
 accomplish your hellish purpose. But for your 
 will to write you often wouldn't read, and yet 
 you keep at it, your purpose growing. Excit- 
 edly you write of two authors between whom 
 you have discovered hidden correspondencies. 
 But for this discovery you would have had little 
 to say of either. As you proceed you acquire 
 momentum. Johnson's " Irene " does not stop 
 you, nor " The Curse of Kehama." Before you 
 have mastered your material you have learned 
 to read, not without interest, anything out of 
 which copy can be made. That is one way of 
 preparing yourself to write the history of a 
 literature. The other way is to have read the 
 whole of it before the idea of writing its history 
 entered your head. Neither way is ever fol- 
 lowed. Literary historians have always read a 
 
 i55 
 
156 Books and Things 
 
 good deal of their subject, and have never read 
 it all, before resolving to write. Of Mr. Maurice 
 Baring, whose " Outline of Russian Literature," 
 published in the Home University Library by 
 Messrs. Henry Holt & Company, I am about to 
 read, it is safe to guess that his book will sound 
 as if most of his reading had been done to 
 amuse himself. Before beginning it, however, 
 let me see what deposit a little reading of Rus- 
 sian authors has left in my head. 
 
 It was Russia leather, I believe, which taught 
 me that such a country as Russia existed. To 
 other leather it bore the same relation that 
 guava jelly did to jellies of commoner sort. 
 Then came stories of Siberia and of the steppes, 
 and the story of the man who was pursued by 
 a pack of wolves as he drove his sledge, and 
 who saved himself by tossing his children, one 
 after another, to the wolves. A large Russian 
 match-box, picturing men and women in long 
 clothes of splendor, arrived one day, and thence- 
 forth sat on our library table and glowed. Out 
 of such odds and ends Russia made itself inside 
 my head — a Russia of far horizons you drove 
 toward, endlessly, across yellow plains that were 
 
Reviewing Russia 157 
 
 not quite flat; of bright lacquer-like peasants, 
 bending to their tasks in forests and shadowed 
 spots in villages; of winter days as cold as the 
 ice-brook, when you reached the forest at night- 
 fall, and heard howling all about you, and saw 
 the hungry pack as you crossed open spaces of 
 hard moonlight. The next morning you would 
 be off again on your sledge, the forest left 
 behind now, and drive all day toward the Volga, 
 and all the next day and the next over creaking 
 snow, days when there were no low winds, for 
 a wonder, and the clouds, high up, seemed to go 
 of themselves. Terrible to me, a little later, 
 were the images made by such words as 
 anarchist, nihilist, exile, the knout. I never 
 quite believed the things they stood for existed 
 in the older Russia I seemed always to have 
 known. 
 
 Since those early days the Russia inside my 
 head has changed several times, but it is always 
 the work of chance. The lean wolves are not 
 less lean, but they have withdrawn from the 
 centre of the picture, and young children are no 
 longer their staple food. Russians exist whose 
 days are not all passed in sledges or exile, who 
 
158 Books and Things 
 
 have other occupations than bomb-throwing or 
 sternest repression of revolt. For a while I 
 saw them as men who dreamed their lives away, 
 who hoped and felt and couldn't make decisions 
 and regretted. The strayed sportsman lay on 
 the earth all night by the open fire, making 
 believe he was asleep, listening while the boys 
 talked, listening to old superstitions refreshed 
 by youngest believers. From time to time he 
 heard the feet of the horses the boys were keep- 
 ing in that vast meadow. Or he smelled the 
 earth at daybreak, smelled the seasons, heard 
 at the end of winter the sound of waters released 
 on a night of sudden Russian spring — springs 
 as sudden and beautiful as the decisions made 
 by Russian women in love. Women to whom 
 love says, " Who chooses me must give and 
 hazard all he hath," and who do not hesitate. 
 Men who feel deeply, whose indecision leads 
 them to act like tepid souls, and who are not 
 tepid, who always remember, in bitterness, 
 impotently. 
 
 A little later Russia began to change fast. It 
 contained more kinds of men and women than 
 I had been able to see in my real world, more 
 
Reviewing Russia 159 
 
 kinds than any novelist I krew had seen in his. 
 They were seen more direi ly. The same un- 
 obstructed gaze was turned toward their appear- 
 ance, their gestures, their sensations of heat and 
 cold, their shyest motives, their illusions, their 
 most experienced thought. You felt the confu- 
 sion of crowds, of battles, as you feel things 
 here and now. Love's birth and growth and 
 decline were laid bare with a clearness that was 
 not unreal. The greatest novelist in the world, 
 you would have said, if only his seekers after 
 truth had not found what they sought. He 
 made all other novelists, even the other Rus- 
 sian, sound arranged. Next came, strangest of 
 all, the master of hallucination, in comparison 
 with whose intensity your own life seems un- 
 realized, unlived. His fevered, tortured, life- 
 twisted creatures, upon whom their creator 
 spends his incomparable treasure of pity and 
 love, obsess you as you were never obsessed 
 by yourself. When you emerge again into your 
 own world you are aware, for a while, that its 
 sounds come muffled, that you touch it with 
 numb fingers. 
 March, 1915. 
 
ANNA REVISITED 
 
 A FEW pages of " Anna Karenina," when I 
 read it for the first time thirty years ago, 
 were quite enough to convince me that it was 
 the greatest novel in the world. Many of the 
 other greatest novels in the world were still to 
 read. I admitted the fact. But this conscious 
 ignorance could not shake my faith. I had been 
 travelling, and was making a stay in a part of 
 the United States which I had never seen, 
 which I innocently called " the west," and which 
 offered to curiosity, on the shore of Lake 
 Ontario, people, occupations, manners, habits, 
 landscape that were all unfamiliar. This curi- 
 osity had been strong, but it could not compete 
 with the feeling awakened by " Anna Karenina," 
 which effaced the pale real world, brought one 
 into unbelievably close contact with so much 
 life, gave one a hundred new thirsts and free- 
 doms. What novel short of the greatest could 
 cause effects like these? 
 
 Imagine your first meeting with a woman 
 160 
 
Anna Revisited 161 
 
 whose loveliness and grace and radiance out- 
 shone the brightest that your experience had 
 given you hope of seeing, a woman who drank 
 joy from deep-hidden springs. Imagine, if you 
 can, your emotion when she turned into a can- 
 nibal. Imagine the later events of her history 
 combining to prove that cannibalism wrecked, 
 broke, destroyed her, while all the time her 
 charm could not die, but lived on so clear and 
 unspoiled that your opinion of cannibalism 
 underwent great change, and a new tolerance 
 flooded your soul. For " cannibalism " read 
 " adultery." I had been brought up to regard 
 adultery as I now regard the most German of 
 atrocities, plus the warning that it was a thing 
 never to be named, except at morning service. 
 Not for a moment was Anna the kind of woman 
 whom I had been taught to think the only kind 
 who ever committed adultery. For this access 
 of tolerance my education, it is only fair to say, 
 had been an unintentional preparation. With- 
 out at all meaning to, my elders had turned my 
 curiosity about sex away from all relations 
 sanctioned by the church and had concentrated 
 it, timid and fascinated, upon illicitness. All 
 things considered, my misreading of the story 
 
162 Books and Things 
 
 of Anna and Vronsky, my misplacing of the 
 emphasis, was natural enough. 
 
 Thirty years ago, being in love with Anna, I 
 was as a matter of course persuaded of 
 Vronsky's unworthiness. This conviction lived 
 at peace with the conviction that I had rather 
 resemble Vronsky than Levin, and that Vron- 
 sky's imperturbability, his haughtiness when in- 
 terrupted at breakfast by brother-officers whom 
 he did not like, his indifference to criticism, 
 were as inimitable as his good looks. His char- 
 acter and appearance were food for despair, and 
 one turned to Levin for comfort, not in vain. 
 Here was a man shy and awkward in company, 
 confused when he made the same remark twice, 
 a maker and breaker of resolutions, yet nowise 
 despicable, a man liked and even loved. 
 
 The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, 
 Is — not to fancy what were fair in life 
 Provided it could be — but, finding first 
 What may be, then find how to make it fair 
 Up to our means : a very different thing ! 
 
 I had read this: I had tried to believe it. 
 Levin's character and destiny was a concrete 
 proof that the problem was not insoluble, that 
 one's means might be good enough. 
 
Anna Revisited 163 
 
 Yet nobody's egotism, even at nineteen, could 
 be so blind as not to see that " Anna Karenina " 
 was other things than a consoler and liberator 
 and disheartener of one's self. It was the whole 
 of life, it was a house of death and birth, it was 
 a place where the every-day miracles revealed 
 their graver meanings. Watching by the death- 
 bed of Levin's brother one saw, listening to 
 Kitty's cry in childbirth one heard, with a dis- 
 tinctness rare in one's own sensations, the near- 
 ness of man to the other animals. All the sud- 
 den poetry of spring, changing Levin's heart 
 with the change of season, taught one to know, 
 as one knows cold or heat or pain, man's near- 
 ness to earth. Even at nineteen, however, I was 
 troubled because Levin, the seeker, came so near 
 finding the meaning of life. I remember sus- 
 pecting that one part of life was to go on won- 
 dering forever what life might mean. 
 
 Unless one is more than common stupid, 
 which few of us think ourselves, thirty years 
 make large changes in most great books. In 
 advance of experience one craves substitutes for 
 it. Later one cannot help looking for likenesses 
 and contrasts between the book and experience. 
 But " Anna Karenina " is not this kind of great 
 
164 Books and Things 
 
 book. To a young reader it is one of these sub- 
 stitutes for experience which immediately be- 
 come part of experience, so that one of the 
 things you compare it with and test it by, after 
 no matter how many years, is itself. And it has 
 no secrets. All the abundant life in it is seen 
 with the last distinctness, represented with con- 
 cise explicitness. The steeplechase which Vron- 
 sky loses, and which breaks Frou Frou's back, 
 is not more distinctly seen than those obscurer 
 places, in Anna's soul or Levin's, upon which 
 Tolstoi turns his amazing daylight. Last week, 
 when I had re-read " Anna Karenina," this was 
 the new impression I most noticed, that I was 
 over-acquainted with the principal characters, 
 that they were all too distinctly exhibited, that 
 there were no planes in these landscapes of the 
 soul and no lost lines, that nobody's unconscious 
 had any privacy. 
 
 This was not, of course, the only impression 
 I felt as new. For the first time I noticed how 
 carefully Tolstoi builds up his case against 
 adultery, how artfully he represents it as capable 
 of doing thoroughly frivolous men and women 
 no harm, how cautiously he keeps his Christian 
 distrust of the flesh from appearing on any page 
 
Anna Revisited 165 
 
 that tells of Anna and Vronsky, how different 
 Anna's fate might have been if Vronsky had had 
 a passion for excavating buried cities, or for 
 anticipating Mr. Edison. The first time I read 
 the book I accepted submissively the words 
 Tolstoi put at the head of its first chapter — 
 " vengeance is mine, I will repay." To-day his 
 " moral " seems better expressed in this passage 
 from Santayana: "Love itself dreams of more 
 than mere possession ; to conceive happiness, it 
 must conceive a life to be shared in a varied 
 world, full of events and activities, which shall 
 be new and ideal bonds between the lovers. But 
 unlawful love cannot pass out into this public 
 fulfilment. It is condemned to be mere posses- 
 sion — possession in the dark, without an en- 
 vironment, without a future. It is love among 
 the ruins . . . love among the ruins of them- 
 selves and of all else they might have had to 
 give to one another." 
 
 Is " Anna Karenina " the greatest novel in the 
 world? No, the world has not seen and prob- 
 ably never will see its greatest novel. But the 
 phrase is not always vile. It often serves to 
 express a feeling for which no other words will 
 do so well, a feeling that is even stronger in 
 
166 Books and Things 
 
 me, I think, while I read " War and Peace " or 
 " Crime and Punishment." Does " Anna Ka- 
 renina " contain the whole of life? Of course 
 not, yet this phrase too serves to express, with 
 just exaggeration, a reader's wonder at the many 
 living men and women whom Tolstoi created, 
 only a few in his own image. But a re-reader, 
 though he may not feel that much life has been 
 left out of " Anna Karenina," cannot help feeling, 
 at the present moment, that Tolstoi left out a 
 good deal of Russia. 
 July, 1918. 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 A FEW weeks ago, while reading Mr. 
 Mackail's introduction to " The Per- 
 vigilium Veneris," which he translated for the 
 Loeb Classical Library, I came upon these lines, 
 describing what happens to a poet when his 
 poem begins to form itself: 
 
 The fairy fancies range, 
 
 And, lightly stirred, 
 Ring little bells of change 
 
 From word to word. 
 
 The quotation did not seem quite unfamiliar, 
 yet I could not remember its source. Ten- 
 nyson? It didn't sound like Tennyson, either to 
 me or to the four or five persons I consulted. 
 Each of us had what he thought a good reason 
 for being almost certain the lines were not 
 Tennyson. I hunted without success through 
 a one-volume Tennyson containing all of him 
 except his very latest work. When I got 
 back to New York, where books are, I re- 
 membered why I thought the lines were 
 Tennyson's, looked in Mr. Mackail's Latin Lit- 
 
 i6z 
 
1 68 Books and Things 
 
 erature, found they were from a Tennyson 
 spring poem. The rest of the way was not dif- 
 ficult. Short lines, spring — these signs led be- 
 fore long to " Early Spring," in the volume 
 called " Tiresias and Other Poems." The poem 
 has eight stanzas, of which these are the sixth 
 and seventh: 
 
 Past, Future glimpse and fade 
 
 Thro' some slight spell, 
 A gleam from yonder vale, 
 
 Some far blue fell, 
 And sympathies, now frail, 
 
 In sound and smell ! 
 
 Till at thy chuckled note, 
 
 Thou twinkling bird, 
 The fairy fancies range, 
 
 And, lightly stirred, 
 Ring little bells of change 
 
 From word to word. 
 
 Why did three or four persons, who had read 
 a good deal of Tennyson when they were young, 
 and all of whom were forty or more, feel cer- 
 tain that the lines quoted by Mr. Mackail didn't 
 sound like Tennyson? Because for most of 
 them, as for many other persons of their genera- 
 tion, Tennyson had faded to a voluntarily and 
 smoothly noble poet whose moral world they 
 detested. While hunting for " the fairy fancies " 
 I naturally read a little here and a little there, 
 
Tennyson 169 
 
 and so refreshed my antipathy to Tennyson as 
 a critic of life. No doubt many persons, at a 
 first reading of the " Idylls of the King," 
 thought Arthur's reply to Guinevere, at their 
 final meeting, was the real thing: 
 
 " And all is past, the sin is sinn'd, and I 
 Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
 Forgives." 
 
 To-day one merely feels that a man who 
 talked like that deserved all he got, and a bit 
 more. And to-day, on re-reading " Enoch 
 Arden," one cannot help recalling Walter 
 Bagehot's summary of the story: " A sailor who 
 sells fish breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up 
 selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert 
 island, stays there some years, on his return 
 finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a 
 landlady on the subject, and dies." I suppose 
 ten intelligent persons re-read Tennyson's de- 
 scription of Enoch's island, with its many- 
 colored tropical splendors, for one who re-reads 
 the whole poem for its story. Only a malicious 
 person cares to read the closing lines: 
 
 So past the strong heroic soul away. 
 And when they buried him the little port 
 Had seldom seen a costlier funeral. 
 
170 Books and Things 
 
 Some of Tennyson's most wonderful pictures, 
 especially sea-pictures, are framed in his blank 
 verse. But he is no such master of blank verse 
 as Shelley. And although Tennyson's blank 
 verse is his own, it is also Calverley's in the 
 parody : 
 
 Thus on he prattled like a babbling brook. 
 Then I, " The sun hath slipt behind the hill, 
 And my Aunt Vivian dines at half past six." 
 So in all love we parted ; I to the Hall, 
 They to the village. It was nois'd next noon 
 That chickens had been miss'd at Syllabub Farm. 
 
 Still, I don't see why more of my contempo- 
 raries cannot read Tennyson with pleasure, in 
 spite of his unsalted pictures of moral perfec- 
 tion, his grave domestic answers to unanswer- 
 able moral questions, the complacency of his 
 willingness to " forfeit the beast with which we 
 are crossed," the many lines that might have 
 been written by a gifted and meditative curate. 
 While reading you must accept or forget the 
 fact that Tennyson's moral world is a very 
 orderly garden, that the poet himself is a thor- 
 oughly domesticated animal. You must read 
 Tennyson for the beauty of the parts, overlook- 
 ing the moral poverty of the whole, thankful 
 that the parts are so often whole poems. And 
 
Tennyson 171 
 
 it is worth while to remember that Tennyson 
 is filled with things that don't sound like the 
 unreal Tennyson your memory has erected in 
 his dishonor. True, he did model a King Arthur 
 out of blancmange, but he also called the body 
 " this little city of sewers." And it is fair to 
 ask, when Tennyson's Arthur seems more than 
 you can bear, what Tennyson's Ulysses would 
 have thought of Arthur. 
 
 Even if Tennyson was a tame animal in the 
 moral world, he was also a dead shot at wild 
 nature. He looked at wild or cultivated nature, 
 saw it exactly, sketched it in words, turned his 
 sketches into quintessential pictures: 
 
 One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 
 
 You seem'd to hear them climb and call 
 And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 
 
 Beneath the windy wall. 
 
 And one, a full-fed river winding slow 
 
 By herds upon an endless plain, 
 The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 
 
 With shadow-streaks of rain. 
 
 Among English poets Milton is the only 
 greater master of consonants, of the 1, m, n, r 
 out of which English verse can be built so as to 
 sound a little of imperial Rome. At the moment 
 when Tennyson's eye saw nature his ear heard 
 
172 Books and Things 
 
 verse, and later, when he had retouched the 
 verse into that curious felicity he loved so well, 
 when he had distilled and elaborated it into a 
 rich and learned magic, the picture his eye had 
 seen was still there, unspoiled by this elaborate 
 selective process, exacter than ever. As a 
 nature poet he spoke the language science would 
 use if she had a Latin ear and could sing. 
 August, 1915. 
 
BROWNING 
 
 EVERY now and then, and always with 
 surprise, I hear one of my contemporaries 
 remark that he or she cannot read Robert 
 Browning nowadays. The emphasis is usually 
 on the last word. Twenty or twenty-five years 
 ago the speaker could and did read Browning 
 with joy. My renewed surprise is always at the 
 fact of change. Excepting Tennyson, there is 
 no Victorian poet about whom my opinion has 
 changed less. Possibly I now resent more 
 wearily Tennyson's somehow-trustfulness that 
 good will be the final goal of ill, and find the 
 exceptional blamelessness of his blameless- 
 stainless king a little harder to bear. Perhaps 
 I groan louder when he says " we needs must 
 love the highest when we see it." Certainly I 
 get more pleasure than I did from his nature 
 poetry, and especially from the art with which 
 his longer landscapes are composed. Certainly 
 there is an increase in my admiration of his 
 " lonely word." If " Hallowed be Thy name — 
 Hallelujah ! " seems even worse than it used to 
 
 1/3 
 
174 Books and Things 
 
 seem, yet this water-picture seems even more 
 exactly lovely : 
 
 So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain, 
 As on a dull day in an Ocean cave 
 The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
 In silence. 
 
 Forasmuch as Tennyson had Tennyson's eye for 
 the visible world, and Tennyson's ear, we for- 
 give his docile piety, forgive him for degrading 
 life to the level of duty, for wishing to spirit- 
 ualize our animal nature, for his invincible 
 nobility. But here there is little change. Hasn't 
 this been the orthodox attitude toward Ten- 
 nyson for thirty years? 
 
 As for Browning's detractors, in the two or 
 three cases I've investigated, the explanations 
 were a good deal alike. Browning was remem- 
 bered as a believer in personal immortality, a 
 wholesome oppressive optimist, a welcomer of 
 each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough. 
 Worse yet, said my informants, he is an ingeni- 
 ous optimist who seeks to justify his point of 
 view by endless frightful ratiocination. When we 
 were twenty we liked optimism. We don't like it 
 now. My answer, so far as I had any, did not 
 
Browning 175 
 
 prosper. I began by admitting that perhaps 
 Browning, who sees this world as made up of 
 so many things, sees it most of all as a gym- 
 nasium, from which you pass, after gallant 
 arduous exercise of all your muscles, into a sort 
 of everlasting track and field day, where you will 
 break all your worldly records, swim farther 
 under water than you ever swam here, run 
 faster, jump higher, chin yourself more times. 
 Nor can any one deny that Browning is opti- 
 mistic. What may be doubted is that " op- 
 timist " is always and necessarily a term of 
 reproach. An optimist is a nuisance, of course, 
 who folds his hands and meekly concludes, no 
 matter what happens, that God knows what is 
 best for us. So is the optimist who loses his 
 train, unregretfully watches its rear coach 
 dwindle, and turns homeward saying, " All's 
 right with the world. After all, more people 
 caught that train than lost it." 
 
 But Browning is no docile folder of hands. If 
 he lost his train he would probably swear. If 
 he were standing within earshot when you lost 
 yours, and if you swore at all competently, he 
 would listen to your words. His optimism, 
 
176 Books and Things 
 
 whether you like it or not, is his. It accumu- 
 lates in him by a function prodigiously natural. 
 Quite as natural are his ingenious repeated 
 attempts to justify it. He is driven by no sense 
 of duty, but only by a robust enjoyment of the 
 game, when he defends his faith, which was 
 only a normal self-expression, by arguments as 
 erudite and hair-splitting as a scholastic's. Dar- 
 ing to be yourself is a form of courage much in 
 vogue. To give elaborate endless reasons for 
 daring to be yourself may be, and with Brown- 
 ing it is, merely one way more of being your- 
 self. His hope of a better world wasn't rooted 
 in an under-estimate of this, for which his ap- 
 petite was catholic and enormous. Although he 
 believes that God's ends justify God's means, 
 this belief was not essential to his enjoyment of 
 the world. For him, if the ends hadn't justified 
 the means, the means would have justified them- 
 selves. If he hadn't found life good he would 
 still have found it just as interesting. And he 
 was a passionate and rather fair-minded student 
 of evidence against his favorite beliefs. I admire 
 the accident which united a keen appetite for 
 life with a mind eager to justify to itself things 
 which this appetite had o.k.'d, and yet patient 
 
Browning \JJ 
 
 to hear the other side. Browning, with an 
 appetite for life so eager that he would be 
 excusable if he had taken the goodness of the 
 world for granted, does not offer us marked- 
 down faith, bargains in courage, optimism at 
 half-price. 
 
 To me the most irritating of all optimisms is 
 the one which has its roots in reason alone. An 
 anaemic sedentary man, who never puffs and 
 sweats, who can't tell a double play from a 
 thirty-foot putt or cut-plug from shag, loses 
 through inability to value the parts of life all 
 authority when he tries to value the whole. But 
 Browning's athletic argumentative intellect was 
 merely seeking a basis in reason for certain 
 affirmations made by his senses and his imagina- 
 tion and his love of scholarship. In many of his 
 poems, he does, I admit, state the case for God. 
 This habit gives offense in many quarters. The 
 offended persons forget that Browning was 
 almost equally ready to state the case for any- 
 body else, for a grammarian, a faultless painter, 
 a Latin-loving sixteenth-century bishop, a cheat- 
 ing medium, the Third Napoleon. It is no more 
 than decent to remember, when next you are 
 
178 Books and Things 
 
 tempted to blame him for thinking all's right 
 with the world, that he had first-hand evidence 
 for thinking many of the world's details equally 
 all right. By his incessant curious interest in 
 life he acquired a momentum which carried him 
 past his signals plump into a belief in immor- 
 tality. 
 
 However, all this is no answer to people who 
 genuinely don't like to find in poetry beliefs 
 which are not theirs. No answer can be given 
 except by persuading them to re-read the 
 Browning they used to like. Only by doing this 
 can they realize that although he welcomed each 
 rebuff he welcomed a lot of other things — a 
 sunset-touch, a chorus ending from Euripides. 
 His faith was no preference for the high road. 
 It didn't keep him from alertly exploring the 
 byways of doubt, and liking the wild flowers 
 that grow in such places. Although this great 
 poet was a tremendous believer he was also a 
 tremendous enjoyer, a man who wore a top hat 
 in London, dined out, talked profusely and a 
 little too well, loved English country, Italian 
 country, Italian towns, pictures, Greek, music,- 
 liberty, history, the queerest kinks in the queer- 
 
Browning 179 
 
 est minds. And I can't remember against him 
 a case where his faith got between him and the 
 particular things he was looking at, or where 
 his love of loyalty kept him from noting the con- 
 crete oddity of the particular manifestation of 
 loyalty that happened to be engaging his atten- 
 tion. After all, some of us have no strong objec- 
 tion to faiths we don't share. " Sterling and I," 
 says Carlyle, " walked westward in company, 
 choosing whatever lanes or quietest streets 
 there were, as far as Knightsbridge where our 
 roads parted; talking on moralities, theological 
 philosophies; arguing copiously, but except in 
 opinion not disagreeing." 
 May, 1915. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 A SOBER green volume, lately published by 
 the Oxford University Press, and called 
 " Essays by Matthew Arnold," reminds me of 
 an evening I spent, almost thirty years ago, in 
 the smoking-room of a German hotel, where I 
 had no business. If anybody had asked me why 
 I'd left my pension in another part of Dresden, 
 and was hanging about that smoking-room, too 
 young to give myself a status there by ordering 
 a drink, I should not have told the truth. Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold, who was inspecting the 
 schools of Saxony, was staying in that hotel, and 
 I hoped he might come to the smoking-room 
 after dinner. At that moment there was noth- 
 ing I wanted quite so much as to see him and 
 to hear him talk. At last he entered. At last 
 he talked. It would have been hard for me to 
 say whether his appearance or his talk was the 
 deeper disappointment. He sat down near a 
 French actress, but what he said to her did not 
 sound at all like " Faster, faster, O Circe, God- 
 dess! " He said, " Avez-vous bien dormi? " Of 
 
 180 
 
Matthew Arnold 181 
 
 Hungary, where he had lately been a circuitous 
 wanderer, he merely remarked that in one town, 
 where his host had an English wife, he had been 
 very comfortable. Although he spoke of Virgil, 
 he didn't even allude to the sense of tears in 
 mortal things. He recited three or four lines of 
 the Aeneid, just to illustrate by imitation the 
 charmlessness with which English schoolboys 
 pronounced Latin. 
 
 Young enough to feel disappointed, I was not 
 young enough to stay so. After a few bitter 
 days I began to admit that the best that is known 
 and thought in the world cannot always be 
 propagated after dinner, that sad lucidity of soul 
 may be inappropriate to a hotel smoking-room. 
 Being determined to recover from the Hebraism 
 with which seventeen New England years had 
 afflicted me, to let my stock notions dissolve, to 
 acquire Hellenism, I was soon afloat again upon 
 the stream of Matthew Arnold's thinking. It 
 would have been difficult for me at that time to 
 measure my gratitude to him. I was eager to 
 part with what he took away, eager to receive 
 what he gave. Most of my contemporaries had 
 been overexposed to divine worship, and what 
 
182 Books and Things 
 
 was most irksome in the Christianity then preva- 
 lent in New England, a rather bleak inflexible 
 Christianity, Matthew Arnold gently and in- 
 sistently effaced. The Greece he bade us look 
 to and learn from was not the Greece revealed 
 to the youth of to-day by Gilbert Murray and 
 Alfred Zimmern. It was quieter, simpler, more 
 serene, more nearly stationary, marmor-sclwner. 
 Its differences from our own epoch were less 
 perplexing, its superiorities to our epoch more 
 incontestable. Matthew Arnold's Greece was 
 above all more edifying than Mr. Zimmern's or 
 Mr. Gilbert Murray's. It was adequate to the 
 task of seeing us safely through the contempo- 
 rary world, of insuring us against being made 
 dull by business or wild by passion. 
 
 Seventeen is doubtless the proper age for a 
 deliberate re-valuation of life. Matthew Arnold, 
 who would have detested such a phrase, helped 
 us re-value life not only by what he wrote but 
 by what he was. We knew that he was inor- 
 dinately busy, and that business had not dulled 
 his brightness. We knew that neither passion 
 nor anything else had made him wild. His 
 serenity was indisputable. Looking back now, 
 
Matthew Arnold 183 
 
 I rather marvel at our admiration of it. Only 
 very mild youngsters could have been satisfied 
 with a serenity which such a temperate tumult 
 had preceded. His early desire to learn and to 
 discriminate was reinforced so soon by a desire 
 to teach that he hadn't much time left for 
 tumult. He was a man in whom the didactic 
 impulse, no matter what the substance of his 
 teaching had been, would have said " Peace, be 
 still," to his other impulses. We were oddly 
 ready, it seems to me, to believe his other im- 
 pulses as strong and as hard to manage as he 
 thought them. We were a little slow to under- 
 stand that one of the surest ways not to see life 
 whole is to see it too steadily. We had been 
 puzzled by his assertion that poetry is a criti- 
 cism of life. Some of us thought it a hard say- 
 ing. None of us realized how near Matthew 
 Arnold came to believing that life itself is a 
 criticism of life. 
 
 " His foot is in the vera vita, his eye on the 
 beatific vision." The vera vita Matthew Arnold 
 looked forward to and worked for was an 
 ordered life, equable, salutary, curious, humane, 
 discriminating, led by men and women who had 
 
184 Books and Things 
 
 plenty of time left for culture. Time left from 
 what? From the unavoidable activities and rou- 
 tines which he somewhat neglected. This neglect 
 is one of the reasons why the present younger 
 generation, knocking at the usual place, so sel- 
 dom asks at the door for Mr. Matthew Arnold, 
 who did not distinguish between the better 
 ways and the worse, the more wholesome and 
 the less, in which these unavoidable activities 
 and routines may be pursued; who was incurious 
 as to the possibility of reducing, for pretty much 
 everybody, the proportion of life that must be 
 given over to these activities. " The best man," 
 so he quotes the Socrates of the Memorabilia, 
 " is he who most tries to perfect himself." 
 Nowadays the younger generation prefers to 
 get its definition from Schopenhauer, who says 
 the mark of a good man is " dass er weniger, als 
 sonst geschiet, ein Unterschied macht zwischen 
 sich und anderen." You must cure people of 
 poverty before you can profitably set about 
 teaching them the best that has been known and 
 thought in the world. To make life as bearable 
 for all of us as it now is for some of us — here, 
 and not upon self-culture, our younger genera- 
 tion puts its characteristic emphasis. 
 
Matthew Arnold 1 8$ 
 
 Well, the next best thing to being young is 
 remembering that youth was once our privilege. 
 It is pleasant to remember, what Matthew 
 Arnold did for some of us, who were young in 
 the last century's eighties. He bettered our 
 enjoyment of books. He made us feel, rather 
 intimately, the presence or the absence of the 
 grand style, natural magic, fluidity and sweet 
 ease, the lyrical cry. He gave us the illusion 
 that we too were incapable of confusing ele- 
 gance and nobleness, of mistaking simplcssc for 
 simplicitc. With what confidence we used to dis- 
 tinguish, in those early days, between the best 
 and the not quite so good! What days were 
 those, Parmenides, when we scorned the at- 
 tempt to put upon the tail of any bird any salt 
 that was not Attic! Conscious as we then were 
 of Greek aspirations and Greek avoidances, of 
 a desire to recapture and to domesticate the 
 accent of Greek prose, we were just beginning 
 to be aware, uneasily, of giant shapes of dis- 
 tance away in the north, of dim Russian and 
 Scandinavian masters, portentous and modern, 
 soon to grow distinct and unescapable, soon to 
 make us forget the pure lines of Ionian horizons, 
 the liquid clearness of Ionian skies. Surely it 
 
1 86 Books and Things 
 
 honors Matthew Arnold that he was able to feel, 
 almost at the end of his life, the new greatness 
 of one of these northern masters, whose advent 
 made us realize that the best that has been 
 thought and said in the world is an unfinished 
 thing. 
 January, 1915. 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 DO undergraduates read Swinburne nowa- 
 days? Judging from a sample chosen 
 here and there I should say that they don't. 
 They know " When the hounds of spring are on 
 winter's traces," and " In a coign of the cliff 
 between lowland and highland," and " Shall I 
 strew on thee rose or rue or laurel," but they 
 do not take long drinks of Swinburne, out of 
 schooners, as we did between twenty-five and 
 thirty years ago. I do not mean that even in 
 my day all Harvard undergraduates read Swin- 
 burne, or that even to the most decadent among 
 us he was ever a major god. But we could read 
 him in his own tongue, as we could not read 
 Ibsen or Tolstoi, and he added to the excite- 
 ments in life. The women with whom he 
 brought us acquainted were brilliantly unlike 
 the charming girls whom we took to football 
 games or danced with, of a Saturday evening, 
 at Papanti's, and who never appeared, no matter 
 how oddly their mothers chose to dress them, 
 either in raiment of dyed sendaline or clothed 
 
 187 
 
1 88 Books and Things 
 
 about with flame and tears. Along the water 
 side of Beacon Street, in the late eighties, 
 walked few feet shod with adder-skin. And in 
 Swinburne the talk was different. I cannot re- 
 member hearing a Harvard student tell his 
 partner that she laughed " with a savor of blood 
 in her face, and a savor of guile," or call her 
 " my snake with bright bland eyes." In Boston 
 and its environs the proportion of mystery was 
 no doubt what it usually is where young women 
 and young men are gathered together, but it 
 was an innocent natural mystery. 
 
 Sin was the specialty of the Swinburne who 
 wrote " Poems and Ballads," the volume with 
 which, as being the cause of most scandal and 
 cry, we were naturally most familiar. We knew 
 him as the young poet who had set the Thames 
 on fire, in eighteen sixty-something, with his 
 song. He fell among women, and " I say, 
 Archer, my God, what women ! " Although 
 they lived in a world so remote from ours that 
 we could reach it only by a long leap, Swin- 
 burne's rhythms furnished the necessary spring- 
 board. He never degraded Lust by treating it 
 as mere Love. By representing desire as a 
 
Swinburne 189 
 
 thing of sin he enabled us, who had been taught 
 to associate these two, to feel ourselves not so 
 far from home after all. Thus in time we could 
 habituate ourselves to his surprising women, 
 who had subtle-colored hair, eyes like the eyes 
 of a dove that sickeneth, mouths that made the 
 blood beat in feverish rhymes, mouths like fer- 
 vent amorous roses, and whose kisses were 
 rapturous, venomous, poisonous and prolonged. 
 These women lived in a land where the kisses 
 that were given and received had fangs and bit 
 and drew blood, and yet a certain restricted 
 freedom of choice was open to us. Even here 
 there were women and women. Not even here 
 was every sin as scarlet. Monday, Wednesday 
 and Friday, lips darker than purple kisses. 
 Tuesday, Thursday and (at the pleasure of 
 the lover) Saturday, the pallid lips of old 
 Semiramisses. 
 
 Sin was the many-colored garment in which 
 these ladies, wrapping themselves about, sought 
 to hide their monotony from our eyes. And so 
 for a while we were illuded. It takes time to 
 perceive the sad sameness of strange sins. It 
 takes time to perceive the tedium of days. divided 
 
190 Books and Things 
 
 thus: Sin, eight hours; sleep, eight hours; sun- 
 dries, eight hours. The only way to tell these 
 sinners apart was to consult the column marked 
 " sundries," about which Swinburne had nothing 
 to tell us. In " Le Prince d'Aurec," at a fancy 
 dress ball, a lady got up as Marion Delorme 
 makes her entrance with words like these : 
 " Many men loved me, each in his own way ; and 
 I loved them all, in the same way." When at 
 last we saw that all his ladies were desperately 
 the same in their loves we shut his book, we 
 left behind his land of anapaests and dense air, 
 we discovered that our own country had its 
 good side, that we breathed deeply with ease 
 in it, that after so much unrelieved heavy bright- 
 ness its cooler and varied colors interested our 
 eyes. But the best escape of all was from a 
 routine strangeness out into a world where 
 strangeness was accidental, welcome, unex- 
 pected, and where no two strangenesses were 
 alike. 
 
 Is it because an older reader is offended by 
 the sameness of Swinburne's women that Swin- 
 burne is not easy to read continually nowadays? 
 Partly for that reason, no doubt, and partly 
 
Swinburne 191 
 
 because few older readers have kept a conscious- 
 ness of sin. I often do things I wish I had not 
 done, just as I leave undone things I ought to 
 have written promptly and dropped in the mail- 
 box. I am cowardly, procrastinating, evasive, 
 slothful, but the nearest I ever come to feeling 
 sinful is when I get a letter which looks like 
 an assertion that my account is overdrawn, and 
 which often turns out to be nothing but praise 
 of some new beauty in the high-grade security 
 line. Lacking the essential feeling, I sometimes 
 feel, when I pick up " Poems and Ballads," first 
 series, that the poet's purple and scarlet pas- 
 sions hardly deserved to be called sins, that they 
 are no more sinful than a gilt and plush sunset, 
 and that a man who insists so much on the 
 wickedness and shamefulness of his desires 
 probably overestimates their strength. 
 
 This explanation has the merit of accounting 
 for the neglect of Swinburne by the present crop 
 of undergraduates, many of whom have been 
 brought up as if there were no such thing as sin 
 in this universe. Not being equipped with the 
 needful illusion, they find out sooner than we 
 did that almost all Swinburne's intellectual jour- 
 neys were only from heaven to hell, from lilies 
 
192 Books and Things 
 
 to roses, from night to day, from life to death, 
 from tyranny to liberty, and back again, and 
 that upon none of these journeys did he see 
 much that he hadn't noticed the first time. He 
 did not make too much of these contrasts, but 
 he made what he could of them too. often. 
 
 Or else — is it possible — can it be — that the 
 wise youth of to-day, knowing so many things 
 so early, know this also in advance of experi- 
 ence, namely, that wickedness, even in woman, 
 is not the whole of life, and that the most un- 
 chaste woman in the world may be otherwise 
 uninteresting? Or perhaps it is Swinburne's lack 
 of structure that repels them? Often you won- 
 der, as you read on and on, whether his habit was 
 not to start a poem with some fragment that oc- 
 curred of itself, and then to make more frag- 
 ments in the same metre, until his ear desired 
 another metre, when he would take what he 
 had written, choose a first stanza and a last, and 
 let the others arrange themselves. What are 
 they like, these long and structureless poems, as 
 empty of meaning as of movement from mood 
 to mood? They are like blown fires that spread 
 without arriving, like champing swift horses 
 
Swinburne 193 
 
 always in the same place, like huge elusive bel- 
 lying sails that the mind cannot furl. The 
 emptiness is filled with lines that call and clang, 
 with a rushing wind of rhythm, with a musical 
 movement repeated and repeated until it gets 
 into one's blood, and the pulse beats to its 
 measure, and long after the wind has blown 
 itself out the waves keep up their rolling and 
 washing. 
 
 September, 1916. 
 
" THE WAY OF ALL FLESH " 
 
 WHEN was the right moment to adver- 
 tise one's liking for "The Way of All 
 Flesh"? Shaw's preface to "Major Barbara" 
 was not published until 1907. The second Eng- 
 lish edition of Butler's novel was not published 
 until 1908, and in the next year or so a few 
 copies found their way to this country. These 
 were still so few by 1910 or '11 that if you talked 
 big about Butler people were not impressed. 
 Nevertheless, there must have been a golden 
 moment when the observers of " The Way of 
 All Flesh " were still few enough to be distin- 
 guished and already many enough to make 
 themselves heard. This moment has gone. We 
 are to-day that next generation whom Butler 
 wrote for, and we find his novel easy to under- 
 stand and a little old-fashioned and immensely 
 stimulating. Here is the first American edition, 
 published by Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Company, 
 well printed, price a dollar and a half, a book to 
 buy, to read, to keep and not to lend. 
 
 On the paper cover which protects the blue 
 194 
 
"The Way of All Flesh" 195 
 
 cloth binding there is a quotation from Arnold 
 Bennett, to whom Mr. Robert H. Davis had 
 said : " Do you know a novel called ' The Way 
 of All Flesh'?" And Mr. Bennett answered: 
 " I do. It is one of the great novels of the 
 world." Such praise is useful because coming 
 from Mr. Bennett it makes people want to read. 
 Such praise is harmless because Butler is so 
 lively that after you have read a few pages you 
 stop wondering why Mr. Bennett dragged 
 greatness in. You forget that Butler's novel is 
 unlike what you were led by Mr. Bennett's 
 praise to expect. It is unlike any other novel 
 either great or small. It is like a wise selec- 
 tion from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 
 arranged at first as a Pontifex family history 
 and at the end as a biography of Ernest 
 Pontifex. 
 
 These Pontifexes, who started in a small way, 
 rise into a higher air of public school, Cam- 
 bridge, fixed incomes and holy orders. Most of 
 the dramatis personae look safe enough if you 
 judge them by their labels, but you soon dis- 
 cover that the labels do not mean to Butler what 
 they meant to most English novelists in 1880. 
 His school teachers like teaching because it is 
 
196 Books and Things 
 
 tyranny made easy, and not for any other rea- 
 son. His young men take holy orders re- 
 luctantly, because they have not courage enough 
 and imagination enough to resist family pres- 
 sure. His husbands and wives, who normally 
 have married without love, endure each other 
 well or ill, as the case may be. Parents dislike 
 their children and never acknowledge to them- 
 selves that this dislike exists and controls their 
 decisions. Children are slow to acknowledge 
 how sincerely they detest their parents. Small 
 incomes look up admiringly to large incomes, 
 and large incomes respect one another. Rare is 
 the man who has the eye to perceive or the 
 realism to own what he genuinely feels. 
 
 Ernest Pontifex's career is a shock to his self- 
 deceiving people. It begins in the ordinary way, 
 it follows the ordinary routine through public 
 school and Cambridge to holy orders, for which 
 he has no turn. But after taking holy orders 
 Ernest does and suffers strange things. He goes 
 to prison for six months because, in the words 
 of the judge who sentences him : " It is not likely 
 that in the healthy atmosphere of such a school 
 as Roughborough you can have come across 
 contaminating influences; you were probably, I 
 
" The Way of All Flesh " 197 
 
 may say certainly, impressed at school with the 
 heinousness of any attempt to depart from the 
 strictest chastity until such time as you had 
 entered into a state of matrimony. . . . For 
 the last four or five months you have been a 
 clergyman, and if a single impure thought had 
 still remained within your mind, ordination 
 should have removed it; nevertheless, not only 
 does it appear that your mind is as impure as 
 though none of the influences to which I have 
 referred had been brought to bear upon it, but it 
 seems as though their only result had been this 
 — that you have not even the common sense to 
 be able to distinguish between a respectable girl 
 and a prostitute." Soon after getting out of 
 prison Ernest marries a prostitute named Ellen, 
 who used to be his mother's maid, and with her 
 sets up a small second-hand clothing shop. He 
 is in despair when he learns that Ellen is a 
 drunkard, and overjoyed when he learns that 
 she has a husband living. When the novel 
 closes Ernest is in possession of a fortune, he 
 knows what he likes and what he dislikes, and 
 he gives himself to the writing of unpopular 
 books which a later generation will appreciate. 
 But this happy ending is not arbitrary, for we 
 
198 Books and Things 
 
 have known since page 168 that Ernest would 
 come into a fortune at twenty-eight. 
 
 This story is told and commented upon by an 
 active-minded somebody who is Butler himself, 
 who has Butler's humor and wit, his power of 
 shrewd contentious observation, his surprising 
 first-hand common sense. This narrator is the 
 partisan of one point of view, Samuel Butler's 
 own. To his habit of observing with his own 
 eyes he owes his discovery that life is absolutely 
 unlike what the romanticists and sentimentalists 
 have told him about it, and his attention becomes 
 the slave of this discovery. He literally cannot 
 pay attention to any motive or any act or any 
 feeling which might weaken his faith. For the 
 romantic and the sentimental illusion he has 
 substituted a hard-headed illusion of his own. He 
 has the keenest nose for evidence that strength- 
 ens his case, and in the presence of any other 
 kind of evidence he loses his sense of smell. 
 No other novelist with a mind has such an un- 
 pliable mind. Life can no longer either astonish 
 or puzzle him. It never contradicts itself. It 
 is always the good dependable raw material for 
 comment delivered in a voice quietly and uni- 
 formly nipping. 
 
"The Way of All Flesh" 199 
 
 Butler has excluded from his novel all those 
 isolated mountain-top feelings which first gave 
 the romanticists the tip for their convention 
 that the levels are like the high spots. He has 
 excluded everything indistinct. He does incline, 
 to be sure, to the view " that it is our less con- 
 scious thoughts and our less conscious actions 
 which mainly mould our lives, and the lives of 
 those who spring from us." I am not familiar 
 enough with his other writings to know what 
 this view did to his thinking, but it has done 
 almost nothing to " The Way of All Flesh," 
 where there is neither darkness nor dimness nor 
 sudden light, where the same light falls equally 
 upon all parts of a world as clear as one would 
 be which contained only conscious actions and 
 conscious thoughts. 
 
 And yet, although Butler's self-made dissent 
 from conventional beliefs does rather monoton- 
 ously dictate to him, does keep him out of the 
 class of perfectly free observers, the details of 
 his dissent are endlessly amusing and original. 
 Every now and then his observation sounds 
 forced, but even if it never had been, and even 
 if he had lived in a world about which nobody 
 had ever told him any lies, he would still have 
 
200 Books and Things 
 
 acquired the belief in which " The Way of All 
 Flesh " is rooted. This belief, as valid for the 
 real confusing world as for Butler's simplified 
 world, is a belief that hardly anybody knows 
 what he likes and how he feels, and that for 
 everybody the beginning of wisdom is to find 
 out. 
 July, 1916. 
 
AN IMMORTAL WRITER 
 
 IN the Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edi- 
 tion, only forty-seven lines are given to Miss 
 Marie Corelli, and only twenty to Mr. Hall 
 Caine. Good, you say, for the Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica. Ah, my guileless friend, " there did 
 I wait for thee," with malice up my sleeve, 
 knowing that this same work of reference says, 
 in the article called "Caricature:" "The work 
 of Mr. Max Beerbohm (' Max ') has the note of 
 originality and extravagance too." In the 
 article on English literature in the nineteenth 
 century, in a paragraph called " Criticism," the 
 Britannica says further: " Birrell, Walkley and 
 Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the 
 wake of the Stephens and Bagehot, who have 
 criticized the sufficiency of the titles made out 
 by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists." 
 Surely it was the fall of the dice that handed 
 English literature in the nineteenth century 
 over to a writer capable of such a remark. Pass, 
 however, the stupidity in itself and consider only 
 the space it occupies — four lines, by the most 
 
 201 
 
202 Books and Things 
 
 liberal estimate, given to Max Beerbohm, writer. 
 Add the line and a half given to Max, cari- 
 caturist, and you reach a total of five and a half 
 lines, if the index volume may be trusted. 
 Somewhat grotesque, isn't it? For of Max 
 Beerbohm's prose you may safely predict that 
 it will have the kind of immortality which he 
 has predicted for Whistler's. " When I dub 
 Whistler an immortal writer," he says, " I do 
 but mean that so long as there are a few people 
 interested in the subtler ramifications of English 
 prose as an art form, so long will there be a 
 few constantly recurring readers of ' The Gen- 
 tle Art' " 
 
 No one except himself can write of Max 
 Beerbohm in just the appropriate tone. I sup- 
 pose a bland irritation often animates the amuse- 
 ment with which he reads what people say about 
 him. Twice, so far as I remember, he has al- 
 lowed this irritation to appear. Once when Mr. 
 James Huneker called him a gentle mid-Vic- 
 torian, or something of the sort; once when Mr. 
 William Archer set forth his reasons for wish- 
 ing a London morning daily would engage Max 
 as dramatic critic. An innocent wish? That 
 
An Immortal Writer 203 
 
 depends a little on the wisher, and Mr. Archer 
 always goes armed with lethal weapons. It was 
 Mr. Archer who advised Mr. Shaw to do fewer 
 " You Never Can Tells," and more " Widowers' 
 Houses." It was Mr. Archer who heard, through 
 several acts of a play by Mr. Stephen Phillips, 
 the younger Dumas speaking with the voice of 
 Milton. But nothing said by Mr. Archer or Mr. 
 Huneker, nothing I shall say to-day, can attain 
 the perfection in inappropriateness of a speech 
 made by Mr. James Pethel, when he and Mr. 
 Beerbohm were on their way out of a cafe in 
 Dieppe: "He asked me what I was writing 
 now and said that he looked to me to ' do some- 
 thing big, one of these days,' and that he was 
 sure I had it 'in' me. This remark (though 
 of course I pretended to be pleased by it) irri- 
 tated me very much." Was I not right in think- 
 ing that only Mr. Max Beerbohm could find the 
 proper tone? 
 
 "James Pethel," with whose peculiar person- 
 ality a few pages in the January Century make 
 us well acquainted, is also the title of a peculiar 
 story, characteristic of Max Beerbohm in being 
 Unlike his other stories, characteristic in its 
 
204 Books and Things 
 
 mockery of the feeling it communicates, or 
 hardly communicates, since it betrays the reader 
 into an excitement the author never knew. The 
 most exciting page of all, a description of 
 riskiest motoring from Dieppe to Rouen, is also 
 the page where the art of caricature is carried 
 furthest. But the story is characteristic of Max 
 Beerbohm not only in the touches it adds to 
 one's picture of his gifts. By a humor always 
 present and sometimes manifest, by strokes of 
 preparation neither too heavy nor too light, by 
 an almost masculine intuition into the essential 
 virtue of words, by a verbal dexterity born of 
 this insight, by unlabored ease in elegance, by 
 a precision as happy as carelessness could hope 
 to be, " James Pethel " resembles everything 
 else Mr. Max Beerbohm writes nowadays. 
 Twenty years ago, when he was hardly more 
 than half his present age, the ease did not 
 always prevail against the elegance, and many a 
 mannered sentence would have died of precious- 
 ness if he hadn't kept it alive by his mockery 
 of its beauty. In Chicago, when he was twenty- 
 three, he wrote of Walter Pater: "Not that 
 even in those more decadent days of my child- 
 hood did I admire the man as a stylist. Even 
 
An Immortal Writer 205 
 
 t _ — __ ■ ■ 
 
 then I was angry that he should treat English 
 as a dead language, bored by the sedulous ritual 
 wherewith he laid out every sentence as in a 
 shroud — hanging, like a widower, long over its 
 marmoreal beauty or ever he could lay it at 
 length in his book, its sepulchre." Even then, 
 however, Max Beerbohm seldom wrote so. 
 Even then, he could write like this, of Thack- 
 eray: "He blew on his pipe, and words came 
 tripping round him like children, like pretty 
 little children who are perfectly drilled for the 
 dance, or came, did he will it, treading in their 
 precedence, like kings, gloomily." 
 
 There, by the grace of God, spoke an 
 originator of rhythms proper to English prose, 
 a young light-handed master of its other har- 
 mony. The rhythm here is as original as this 
 of Landor's, which of course you got by heart 
 long since, leaning against your mother's knee, 
 and which I never tire of tiring people by quot- 
 ing: "There are no fields of amaranth on this 
 side of the grave : there are no voices, O 
 Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however 
 tuneful : there is no name, with whatever em- 
 phasis of passionate love repeated, of which the 
 
206 Books and Things 
 
 echo is not faint at last." But not in stateliest 
 Landor, in Max alone among the masters of 
 cadence, will you find beauty bestowed on 
 absurdest incident. Who else would turn the 
 emptying of a pitcher from an upper window 
 upon a man waiting below, into this : ' ' Come 
 a little nearer,' she whispered. The upturned 
 and moonlit face obeyed her. She saw its lips 
 forming the word ' Zuleika.' She took careful 
 aim. Full on the face crashed the cascade of 
 moonlit water, shooting out on all sides like the 
 petals of some great silver anemone." 
 
 His ear is as sensitive to silver as his eye. 
 You recall his noon in Oxford? "Some clock 
 clove with silver the stillness of the morning. 
 Ere came the second stroke, another and nearer 
 clock was striking. And now there were others 
 chiming in. The air was confused with the 
 sweet babel of its many spires, some of them 
 booming deep, measured sequences, some tink- 
 ling impatiently and outwitting others which 
 had begun before them. And when this 
 anthem of jealous antiphonies and uneven 
 rhythms had dwindled quite away and fainted 
 in one last solitary note of silver, there started 
 
An Immortal Writer 207 
 
 somewhere another sequence; and this, almost 
 at its last stroke, was interrupted by yet another, 
 which went on to tell the hour of noon in its 
 own way, quite slowly and significantly, as 
 though none knew it." He has taught words to 
 reveal a beauty in things comic, the humor in 
 other things. He has seen his world with deco- 
 rative humor and decorative insight. He has 
 made his world clearer by arranging it in his 
 own pattern. With his own taste as his court 
 of last resort, among so many contemporaries 
 trying to be themselves, he has tranquilly said 
 what he felt, serenely himself without trying. 
 
 January, 1915. 
 
LATER GEORGE MOORE 
 
 AN elderly egotist has written three volumes 
 of malicious reminiscences. That is a 
 true statement about George Moore's " Hail 
 and Farewell." It is also an absurdly misleading 
 statement. 
 
 The reminiscences are not like ordinary 
 reminiscences. Wishing to make portraits of 
 his friends, George Moore sits down and con- 
 sults his memory. When memory yields just 
 the characteristic saying or doing that he needs 
 in his picture he seeks no further. When 
 memory is stingy he invents. With nicest 
 craftsmanship he keeps the remembered things 
 and the invented things in the same key. His 
 sitters may declare that they never said this or 
 never did that, and they may be right. It does 
 not matter. Nobody who is not acquainted 
 with them, at first or second hand, can tell the 
 invented bits from the remembered. Both kinds 
 help to make the pictures superb examples of 
 Kleinmeisterei. 
 
 The malice is not like ordinary malice. It is 
 208 
 
Later George Moore 209 
 
 George Moore's indispensable color. Without 
 it he simply cannot paint. Whether his malice 
 is claro or Colorado or maduro, it never exists 
 for its own sake. There is claro malice in the 
 portrait of Edward Martyn, but there is also 
 tenderness and love. Moore has dutchpainted 
 Martyn in the round, colored and solid, short 
 legs in queer trousers, the room over the tobac- 
 conist's, the passion for Palestrina, the queer 
 candles Martyn reads Ibsen by, all the friendly 
 kinks and creases of his mind. There is 
 Colorado malice in the portrait of Yeats — his 
 height and his hands, the adjusted drapery of 
 his intellect, his figured speech and wise — but 
 there is also a very real admiration. There is 
 maduro malice in the portraits of Plunkett and 
 Gill, but there is also lighthearted fun. 
 
 The egotism is not like ordinary egotism. 
 George Moore shows us George Moore inter- 
 rupting AE, George Moore interrupting Yeats, 
 George Moore interrupting Colonel Maurice 
 Moore, George Moore interrupting John Eglin- 
 ton. He knows that such an inveterate inter- 
 rupter must bore his friends. Down goes the 
 evidence against himself just the same. He 
 shows us the friendship between Lady Gregory 
 
210 Books and Things 
 
 and Yeats as admirably sound on the whole, 
 shows it slightly comic in parts, shows it mak- 
 ing George Moore jealous and petulant. He 
 puts in the jealousy and the petulance because 
 they give definition to Lady Gregory's liking 
 for Yeats, and because he needs them in his 
 malicious portrait of George Moore. 
 
 This is a very special brand of egotism. 
 Hardly a word in praise of George Moore is set 
 down. Many rufflings of his vanity are re- 
 corded. It is not a devouring egotism. It 
 doesn't always come to the table three regular 
 times a day, but it does a good deal of nibbling 
 between meals. George Moore's interest in 
 himself doesn't shrink his power to observe 
 other men. He observes while he is in the act 
 of interrupting. This egotist, who is all the 
 time looking at himself in the glass, sees other 
 people a good half of the time. 
 
 George Moore has made a lifelong attempt 
 to know himself, and he has almost succeeded. 
 Almost everything concerning himself, from 
 his love of Manet to the queer figure George 
 Moore cuts in his pajamas, he records and 
 understands. But one part of himself he mis- 
 understands totally. He has no idea how fool- 
 
Later George Moore 211 
 
 m i ' 1 ,i. . ii i i . 1 
 
 ish it was of him to enter himself for the stand- 
 ing and running broad generalization prize. 
 The passages of sustained ratiocination are the 
 only grotesques in the three volumes of " Hail 
 and Farewell." He is rich in the small change 
 of thought: he should never try to think con- 
 secutively. His self-knowledge has one other 
 odd defect. He thinks it was his sympathy with 
 the Boers in the South African war that drove 
 him out of England and instigated the breakage 
 of several old friendships. His mood at this 
 time, in his own opinion, was harsh and bitter 
 and savage and unrelenting and ferocious. He 
 was stirred to the depths. All self-delusion, you 
 understand. George Moore was fussed. That 
 was all. 
 
 One other self-delusion is worth noting. It 
 is hard to define, but its effect is plain. It has 
 led George Moore to insert a few coarse and a 
 few over-intimate passages in " Hail and Fare- 
 well." Their presence raises no moral question. 
 It raises no aesthetic question. They are neither 
 more nor less than bad smells. 
 
 Their sole function is to put an edge on our 
 wonder that the man who wrote them wrote 
 also such sentences as- these: "Not a wind 
 
212 Books and Things 
 
 stirred in the tall grass, nor was there a cloud 
 in the sky; a dim gold fading into gray and into 
 blue, darkening overhead. A ghostly moon 
 floated in the south, and the blue sailless sea 
 was wound about the shoulders of the hills like 
 a scarf." Or this: "We returned through the 
 hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening 
 above us, and apple-trees lining the road, all 
 the apples now reddened and ready for gather- 
 ing." Or this : " I had expected him to answer 
 ' Cologne,' where we had stopped before to hear 
 a contrapuntal Mass; two choirs, as well as I 
 remember, answering each other from different 
 sides of the cathedral, the voices dividing and 
 uniting, seeking each other along and across the 
 aisles." The first quotation is a little trite at 
 the start, but doesn't it end in loveliness? And 
 doesn't the creator of the last two know some- 
 thing about the rhythms of English prose? 
 
 An equal beauty is suffused over the longer 
 landscape passages. George Moore is a true 
 landscape painter. His recollections of Irish 
 country are little gentle marvels of composition. 
 They seem, as he might say if the pictures were 
 by another hand, to have been breathed upon 
 the page. Add to these and to the portraits 
 
Later George Moore 213 
 
 of persons, when you are counting his good 
 points, the narrative art which makes many 
 greater men's narrative sound harsh and jerky 
 by comparison; add the consummate skill of his 
 spacing, a skill which ordains that the landscapes 
 shall never be too few or too frequent for the 
 portraits and the dialogue. 
 
 A reader who isn't curious about technical 
 questions, about prose as an art, about narra- 
 tive as an art, will never get out of George 
 Moore the best that is there. But we may easily 
 acquire the curiosity; it doesn't take much mind. 
 All the rest of George Moore may be enjoyed 
 without any mind at all. Reading him gives 
 many readers impious little feelings of freedom. 
 He has labored with zest to restrict the area 
 of the unmentionable. He has added several 
 to the list of mentionable things. He has 
 helped enormously to break down the conven- 
 tion which says to an artist: " You are welcome 
 to do your friends in bronze or marble or 
 pastel or oil. You must let them alone if your 
 medium happens to be words. You mustn't try 
 to put their actions and talk into print." 
 
 " Hail and Farewell " is a by-product. Moore 
 was lured back to Ireland by his yearning to be 
 
214 Books and Things 
 
 in the movement, to bear his part in the attempt 
 to revive Irish letters and drama. The " move- 
 ment " never took him to its bosom. It pre- 
 ferred, very wisely, Yeats and Lady Gregory 
 and Synge; leaving George Moore free to write 
 these volumes for his own pleasure and ours. 
 He has done no better writing. Landscape and 
 wistfulness and portraiture and even wit are 
 harmonized here into the easiest narrative. 
 Never has George Moore, Kleinmeister, ap- 
 peared so easily master of his art. 
 
 November, 1914. 
 
HENRY JAMES'S QUALITY 
 
 ALTHOUGH it was Henry James's good 
 fortune, until almost the end of his life, 
 to keep coming nearer and nearer mastery of 
 his special world as it grew richer and more 
 intricate and harder to master, yet this world 
 was ever the same place of tradition and ap- 
 pearances, of relations and perception. 
 
 We have found out something about a writer 
 when we have noticed his attitude toward love 
 or time. The lapse of time was told to Rossetti 
 by the sea's sound, which men have always 
 heard and always will hear. Nothing so un- 
 changeable spoke of time to Henry James. He 
 did not feel it as either an island in eternity or 
 as a path into the future. Time interests him 
 because it has given their tone to pleasant 
 houses set in English country and English 
 leisure, or looking down at Italian cities, because 
 it enables man to make a long stay in one spot, 
 because it obliterates rawness and newness. 
 For him it is the maker of tradition, without 
 
 215 
 
216 Books and Things 
 
 which he does not conceive life as possible in 
 the high manner and on the great scale. 
 
 With tradition he knew from the first how to 
 deal so well that even for him the chances were 
 slight of his learning to deal with it better. 
 One might say almost as much about his way of 
 dealing with appearances. From the Florentine 
 or Roman landscape in " The Portrait of a 
 Lady" (1881) to the Venetian landscape in 
 "The Wings of the Dove" (1902) the progress 
 is less obvious than from the earlier to the later 
 picture of personal relations. The later land- 
 scapes are more brilliant, more achieved, more 
 done, but their superiority shows even more 
 sharply in the use Henry James puts them to, 
 as matching or illustrating something in human 
 character or predicament or mood. His later 
 fullness of power over the external world is re- 
 vealed with splendor in those large metaphors 
 which rise above the horizon and flush the con- 
 sciousness of his men and women with unfor- 
 gettable color. The Princess, in " The Golden 
 Bowl," is looking in through the window at the 
 table where her father is sitting, and her hus- 
 band, and the woman who is her father's wife 
 and her husband's mistress. She wonders why 
 
Henry James's Quality 217 
 
 » — , __ 
 
 " she had been able to give herself so little, 
 from the first, to the vulgar heat of her wrong. 
 She might fairly, as she watched them, have 
 missed it as a lost thing; have yearned for it, 
 for the straight vindictive view, the rights of 
 resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests 
 of passion, as for something she had been 
 cheated of not least: a range of feelings which 
 for many women would have meant so much, 
 but which for her husband's wife, for her father's 
 daughter, figured nothing nearer to experience 
 than a wild eastern caravan, looming into view 
 with crude colors in the sun, fierce pipes in the 
 air, high spears against the sky, all a thrill, a 
 natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short 
 before it reached her and plunging into other 
 defiles." 
 
 As a man whose use of words has always told 
 his curiosity about them, and whose patience 
 gains a knowledge of their original meaning, 
 comes little by little to use them so as to bring 
 out their shyer and less audible tones, so Henry 
 James's insight into human relations grew more 
 penetrating, and his invention of ways to render 
 what he saw grew almost as much. 
 
 Readers who agree in rating his latest novels 
 
218 Books and Things 
 
 i — , _ __ — , 
 
 higher than his earlier would also, I suppose, 
 agree in saying that nowhere has he created 
 more complicated and exquisite relations, no- 
 where has he explored them more exhaustively, 
 than in " The Awkward Age," " The Wings of 
 the Dove," " The Ambassadors " and " The 
 Golden Bowl." In each of these books his main 
 concern is with " the great constringent human 
 relation between man and woman at once at its 
 maximum and as the relation most worth while 
 in life for either party." The quotation is from 
 a lecture he gave in 1912, when he said also 
 that in " The Ring and the Book " Browning 
 offered us this relation " always and ever as the 
 thing absolutely most worth while." Ten years 
 earlier, in an essay on d'Annunzio, he had said 
 of sexual passion : " From the moment it de- 
 pends on itself alone for its beauty it endangers 
 extremely its distinction, so precarious at the 
 best. . . . What the participants do with their 
 agitation, in short, or even what it does with 
 them, that is the stuff of poetry, and it is never 
 really interesting save when something finely 
 contributive in themselves makes it so." 
 
 For Henry James nothing so endangered this 
 passion's distinction as facility, as the loose easy 
 
Henry James's Quality 219 
 
 dirigibility of its turnings from mistress to mis- 
 tress, from lover to lover. Its justification, its 
 beauty and dignity, must be missing unless the 
 fire were lighted before one altar only, unless it 
 burned there with an intensity that gave prom- 
 ise of its being perpetual. So deep a distrust 
 of facility is also a positive need, felt by him 
 on behalf of his men and women in love, of 
 obstacles and difficulties across the way to com- 
 plete possession. He has not painted for us the 
 passion which is free to begin and to continue 
 in the open, which travels the beaten road of 
 marriage under the indifferent approving eyes 
 of all the world. He seems to regard the maxi- 
 mum of intensity as impossible where there is 
 neither danger nor any reason for secrecy. 
 
 According to the more usual opinion a pas- 
 sion that has its reasons for secrecy can almost 
 never escape baseness. In Henry James we are 
 often invited to feel that the necessary sacrifices, 
 of scruple, of good faith, of elementary straight- 
 ness and Tightness of relation precisely where 
 the lovers are most bound to go straight, serve 
 to measure the passion's intensity and to justify 
 the lovers in giving right of way to their central 
 loyalty. Any one's moral code, no matter what 
 
220 Books and Things 
 
 else it consists of, is sure to contain an article 
 forbidding us to treat a human being as a con- 
 venience, and another forbidding us to pretend 
 while doing this that we are doing something 
 else. Both articles are violated in the four- 
 novels I have named, but to call the result 
 merely base and cruel would be absurd. The 
 price paid is high : it is not exorbitant. In the 
 moral world which Henry James cares for, the 
 lovers somehow save their dignity by being 
 imaginative and considerate, by being above all 
 what he most wanted to have them, " distin- 
 guished " through their prodigious ability to 
 perceive. Deeds are to be estimated, he would 
 have us understand, largely by the kind of 
 existence they have in the doer's consciousness. 
 A doing wrong which is accompanied and con- 
 ditioned by the most sensitive perception of 
 other people's spiritual needs may easily be a 
 richer moral good than a strict straight road of 
 obvious duty, followed by plodders who are in- 
 sensitive, unperceiving, blinded and benumbed 
 by the mere weary miles of their march. 
 
 Nearly everything ministers to the distinction 
 of Henry James's men and women, their sur- 
 faces, their bodily felicity, their capacity for 
 
Henry James's Quality 221 
 
 being refined by joy and by torment, yet one 
 thing, throughout each of his four supreme 
 novels, wages against this distinction a most 
 curious war. I refer to that remorseless inquisi- 
 tiveness which satisfies itself, for our enlighten- 
 ment no less than for the inquisitor's own, but 
 terribly more to our perplexity than to theirs, 
 by questions of which the explicit insistence is 
 hard to reconcile with any remotest regard for 
 the questioners' own notions of distinction. And 
 remarkable indeed, as a measure of the extent 
 to which Henry James can make us care for 
 the things he specially cares for, is the fact that 
 we resent less the almost universal failure of 
 everybody to act upon wishes not understood 
 and appraised with unreal clearness by the 
 wishers, than we resent that persistent question- 
 ing so oddly offered to us by their creator as no 
 violation of their own high code. 
 
 Each of his later novels is peopled by protago- 
 nists who watch themselves and one another, 
 and by minor characters who watch the pro- 
 tagonists sleeplessly. They are not more inter- 
 ested than I, these minor characters, in the 
 great relation we are studying together with 
 such minuteness, yet their preoccupation makes 
 
222 Books and Things 
 
 me as uneasy as I might be on finding, while 
 reading a breathless detective story, that the 
 author had introduced several persons whose 
 chief function was to sit up half the night in 
 order to finish it. 
 
 The presence of these vigilant questioning 
 satellites, in three of Henry James's greatest 
 novels, has the additional disadvantage of leav- 
 ing the protagonists without enough of such 
 companionship as they would naturally desire 
 and have. Except for " the great constringent 
 relation " which absorbs them, and for the 
 other relations which most sharply conflict with 
 it, Merton Densher and the Prince, Maggie and 
 Charlotte Sant and Kate Croy, strike one as 
 leading lives that are strangely lacking in ade- 
 quate friendships. Only in " The Awkward 
 Age," in the society where we meet Nanda and 
 Mrs. Brook, Mitchy and Vanderbank, do the 
 companionable elements seem as richly supplied 
 as the others. Nothing in " The Awkward 
 Age " is finer than the relation, in " The Wings 
 of the Dove," of Kate Croy and Milly and 
 Densher, or than the relation of Maggie to her 
 father in " The Golden Bowl." But the world 
 of " The Awkward Age " has more dimensions, 
 
Henry James's Quality 223 
 
 it is more populous, more of the inhabitants 
 are worthy to breathe its air. One likes to 
 remember that Henry James came in the end 
 to understand the position of this masterpiece. 
 Only two years ago he wrote, in " The New 
 Novel": "It is no less apparent that the novel 
 may be fundamentally organized — such things as 
 ' The Egoist ' and ' The Awkward Age ' are 
 there to prove it." I am glad that he had this 
 feeling about what he had done, and that he did 
 not leave us ignorant of a self-estimate in which 
 he must have found consolation and reward. 
 March, 1916. 
 
" THE MIDDLE YEARS " 
 
 SINCE the " Turn of the Screw," which fas- 
 tened me in the habit of reading as it 
 came out every new book by Henry James, 
 I have had several moments of reaction against 
 his way of looking at life and his way of 
 writing English. " In the Cage " gave me one 
 of these moments. Reading it was like watch- 
 ing Henry James watching through a knot- 
 hole somebody who was watching somebody 
 else through a knot-hole. " The Sacred Fount," 
 to take another example, was a book to shake 
 the faith of the faithful. For weeks after 
 reading it I hoped and prayed I might never 
 again be exposed to novels of country house 
 adultery. Another moment of rebellion is the 
 present, when I have been reading " The Middle 
 Years," not the story but the fragment of auto- 
 biography named after the story. I am glad it 
 has been published, there are things in it one 
 would on no account have missed, portraits in 
 different scales of Swinburne, Renan, Browning, 
 
 224 
 
"The Middle Years" 225 
 
 Lewes, George Eliot, Tennyson, Mrs. Greville, 
 Lady Waterford. But it makes me feel that 
 Henry James took with him to England, as a 
 young man of twenty-five, a state of mind which 
 would have been forgivable if it had been tem- 
 porary, and which lasted forever after. On a 
 March day in 1870 he arrived at Liverpool in a 
 condition of anxious receptivity, and so he con- 
 tinued until the end. Like Coventry Patmore's 
 lover, who kept on suing and wooing long after 
 " all is won that hope can ask," Henry James 
 kept up his nervous courtship of England. For 
 years he and England lived together on what, 
 had the anxious husband been able to remember 
 that he was no longer bridegroom or fiance on 
 probation, might have been terms of placid 
 connubial friendship, but he never got used to 
 her. Something about her, something storied or 
 even something finished and fashionable, some 
 attitude which marked her as belonging to a 
 greater world than his, provoked him ever to 
 pursue. England lived at her ease with Henry 
 James: he lived with her in a sacred twitter. 
 
 " This doom of inordinate exposure to ap- 
 pearances, aspects, images, every protrusive 
 
226 Books and Things 
 
 item almost in the great beheld sum of things, 
 I regard in other words as having settled upon 
 me once for all while I observed for instance 
 that in England the plate of buttered muffin and 
 its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl 
 after hot water had been ingenuously poured 
 into the same, and had seen that circumstance 
 in a perfect cloud of accompaniments." Trop 
 de beau style, says a French critic, after reading 
 one of Zola's heavy-laden descriptions of a 
 table set for luncheon, trop de beau style pour 
 des prunes. So in this case. Too fine and 
 laborious a receptivity, too rich a cloud of ac- 
 companiments, for a plate of buttered muffin. 
 From the perusal of such a passage I rise and 
 shout something about " the need of a world of 
 men for me." When I find Henry James re- 
 membering the exact number of times he had 
 been asked out to breakfast in the United States 
 of America, up to March, 1870, I exclaim: 
 " Teach him rather to forget." To Henry 
 James, my irritation tells me, life Avas too much 
 " the great adventure of sensibility," and too 
 little anything else. In London " the com- 
 monest street-vista was a fairly heart-shaking 
 contributive image." In London, after one of 
 
"The Middle Years" 227 
 
 his adventures in sensibility, he " cherished for 
 the rest of the day the peculiar quality of my 
 vibration." Now, though I yield to none, and 
 so forth, there are moments, and this is one of 
 them, when passages like these make me long 
 to pack my grip and go to some place where 
 men do not cherish or discriminate their vibra- 
 tions, where men do things and think only for 
 the sake of doing them, where they butt one 
 another off the sidewalk without apology, where 
 they eat pie and steak for breakfast. Take me 
 out of this world of sensibility, I cry, take me 
 into the world where men hustle and loaf and 
 spit on the floor. 
 
 And the way of writing? Don't let us hunt 
 out something special, let us take what we hap- 
 pen to find, not forgetting of course that Henry 
 James did not revise his first dictated draft of 
 " The Middle Years ": " What was the secret of 
 the force of that suggestion? — which was not, 
 I may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the 
 further observation of cases and conditions. 
 Was it that the enormous ' pull ' enjoyed at 
 every point of the general surface the stoutness 
 of the underlying belief in what was behind all 
 
228 Books and Things 
 
 surfaces? " Compare these, which for their dic- 
 tating author are rather plain, with two sen- 
 tences, written about the time of which Henry 
 James is speaking, by another observer of Eng- 
 lish life: "Your middle class man thinks it the 
 highest pitch of development and civilization 
 when his letters are carried twelve times a day 
 from Islington to Camberwell, and from Cam- 
 berwell to Islington, and if railway trains run 
 to and fro between them every quarter of an 
 hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains 
 only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at 
 Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camber- 
 well; and the letters only tell him that such is 
 the life there." Or go back from Matthew 
 Arnold's prose, back a hundred years to the 
 prose of Fielding. Leaving all other biog- 
 raphers who have told the lives of great and 
 worthy persons, Fielding turns to " Colley Cib- 
 ber's Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber " and 
 to " Pamela " : " But I pass by these and many 
 others to mention two books lately published, 
 which represent an admirable pattern of the 
 amiable in either sex. The former of these, 
 which deals in male virtue, was written by the 
 great person himself, who lived the life he hath 
 
"The Middle Years" 229 
 
 recorded, and is by many thought to have lived 
 such a life only in order to write it." 
 
 It is in the eighteenth century, most of all, 
 that the style of " The Middle Years " makes 
 one want to stay. I believe I'll stay there for 
 a while, reading Swift and Goldsmith and Defoe, 
 until I have had time to relapse into homesick- 
 ness for the modern, until I miss the " inspira- 
 tion caught from subtler hues." 
 
 December, 191 7. 
 
RICHARD THE LION-HARDING 
 
 FROM the outset of his career, when he was 
 writing stories curiously accomplished for 
 so young a man, it has been Mr. Richard Hard- 
 ing Davis's misfortune to excite in many of his 
 many readers a slight prejudice against him. 
 The years have not weakened this prejudice, 
 although they should have. When a writer is 
 fifty, or thereabouts, and has published many 
 self-revealing volumes, you may or may not like 
 him, but prejudice ought long ago to have dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 In Mr. Davis's case the operation of prejudice 
 is easily described. Toward the end of one of 
 his books you come across a passage which may 
 be taken, let us suppose, in either of two senses. 
 You promptly take it in the sense less favorable 
 to Mr. Davis. Prejudice inclines you to this 
 less favorable interpretation, and it is the 
 author himself, in earlier passages, who has un- 
 wittingly prepared you to understand the later 
 passage as he never meant it to be understood. 
 
 It is easy to find examples of this in " With 
 230 
 
Richard the Lion-Harding 231 
 
 the Allies." Mr. Davis is praising the work done 
 by certain Americans in Paris : " At the resi- 
 dence of Mr. Herrick, in the rue Francois Pre- 
 mier, there was an impromptu staff composed 
 chiefly of young American bankers, lawyers and 
 business men. They were men who inherited, 
 or who earned, incomes of from twenty thou- 
 sand to fifty thousand a year, and all day and 
 every day, without pay, and certainly without 
 thanks, they assisted their bewildered, penniless 
 and homesick fellow countrymen." Mr. Davis 
 does not intend to imply that the nobleness of 
 such conduct varies with the size of the income. 
 He does not intend to imply that the nobleness 
 is the same whether the income be dependent 
 upon the young banker's exertions or inherited 
 and continuous. Yet an unsympathetic reader 
 is, by the time he reaches this passage, prepared 
 to seek and find both implications. 
 
 Mr. Davis is a genuine admirer of courage, 
 chivalry toward women and undemonstrative- 
 ness. He has an unaffected natural talent for 
 praising them in words which inspire one with 
 a passing distaste for these good things. Have 
 you never, although you may be rather chival- 
 rous yourself, in a modest way, risen from the 
 
232 Books and Things 
 
 perusal of Mr. Davis on chivalry with a deter- 
 mination never again, no matter how infirm the 
 woman standing in front of you might be, or 
 how heavy-laden, to rise from your seat in the 
 car for her sake? And instead of thanking him 
 for releasing you from the bondage of chivalry, 
 haven't you sometimes been rather annoyed 
 with him for cheapening chivalry by his praise? 
 
 Fortunately for chivalry, there is next to noth- 
 ing about it in " With the Allies." There is, 
 however, and unavoidably, much about courage. 
 Mr. Davis describes with vividness the un- 
 demonstrative curt courage of British officers, 
 and somehow you get a picture not only of this 
 courage, but also of Mr. Davis himself, sitting 
 opposite each curtly courageous British officer, 
 filling himself with an admiration which will 
 overflow by and by, in romantic eulogy of 
 courage so undemonstrative. 
 
 Of Mr. Davis's own courage, which is the real 
 thing, which has been proved over and over 
 again all over the world, there is in " With the 
 Allies," as in all his other books, neither ro- 
 mantic eulogy, nor any eulogy whatever. Some- 
 thing deeper than prejudice against Mr. Davis, 
 some meanness in one's own grain, is the only 
 
Richard the Lion-Harding 233 
 
 valid explanation of sneers at him for letting us 
 know, indirectly, that he is a brave man. In 
 no way can a war correspondent whose heart 
 is in his work avoid imparting this kind of 
 information. 
 
 There is nevertheless, in Mr. Davis's attitude 
 toward his own courage, something subtly self- 
 contradictory. One gets, along with a convic- 
 tion that he is brave, and a conviction that he 
 sincerely wishes never to boast of this fact, a 
 hint here and there of a hardly conscious wish 
 to let us know that if the hour struck for him he 
 too would die like an English gentleman, with- 
 out pose, laconically, sans phrase, as part of the 
 day's work, as a matter of course. One suspects 
 him, in his own case, of wanting us to value at 
 its true worth a courage which he is too good 
 an English gentleman to value so highly. He 
 really possesses many of the fine qualities he 
 praises in other men, and he seems dimly uneasy 
 under the yoke of a code which does not permit 
 him to praise these qualities wherever they are 
 found. 
 
 As for this code, so special and so highly 
 esteemed, one infers that it does not preclude 
 an occasional reference to the war correspond- 
 
234 Books and Things 
 
 ent's own predicament: "Maxim's, which now 
 reminds one only of the last act of ' The Merry 
 Widow,' was the meeting-place for the French 
 and English officers from the front; the Ameri- 
 can military attaches from our embassy, among 
 whom were soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines; 
 the doctors and volunteer nurses from the 
 American ambulance, and the correspondents 
 who by night dined in Paris and by day dodged 
 arrest and other things on the firing-line, or as 
 near it as they could motor without going to 
 jail." 
 
 Maxim's, and the life there in war time, make 
 Mr. Davis almost reflective. " When the Eng- 
 lish officers are granted leave of absence," he 
 writes, " they . . . motor into Paris for a bath 
 and lunch. At eight they leave the trenches 
 along the Aisne and by noon arrive at Maxim's, 
 Voisin's or Larue's. Seldom does war present 
 a sharper contrast. From a breakfast of ' bully ' 
 beef, eaten from a tin plate, within their nostrils 
 the smell of campfires, dead horses and un- 
 washed bodies, they find themselves seated on 
 red velvet cushions, surrounded by mirrors and 
 walls of white and gold, and spread before them 
 the most immaculate silver, linen and glass. 
 
Richard the Lion-Harding 235 
 
 And the odors that assail them are those of 
 truffles, white wine and ' artichaut sauce mous- 
 selinc.' " . Mr. Davis finds the contrast not only 
 sharp. He finds it more significant, subtly 
 sweeter and dearer, than some of us can find it, 
 no matter how hard we try. In his eyes, one 
 imagines, it's a contrast of which the British 
 privates could give only an inferior imitation if 
 they should leave the trenches at eight, travel 
 third class to Paris, lunch amid the complicated 
 odors of an etablissement Duval, or drink, at one 
 of the prix fixe places, vin compris. 
 
 Cleanly bred English gentlemen, well edu- 
 cated, finely trained, who know how to risk 
 their lives quietly, without phrases or fuss, and 
 how to order a meal— we read a good deal about 
 them in " With the Allies," and as we read we 
 trace our slight prejudice against Mr. Davis 
 to its source, to our suspicion that in his eyes 
 physical courage is not very much more impor- 
 tant than good form in courage, that he over- 
 rates the code which defines correctness on the 
 battlefield for the members of a laconic polo- 
 playing class. 
 
 A perfect day, for Mr. Davis, would consist 
 of a morning's danger, taken as a matter of 
 
236 Books and Things 
 
 course; in the afternoon a little chivalry, equally 
 a matter-of-course to a well-bred man; then a 
 motor dash from hardship to some great city, 
 a bath, a perfect dinner nobly planned. Shrap- 
 nel, chivalry, sauce moussclinc , and so to work 
 the next morning on an article which praised 
 in others virtues his code compels him almost to 
 ignore in himself. Richard Coeur-de-Lion 
 would not have disliked such a day, once he was 
 used to shrapnel. 
 January, 1915. 
 
VICTOR CHAPMAN'S LETTERS 
 
 PASCAL bids us imagine a number of men 
 in chains, and all under sentence of death. 
 Every day some of them are chosen, and their 
 throats are cut in sight of the others. Those 
 who are still alive see their own fate in that of 
 their companions. They look one upon the 
 other in pain and without hope, awaiting their 
 turn. This, says Pascal, is a picture of man's 
 predicament. The truth of this picture, from 
 which we turn our eyes during most of the days 
 of our life, is not so easily disregarded in the 
 days of war. To the men at the front death 
 may be near in time or far off. They cannot 
 tell. But this they do know, that for each of 
 them death is only a few inches distant. 
 
 Among all the realities of war this nearness 
 of death is the easiest for stay-at-homes to 
 imagine. Any one can imagine it, can imagine 
 it almost vividly, who has known fear. There 
 is a greater difference between our pictures of 
 
 237 
 
238 Books and Things 
 
 war's other realities and the things themselves 
 — the monotony, the lack of privacy, the torn 
 bodies, the scattered fragments of men, the 
 rains, the mud, the noises of agony, the stench, 
 the hopes defeated. Yet one may doubt whether 
 our imaginings differ more widely from the 
 realities than these realities differ to the atten- 
 tion and the perception of different men at the 
 front. One soldier sees in war what a pacifist 
 orator guesses at. Another, the author of those 
 " Lettres d'un Soldat " which Miss Sergeant re- 
 vealed to us, a few weeks ago, in the New 
 Republic, trains his will and his attention until 
 he can ignore many of the realities by which 
 other soldiers are obsessed, until he can keep his 
 mind, for hours together, upon beauty in the 
 visible world, and upon doing his work. 
 
 Life at the front, to the author of those let- 
 ters, was a triumph of the will, a daily and 
 hourly effort not to hear and not to see, an equal 
 effort to see and to do. Victor Chapman re- 
 sembled this young French soldier in his love 
 of landscape: both were brave men: the resem- 
 blance stops there. A sense of effort is the last 
 thing you feel in reading Chapman's letters. 
 
Victor Chapman's Letters 239 
 
 He was happier at the front than he had ever 
 been before the war, happier as a member of 
 the Franco-American Aviation Corps than he 
 had been in the Foreign Legion. " Victor never 
 really felt that he was alive," Mr. John Jay 
 Chapman says in the Memoir of his son, " ex- 
 cept when he was in danger. Nothing else 
 aroused his faculties. This was not conscious, 
 but natal — a quality of the brain. As some peo- 
 ple need oxygen, so Victor needed danger. 
 . . . His pleasure was in scenery. If you could 
 place him in a position of danger and let him 
 watch scenery, he was in heaven. I do not 
 think he was ever completely happy in his life 
 till the day he got his flying papers." 
 
 Victor Chapman was killed at Verdun, on 
 June 23, 1916, while flying over the German 
 lines. Less than a week earlier he had been 
 wounded, but had withstood all attempts to 
 send' him to Paris for a rest, or to a hospital. 
 His captain, by promising him a new and better 
 machine, persuaded him to take things easily 
 for a few days, on each of which Chapman would 
 fly over to a hospital, carrying oranges to a 
 friend who lay wounded there. On the after- 
 
240 Books and Things 
 
 noon of the 23d he followed three of his com- 
 panions, Captain Thenault, Prince and Lufbery, 
 to the lines, meaning to stay only a little while 
 and then go on to the hospital. Finding his 
 friends outnumbered he dived among the Ger- 
 man machines, and soon afterward his own, a 
 Nieuport, was seen to fall. He was twenty-six 
 years old, had been a pilot since February of the 
 same year, and had spent a year in the trenches. 
 " For over one hundred consecutive days," Mr. 
 Chapman writes, " Victor was in the front 
 trenches as aide-chargeur to a mitrail. He was 
 slightly wounded once, and one-half of his 
 squadron was either killed or seriously hurt." 
 Although he knew what risks he ran, and had 
 said, three days before his death, " Of course 
 I shall never come out of this alive," his letters 
 leave upon one the impression of a man who 
 not only took danger as a matter of course, but 
 who thought of it only when assuring his 
 parents that there was none. " One is as safe," 
 he writes to his father from the trenches, " as 
 in any other walk of life. These whistling balls 
 can be compared to microbes in the air. There 
 are thousands, but if the proper precautions are 
 taken one is no more imperiled than from small- 
 
Victor Chapman's Letters 24I 
 
 pox or pneumonia. The danger was when we 
 first arrived. No one knew the lay of the land, 
 where it was suicidal and where not. But now 
 every one knows the ropes." Chapman was 
 reluctant to admit that danger was danger until 
 it was past. 
 
 His letters express his passion for landscape, 
 for the French countryside he could look down 
 on, for the clouds near which he was so much at 
 home. He had his joy in the air and in fighting. 
 Privation did not exist to his attention. Danger 
 was the element he breathed most easily. It is 
 impossible not to feel, as one reads the Letters 
 and the Memoir, that Victor Chapman was a 
 prisoner on this earth at peace; that he escaped, 
 exulting and grave, into war and the sky. 
 Friends must have realized who knew him as a 
 boy, solitary and daring and generous, with his 
 deep melancholy and his capacity for never for- 
 getting his dead, that whatever his fate might 
 be it could not be commonplace. He and his 
 mother come to life again, and will live with 
 a tragic intensity forever, in this Memoir, where 
 Mr. Chapman speaks of them with a passion of 
 candor that is lonelier than any reticence. 
 
242 Books and Things 
 
 War is not romance for most soldiers, nor 
 fighting the satisfaction of an ideal passion. 
 Some moment when we realize this to the exclu- 
 sion of other realities, when we have forgotten 
 the exception in the rule, when we come near 
 denying that characters so unusual as Victor 
 Chapman's exist in contemporary flesh and 
 blood, that will be one of the moments to take 
 up and re-read this book, to be reminded that 
 antique fortitude and antique contempt of death 
 are still alive. Mr. John Jay Chapman, while in 
 the act of putting in those life-touches which 
 make his portrait of his son so vivid and so 
 individual, would have us remember that Victor 
 Chapman was only one brave man among many 
 brave. " I have never regretted it for him," 
 says a letter from Kiffin Rockwell, who was 
 killed a little later, " as I know he was willing 
 and satisfied to give his life that way if it was 
 necessary, and that he had no fear of death, and 
 there is nothing to fear in death." So these 
 sailors of the air can speak, and so they feel. 
 For them, as for those older sailors who took 
 the Latin words for their motto, navigare 
 necesse est, vivere non necesse. " II ne faut pas 
 que l'univers s'arme pour l'ecraser," Pascal says 
 
Victor Chapman's Letters 243 
 
 of man, in one of his most famous passages. 
 " Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le 
 tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'ecraserait, l'homme 
 serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce 
 qu'il sait qu'il meurt; et l'avantage que l'univers 
 a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien." 
 August, 1917. 
 
"THE SPIRIT OF MAN" 
 
 ALTHOUGH we may nowadays treat the 
 Golden Treasury too much like a common 
 anthology, as if it were only a convenient place 
 for meeting old friends, yet at one time or 
 another we have all admired, some of us with- 
 out help and some not until Matthew Arnold 
 had shown us how to admire, the beautiful put- 
 ting together of its pieces, the way in which 
 many of them gain, from their setting among 
 the right neighbors, something of color or mean- 
 ing or sound. 
 
 Those who perceive for themselves, or those 
 who can perceive with assistance — which class 
 do we belong to? "The Spirit of Man" will 
 not help us to an answer, for in this new 
 anthology, made by the poet laureate, Robert 
 Bridges, and published a year ago, the arrange- 
 ment is so winning that he must be a dull reader 
 who can withstand its action. Perfection of 
 arrangement was no doubt easier for Mr. 
 Bridges to approach than for Palgrave. " The 
 Spirit of Man " is not a collection "of the best 
 
 244 
 
" The Spirit of Man " 245 
 
 songs and lyrical poems in the English lan- 
 guage." Its aim is to illustrate and support the 
 belief " that spirituality is the basis and founda- 
 tion of human life." Prose and verse in Eng- 
 lish and French are admitted, and so are transla- 
 tions from the Russian, from Greek and Latin, 
 and things brought from the East. A purpose 
 so much more special than Palgrave's gave Mr. 
 Bridges material more homogeneous, less refrac- 
 tory, not so hard to put in order. 
 
 The success of his chosen order is obvious if 
 we will read his book as he would have us read 
 it, beginning at the beginning and going straight 
 ahead. He leads us in all ease from mood to 
 mood, takes us with him all the way, leaves us 
 rested and bettered by the journey. His taste 
 and art allow us to feel, for a short time and in 
 the case of some of us perhaps for the last time, 
 the beauty of those spiritual moods to which 
 nowadays we do not rise by accident, nor yet by 
 will, nor at all without the help of strong hands. 
 I know that while I was reading his book the 
 other day I had an illusion that I was growing 
 physically lighter, that not only did my eyes look 
 up through the clouds to serener spaces, but 
 that I was carried gently upward to them, and 
 
246 Books and Things 
 
 breathed for a while those brighter, purer and 
 austerer airs where Mr. Bridges lives and is at 
 home, nor ever suffers from mountain sickness. 
 Great must be the persuasiveness of an anthol- 
 ogy which can lift a heavy body to uncongenial 
 spiritual heights. 
 
 Coming down to earth again, later, I asked 
 how it was that I, whose soul is no frequenter 
 of the uplands, visiting them but seldom and 
 never staying long, had been so submissive to 
 Mr. Bridges. Why had I not been on guard 
 against being exalted? Why had I not resisted 
 this unfamiliar refining process? And the 
 answer, when it came, came as a surprise. Mr. 
 Bridges has printed the names of his authors 
 at the end of his book. " It is true," he writes, 
 " that very often we cannot fully understand a 
 passage unless we know who wrote it ; on the 
 other hand it is an idle and pernicious habit to 
 ask for information on any question before 
 bringing one's own judgment to bear upon it; 
 and this book may even have a secondary use- 
 fulness in providing material for the exercise of 
 literary judgment, in those who. have any taste 
 for the practice." This exercise in literary judg- 
 ment, made possible because Mr. Bridges has 
 
" The Spirit of Man " 247 
 
 printed nearly all his pieces without names, kept 
 me from suspecting that I was growing too 
 spiritual to be true. Vanity's strongest instinct 
 is the instinct of self-preservation, but vanity 
 also likes to run risks. Sometimes I tried to 
 guess who wrote what I was reading, sometimes 
 I tried only to guess the writer's epoch. My 
 mistakes were many, as when I failed to give 
 Thomas a Kempis his own, and could not put 
 Marcus Aurelius near his right century. Most 
 of all was I vexed when I ascribed to Pascal, of 
 whom I judge as the good judges do, a piece 
 written by Amiel, whom I like but feebly, believ- 
 ing the good judges rate him too high. And in 
 general I found, whenever I was certain of an 
 author's name, that it was memory which made 
 me certain, and not insight. 
 
 Perhaps the spirituality in this book would 
 seem too spiritual if one's attention were not 
 taken off it by the exercise in literary judgment. 
 At times the wish to attribute rightly is on top, 
 and at times this disappears and one attends 
 only to the wisdom or beauty or high mind of 
 the written things. Thus a reader's attention, 
 turning from this hand to that hand, keeps its 
 strength without faltering, has even strength to 
 
248 Books and Things 
 
 spare for a hundred and one details, for the 
 skill with which the high color of Bacon or of 
 Burke is placed so as not to seem out of har- 
 mony with its quieter surroundings, for the con- 
 trast, in Mr. Bridges's own subtly-rhythmed 
 quantitative hexameters, between the pattern 
 made by the quantities and the pattern made by 
 the stressed syllables. Now the patterns coin- 
 cide, now they have separated and each is trying 
 to get possession of the listener's ear. Now we 
 move with the stressed syllables against the 
 stream of the quantities, now the stressed syl- 
 lables and the long syllables are the same for a 
 few feet, and what we hear is less complex and 
 moves faster. Newer and more varied rhythms 
 are given to the ear in the experiments Mr. 
 Bridges has made in quantitative verse than in 
 all the free verse I have read. 
 
 Besides his hexameters from Virgil and 
 Homer, Mr. Bridges has put into this book " a 
 few half-original verse-translations," and a few 
 of his improvements upon other translators' 
 work. A study of these reworkings of older 
 versions will delight anybody who likes to per- 
 ceive, in these small and transforming touches, 
 how small a change may make how great a dif- 
 
" The Spirit of Man " 249 
 
 ference. But on the whole Mr. Bridges has 
 feared too much " a perpetual temptation to 
 quote from himself." I wish he had felt this 
 temptation oftener. Here we have only one 
 poem by Robert Bridges. I wish he had put in 
 the last one in Book V of his " Shorter Poems," 
 for I know of no poem, anywhere, that better 
 expresses the final mood in which his anthology 
 would leave us : 
 
 Weep not to-day : why should this sadness be ? 
 Learn in present fears 
 To o'ermaster those tears 
 That unhindered conquer thee. 
 
 Think on thy past valour, thy future praise ; 
 Up, sad heart, nor faint 
 In ungracious complaint, 
 Or a prayer for better days. 
 
 Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace 
 Draweth surely nigh, 
 When good-night is good-bye ; 
 For the sleeping shall not cease. 
 
 Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away 
 Deem, nor strange thy doom. 
 Like this sorrow 'twill come, 
 And the day will be to-day. 
 
 January, 1917, 
 
MY NEW ULSTER 
 
 ALTHOUGH my ulster was what we used 
 to call worn out, being a little ragged in 
 spots and more than a little threadbare, and 
 although it was almost ten years old, I did not 
 easily bring myself to buy a new one. I was 
 held back by pictures of the other things that 
 could be bought for the same money, and of the 
 men who needed these things. Nor was I quite 
 uninfluenced by that decent respect for the 
 opinions of mankind which some of us call fear. 
 Several ready-made shops did I visit, trying on 
 before mirrors of heroic size, conscientiously 
 feeling different cloths, behaving in general like 
 a man who thinks to hide his ignorance of wine 
 by holding his glass of sherry against the light, 
 testingly. Having thus persuaded myself, much 
 of course against my will, that the better article 
 is always cheaper than the cheaper, I went to 
 my tailor's with a conscience nearly in the place 
 where I had been trying to put it. 
 
 Nearly, but not quite. The new ulster has a 
 more " conspicuous plainness " than most of the 
 
 250 
 
My New Ulster 251 
 
 clothes I buy when nobody gives me sobering 
 advice. It looks a little, now when I survey it 
 with an unimpassioned eye, like a garment 
 chosen by one who wished to escape notice. 
 Now and then, wearing it carelessly before 
 friends whom I judge to be good judges of such 
 things, I have caught myself wondering whether 
 the degree to which it has failed to attract their 
 attention were not excessive. One of them, I 
 am bound to say, did give that ulster the praise 
 it deserves. Then he paused for a minute, ap- 
 peared to calculate, and added: "It ought to 
 last you half the rest of your life." 
 
 • True, perhaps, but what is the use of remind- 
 ing a man that he is mortal by such concrete 
 illustrations? Their convincingness is their of- 
 fense. If a friend must tell me that I am to die, 
 if he cannot be happy until he has got this truth 
 off his chest, let him say it in a jargon of abstract 
 words, like senescence. Why poison my mind 
 against a worthy ulster, which for days I shall 
 not put on without reflecting that if you measure 
 its length of life by that of its predecessors, and 
 my length of life by that of mine, the next ulster 
 I buy will probably be my last? In Paris once, 
 
252 Books and Things 
 
 years ago now, I came suddenly on a shop which 
 sold dix mille chemises. The thought that I 
 could not live to wear so many made mortality 
 seem real. 
 
 What would my conduct be, I wonder, if in 
 truth, and say for a week on end, I did imagine 
 myself part of this earth's perishable freight? 
 Set my house in order? Try to remember 
 where I put my will? Number my days so that 
 I might apply my heart unto wisdom? Of 
 course, of course. But what else? "What," 
 said Samuel Johnson, upon one of the many oc- 
 casions when he thought of death, " what must 
 be the condition of him whose heart will not 
 suffer him to rank himself among the best, or 
 among the good? Such must be his dread of the 
 approaching trial, as will leave him little atten- 
 tion to the opinion of those whom he is leaving 
 forever." I do not believe I should partake of 
 this feeling. The opinion of those whom I was 
 leaving forever would matter a good deal. In 
 one's last week on earth it would be pleasant 
 to do something, not melodramatic or obviously 
 staged, which would round off one's life with a 
 quietly noble gesture, stop on the right note, 
 
My New Ulster 2^3 
 
 look handsome in retrospect, be not misplaced 
 on the front page. In practice, such gestures 
 being difficult, I should doubtless content myself 
 with removing one or two objects from my 
 effects. This book, for example, in which I have 
 written so many words, this must not fall under 
 the eyes of my heirs. They would not read it, 
 that is more than probable, but certainly they 
 will not if I commit it, thus, to the flames. 
 . . . There! . . . That is done. ... It 
 burns . . . it is gone. 
 
 It was far from a " roguish " book, of the kind 
 which Mr. Samuel Pepys burned now and then, 
 lest it be found in his library to shame him. It 
 was only a blank book in which I had built, line 
 upon line, page upon page, a monument to my 
 unwisdom. There I had set down, beginning 
 with August, 1914, what I believed about the 
 var. I believed that the Germans would be 
 .ought to a standstill somewhere in Belgium, 
 that by their continued attacks in mass forma- 
 tion they proved how little they had learned 
 since 1871 about the art of war, that the German 
 navy would be destroyed before August, 1915, 
 that the strength of the Russian army would 
 
254 Books and Things 
 
 bear against Germany with ever increasing 
 weight, that the entrance of Rumania into the 
 war would shorten it, that England had got the 
 submarines under control. These and other 
 opinions did I write down, and nearly every one 
 of them wrong. 
 
 The men who are running the war, who have 
 to judge probability and to make decisions, these 
 need all possible confidence in themselves. But 
 I wish that everybody who does nothing for the 
 war or to the war except to talk about it, and 
 whose self-confidence needs impairment, had 
 kept a book like mine and were forced to re-read 
 it at short intervals. Alike from one's obvious 
 mistakes and from one's monotonous consist- 
 ency something might be learned, some self- 
 distrust acquired. Early in the war my cousin 
 Isabel became convinced that the Germans had 
 committed atrocities. The war has convinced 
 her of nothing else. She has been consistent, 
 stationary, unexperiencing. 
 
 Which minds have learned least in the last 
 four years from the war, those which still feed 
 on atrocities and give eager credence to every 
 spy story, or those whose attitude was fixed 
 
My New Ulster 255 
 
 once for all by their reaction against the ro- 
 mantic illusion about war? For them the details 
 of a soldier's life have an unchanging fascina- 
 tion. Their attention is fixed upon the cold, the 
 ruin, the mud, the vermin, the stenches. They 
 see war as a field of putrid flesh, hear it as 
 shrieks of agony, feel it as the human body into 
 which a bayonet crashes or slips. They forget 
 that the widespread, the almost universal cour- 
 age which endures these things is greater than 
 it would need to be if war were all glory and 
 romance. The worse war is, the more horrible 
 and futile, the more miraculous that greatness 
 of spirit which has fought and fights on. 
 
 Meanwhile I notice, in my friends and in 
 myself, a feeling which is of no value to any- 
 body, and which does not change except to 
 grow deeper and to displace other feelings. 
 Here we all are, safe, middle-aged, warmed, fed, 
 clothed, harmlessly occupied. And over there 
 the better bodies and better brains of younger 
 men are being destroyed scientifically, day by 
 day, at a rate that can almost be predicted. 
 This contrast is already old, but always new to 
 feel, week by week more unbearable, unthink- 
 
256 Books and Things 
 
 able. Our feeling is more presentable than my 
 cousin Isabel's monomania, but not more useful. 
 In my case it produces only sill)' self-deceptions 
 before spending money on myself. For I still 
 believe I should not have bought that new over- 
 coat if I hadn't lost the old one. 
 January, 1918. 
 
ACTS OF COMPOSITION 
 
 IN imagination I stand, some fine morning of 
 next June, upon a platform slightly raised, 
 where teachers are sitting, and even a few 
 trustees. Ingratiatingly I look down upon a 
 roomful of school-children who actually wish to 
 listen. I see fifty or sixty expectant faces, 
 washed and upturned, visibly waiting for the 
 words that are to set them free. Not in vain 
 are they eager. The words come. In accents 
 of unfeigned sincerity I begin my lecture upon 
 rhetoric, or the art, as in my own youth we were 
 incited to call it, of efficient communication by 
 language. 
 
 Let us start, I tell my little hearers, with 
 paragraphs. Years ago a revered teacher 
 taught me that the first sentence of a well-made 
 paragraph should discover a subject and that 
 the last sentence should drive a conclusion 
 home. For months I struggled to satisfy this 
 idea of paragraph structure, without ever get- 
 ting even so far as to learn with what material 
 one should fill the space between these limitary 
 
 257 
 
258 Books and Things 
 
 sentences, the announcer and the summer-up. 
 Many paragraphs by many masters did I pull 
 to pieces, finding about ten that did not con- 
 form to this ideal pattern for every one that did. 
 So I banished the ideal, renounced the teacher, 
 forgot his advice until only the other day, when 
 I read in the editor's prefatory note to " The 
 Middle Years " that Henry James usually put off 
 the markings of his paragraphs until the final 
 revision of a book. Why should he have done 
 otherwise? The paragraph was invented for 
 the convenience of readers, as an ex post facto 
 sign that one of the writer's impulses had spent 
 itself, or was about to change cars. To most 
 men dreams do not come in paragraphs, nor 
 day-dreamt hallucinations, nor confessions of 
 faith, nor declarations of love. If you keep con- 
 sciously aiming to write paragraphs you risk 
 contracting the habit of trying to see the world 
 in paragraphs, a sad preventive of the better 
 habit of trying to see. Paragraph structure, so 
 I end this part of my lecture, isn't anything to 
 worry about. 
 
 Transition, or the art of getting from this 
 paragraph to that, is another thing that the 
 writer must put clean out of his head. If he 
 
Acts of Composition 259 
 
 does not, if he remains a slave of transition, he 
 will pester his reader with obtruded connectives, 
 with at the same times, with on the other 
 hands, with thens flanked by commas and aca- 
 demically sticking out. At its worst transition 
 is a long way round from something you have 
 been saying — to something you mean to say — 
 through something better left unsaid. Poem, 
 essay, chapter, argument — too much attention 
 to transition will make any one of these resem- 
 ble John Florian's dinners, at which the last 
 mouthful of every course except coffee tasted 
 a little like the first mouthful of the next. 
 
 About clearness, force and ease I make only 
 two remarks, both striking. I invite my audience 
 to inquire whether " The Faery Queen " would 
 have been better, in any sense that any sane 
 person could give the word, if Spenser had tried 
 for force; whether by trying for ease Browning 
 would have bettered " Childe Roland to the Dark 
 Tower Came; " whether " The Listeners " could 
 have kept its charm if Mr. de la Mare had made 
 it as clear as " What Does Little Birdie Say." No 
 writer, I add, nobody whom anybody would 
 think of calling a writer, ever bothers his head 
 about ease or force when he is performing that 
 
260 Books and Things 
 
 one of the many acts of composition which con- 
 sists in putting words together into a sentence. 
 Clearness is in a different category. But not 
 even clearness need be the conscious concern of 
 any one while he is writing. A writer almost 
 never tells himself he must be clear. What he 
 says to himself is " That isn't what I mean " — 
 " That's not what I'm after "— " I can't let it go 
 like that." The impulse which he acts on when 
 he rewrites an obscure sentence is very like the 
 impulse which takes you out of your chair and 
 across the room in order to straighten a picture 
 that hangs crooked. 
 
 The act of composition, as some people still call 
 it, is neither single nor distinct. It is all the 
 acts of experiencing and remembering and in- 
 venting and translating into words. Learning 
 to translate into words is the act of adding both 
 unconsciously and also consciously to the num- 
 ber of things you can unconsciously do. It is 
 like learning to play a game, except that no 
 learner of any game has ever to be on his guard 
 against excess of either conscious or uncon- 
 scious imitation. But even in writing, if you have 
 a voice of your own, your fear of imitating too 
 closely is controlled by your certitude that you 
 
Acts of Composition 261 
 
 cannot imitate successfully, and that through imi- 
 tation you become free. Qui apicem gessisti, 
 mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos 
 fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium. Try to 
 copy into English not the total effect of this 
 inscription on a Roman tomb, but the effect of 
 its m's and n's, the salience of its three ia's, its 
 vowel sounds in their order, the funeral march 
 of its clauses. By consciously trying to imitate 
 you learn to do unconsciously, when the right 
 matter and the right mood come together and 
 join hands, something you would have written 
 differently but for the imitative exercises you 
 have forgotten. 
 
 Most of the too few painters I know talk 
 easily enough, but when one of them is talking 
 to another I notice how he often hesitates, not 
 for a word but for a memory. His eye is wait- 
 ing until it sees with the needed degree of dis- 
 tinctness the color or the form of the thing he 
 is talking about. So a writer will often stop, 
 hesitate, hang back until memory has brought 
 his subject into the field of vision, where he will 
 hold this subject until his remembering eye has 
 seen what he was looking for, concretely, in 
 its haecceity, and the words he was after come 
 
262 Books and Things 
 
 of themselves to his pen. They will not be the 
 words that would have come if he had not made 
 this effort to remember. To the good memory, 
 the memory that can command things seen, 
 heard, felt or understood, comes the phrase that 
 nobody ever thought of before, in its fresh 
 exactness. 
 
 Out of memory, by a hand whose sensitive- 
 ness experiment has refined, whose strength 
 experiment has made stronger — such is the 
 pedigree of much good writing. To say this, 
 however, is to refer to those two only of the 
 acts composing the act of composition in which 
 self-improvement is a possible thing. A rich 
 experience to remember, that power to remake 
 remembered experience which we call invention, 
 are at no one's command. They depend, I sup- 
 pose, upon a writer's physiological equipment. 
 But anybody may choose to write about what he 
 remembers most sharply. Anybody may in- 
 crease the faithfulness of his words to remem- 
 bered things. 
 
 With these words of temperate hope I bring 
 my lecture to a close. Its effect is not quite 
 what I anticipated. No teacher threatens to 
 assault me in reprisal for my derogatory re- 
 
Acts of Composition 263 
 
 marks about clearness, force and ease. The 
 children do not crowd about the platform saying 
 things which lead me to exclaim, with a well- 
 rehearsed involuntary air, " I am glad you asked 
 me that question." Well, it doesn't matter. 
 Better luck next time. And, anyway, I have 
 made my train without having had to tell any- 
 body that I stole my Latin inscription from Mr. 
 Mackail's wise and beautiful introduction to his 
 " Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology." 
 March, 1918. 
 
FORGET IT 
 
 TO make the last three months intelligible 
 I must go back further than that. One 
 little year ago I was almost happy. Nearly all 
 the members of my family had become inured 
 to my presence in the home. My friends never 
 showed, and I believe seldom felt, discomfort 
 when I accepted their invitations. Acquaint- 
 ances would smile cheerily when we met on the 
 street. Now and then one among them would 
 stop of his own accord and pass the time of 
 day. In my quiet way I was, in short, a popular 
 man. 
 
 Not quite a year ago an acute observer might 
 have detected, here a little and there a little 
 more, signs of change. That acute observer was 
 not I. The first step on the downhill road was 
 taken when I bought a magazine, the second in 
 several years, and read an advertisement. It 
 told how Mr. Smith, whose memory had been 
 so defective that he could not recall the names 
 of his children by his first wife, or the address 
 
 264 
 
Forget It 265 
 
 to which he was expected to send the alimony 
 check, now could and did tell such of his seven- 
 teen thousand acquaintances as came his way 
 their telephone numbers and middle names. I 
 took the memory training lessons by which Mr. 
 Smith had profited so strangely. Next I read 
 an advertisement which narrated the methodical 
 saturation of Mr. Jones in general information. 
 A quarter of an hour a day was turning him into 
 a well posted and therefore brilliant conversa- 
 tionalist. I took that course too. I made myself 
 a lord of miscellaneous knowledge. No doubt 
 you can guess the next and last step. You can 
 see me, after but a few months devoted to train- 
 ing my will by mail, a changed man, an aggres- 
 sive character, a dominating personality. 
 
 Now I am not yet prepared to admit that any 
 one of these three disciplines, taken singly, 
 would have wrecked my life. Perhaps even the 
 three together would not have shattered my 
 happiness if I had not been such a forward 
 pupil, which is what each of my teachers as- 
 sured me, by mail, that I was. Be these things 
 as they may, the great fact remains : Last June, 
 when I, the finished product of all this training, 
 burst upon the world, confidently, optimistically, 
 
266 Books and Things 
 
 the world did as it always does when things 
 burst. It ran for cover. 
 
 By the way, I ought at this point, in fairness 
 to the advertisements which I accuse of my 
 undoing, to say that they kept many of their 
 promises. They turned me from nobody into 
 somebody. My improved memory was of im- 
 mense utility in my office, where works of ref- 
 erence fell into disuse as soon as my employer 
 had tired of the pastime of consulting them to 
 verify what I said. Of what service were they 
 when it was so much quicker for anybody who 
 wanted to know the duty on cocoa matting in 
 the tariff of 1884, whether it was hemp or wool 
 that ought to be wet-rotted, scutched and 
 hackled, whether Kosciuszko shrieked as Free- 
 dom fell, or the other way round, to ask me? 
 An ability to remember things like these has a 
 cash value. Combined with my new dominat- 
 ingly aggressive will it raised my salary to 
 eighteen thousand a year. 
 
 That is the good side of my case, and would 
 that my case had been one-sided ! But it wasn't. 
 Beyond the walls of my office, where I united 
 the merits of a work of reference and of an 
 irresistible force, there was a different story to 
 
Forget It 267 
 
 tell. My acquaintances began to behave them- 
 selves oddly. They seemed always to be hur- 
 rying to important engagements. Friends, what 
 you would really call friends, ceased to be. My 
 wife took to accepting an improbable number of 
 invitations in which I was not included, and I 
 have reason to believe that when invitations 
 were lacking she would sometimes dine alone 
 at her modest club. My children escaped me by 
 marrying, hastily, people they hardly knew. 
 
 From June until near the end of September 
 my way of life led me from solitude to solitude, 
 from hell to hell. In September, at the request 
 of friends who used to be mine and had become 
 my wife's, I first heard of Dr. Lugweed. His 
 mere waiting-room made an immediate impres- 
 sion. Its literature was obviously modern. 
 There was a profuse supply of pamphlets, by 
 which I was astonished, puzzled and thrilled. 
 Here indeed were the sources of hope — What to 
 Forget and How; The Lost Is Found, or Inhibi- 
 tions Regained; The Abortion of Anecdotes. I 
 entered Dr. Lugweed's private office with a 
 beating heart and shining eyes. 
 
 The doctor did not disappoint the expecta- 
 tions his ante-room had raised. Without a sign 
 
268 Books and Things 
 
 of patience he listened to my sad story. When 
 at last I had finished he said: " Your case is not 
 uncommon, although exceptionally grave. Its 
 gravity, of which you do not appear to be fully 
 aware, you have revealed by many signs, of 
 which I select but one to notice. While sitting 
 here, consulting a busy and by no means inex- 
 pensive physician, you have seen fit to tell him 
 the population of Sandusky in 1910, the relation 
 of James I of England to Henry VIII, and the 
 mean height of the Vale of Kashmir above sea- 
 level. Yes, your case is grave. But I do not 
 despair of curing you if you will consent to be- 
 come an inmate of my sanitarium for three 
 months." 
 
 Into the details of those three months, which 
 began with October, I shall not go. Suffice it 
 to say that Dr. Lugweed, after testing and 
 observing me for a week, took a more hopeful 
 view of my case than I had given him at our 
 first encounter. His method is to impair the 
 memory, to strengthen the suppressing and re- 
 pressing will, or to do both at once. It was 
 method number two that he essayed with me. 
 " By this method," he said, " the battle is 
 harder, but the victory, if won at all, is decisive. 
 
Forget It 269 
 
 Your will to impart miscellaneous information 
 has been wonderfully trained, wonderfully. Per- 
 haps we shall overcome it by training the will 
 to keep miscellaneous information to yourself, 
 where it belongs. Should this effort fail we'll 
 try to bring your memory down to normal." 
 
 Well, here I am, after three months of inten- 
 sive treatment, cured, healed, capable of speak- 
 ing without putting everybody within sound of 
 my voice to flight. It would be unfair to Dr. 
 Lugweed, whom I have had the happy thought 
 of addressing as " Master," to reveal his secret, 
 but there is, I believe, no harm in recording 
 fragments of his talk. " Aim high," he said one 
 day. " I had a friend once who had taken all 
 knowledge to be his province, and who went 
 through life silent, for fear of talking shop. 
 Keep him in mind." And on another occasion, 
 in a less earnest mood, he let fall this: "Here 
 is the paradox of social intercourse : Although 
 the best companion is not he who says nothing, 
 the good companion is known by what he omits 
 to say." And on a third occasion, laconically: 
 " Few are they who can endure the society of 
 a well informed man." I owe much, moreover, 
 perhaps more than I can hope to express in 
 
270 Books and Things 
 
 words, to a booklet called " Teach Me Rather to 
 Forget," written by Dr. Lugweed himself. Al- 
 though designed peculiarly for patients who are 
 taking the memory-weakening course, the open- 
 ing pages of this tract have a meaning for me, 
 possibly for us all : " ' That reminds me,' says 
 my memory. ' I mustn't say it,' says my love 
 of my neighbor. And in the end, which is not 
 far from the beginning, my love of neighbor 
 yields to my memory, I open my mouth and 
 off I go." 
 January, 1919. 
 
" LE PETIT PIERRE " 
 
 REVERENCE lessens with the years, and 
 the habit of visiting holy places loses its 
 sway, yet it was not in youth, it was when I 
 was well over thirty, that I found myself one 
 autumn morning in that short street of low 
 houses, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, 
 which is now named the Villa Said and 
 which will some day be named after Anatole 
 France. 
 
 Look, my friend had told me, not remember- 
 ing the number, look for the house with an old 
 man's head for a knocker or doorbell, a head 
 made of old Florentine bronze. As long as I 
 dared I stood not far from this door, hoping 
 M. Anatole France would come out or at least 
 show his face at a window. He did not appear. 
 Perhaps he did not know that a stranger before 
 his gate was asking only one thing more to be 
 grateful for, a glimpse of him in his own city 
 and street. Perhaps he knew and did not care. 
 Perhaps he was away from Paris in some Italian 
 town, bending over a drawing or an old coin, 
 
 271 
 
272 Books and Things 
 
 lifting his head now and then to look across 
 gardens at some line made by the hills. How- 
 ever this may have been, I had to take myself 
 off at last without seeing the writer whose books 
 have charmed, as no one else's have charmed, 
 all the middle years of my life. 
 
 When he wrote " Le Livre de mon ami " he 
 was, as he has told us, " nel mezzo del cammin di 
 nostra vita." Now, when he is nearer the end of 
 that way, he gives us a third book of his child- 
 hood, " Le Petit Pierre." The thirty years be- 
 tween the two books have brought him friends 
 and enmities, a clear fame through Europe and 
 in the Americas, the promise of an immortality 
 in which one hopes even he must believe, who 
 believes so little. These years have not left his 
 childhood further behind. To represent time as 
 going by and increasing distances has never 
 been one of his gifts. The space between the 
 thing seen and the seer is always about the 
 same. Le Chanteur de Kyme is as near us as 
 Le Procurateur de Judee, Monsieur Bergeret 
 hardly any nearer than l'Abbe Jerome Coignard, 
 although each is set with light certainty among 
 the ideas, the customs, the visible world of his 
 own present, whether ours or not. 
 
" Le Petit Pierre" 273 
 
 Not that Anatole France, who has lived for 
 so many years at the same distance from his 
 childhood, is unconscious of growing older. In 
 " Le Petit Pierre," after some of the loveliest, 
 most touching words ever written by one man of 
 Latin genius about another, he stops and says : 
 " Je ne veux pas mourir sans avoir ecrit quelques 
 lignes au pied de votre monument, 6 Jean 
 Racine, en temoignage de mon amour et de ma 
 piete. Et si je n'ai pas le temps d'accomplir ce 
 devoir sacre, que ces lignes negligees, mais 
 sinceres, me servent de testament." Has old 
 age done anything to his genius beyond lessen- 
 ing the number of years in which he can give 
 us new tokens of it? Very little. Perhaps " Le 
 Petit Pierre " brings back no day quite " so cool, 
 so calm, so bright " as the day when Pierre's 
 mother, in " Le Livre de mon ami," picking him 
 up in her arms and marking with her bodkin 
 a rosebud on the wall of the petit salon, says to 
 him : " Je te donne cette rose." There may be 
 a freshness nearer daybreak on the pages of the 
 older book, an earlier light. The new book is 
 the richer. " Je dirai done," — Anatole France 
 wrote long ago in " Le Jardin d'Epicure," " je 
 dirai done que, s'il n'y a pas proprement de style 
 
274 Books and Things 
 
 simple, il y a des styles qui paraissent simples, 
 et que c'est precisement a ceux-la que semblent 
 attaches la jeunesse et la duree. II ne reste plus 
 qu'a rechercher d'ou leur vient cette apparence 
 heureuse. Et Ton pensera sans doute qu'ils la 
 doivent, non pas a ce qu'ils sont moins riches 
 que les autres en elements divers, mais bien a 
 ce qu'ils forment un ensemble cm toutes les 
 parties sont si bien fondues qu'on ne les dis- 
 tingue plus." No one has given a better descrip- 
 tion of Anatole France's own prose, so like itself 
 always in its apparent simplicity, so changing 
 in the richness of its diverse elements. With 
 what directness he can say, of the avaricious and 
 prosperous landlord in " Le Petit Pierre: " " On 
 ne lui en voulait pas d'etre grand menager de 
 son bien, et peut-etre Ten estimait-on davan- 
 tage. Ce que Ton considere chez les riches, c'est 
 leur richesse." Read the story of Uncle Hya- 
 cinthe and of the triumph in which he had him- 
 self carried, across thirty barricades in the 
 streets of Paris, disguised as a wounded hero, 
 safe to his mistress's house, and she a laundress. 
 Labiche would have laughed aloud at the story. 
 Or read the anecdote of Caire, the dog with a 
 sense of the comic — a caricature that Mark 
 
" he Petit Pierre" 2J$ 
 
 Twain might have written, if he had been born 
 long enough ago, and in Tanagra. 
 
 Conscientious critics will find in " Le Petit 
 Pierre," have already found, no doubt, what 
 they call Anatole France's shortcomings. But 
 critics ought not to be conscientious. What do 
 those conscientious Frenchmen mean who say 
 he is impassive? I have no idea. Has any one 
 in any age been more sensitive to the difference 
 between ugliness and beauty, between ignoble- 
 ness and generosity, between hardness and gen- 
 tleness of heart? For him these three are the 
 same difference. Nor do I know the worth of 
 the complaint, made by M. Andre Gide, for 
 example, that he can be understood as well at 
 the first as at any later reading, that he is too 
 readily intelligible, clear even at first sight. 
 One might say as much of Homer's " clearness 
 without shadow or stain, clearness divine." Of 
 course the pleasure one takes in jewels cut and 
 set is unlike the pleasure of hunting for them 
 in African river-beds. The bearing of M. Gide's 
 criticism must I suppose depend upon what one 
 means by "understand." Anatole France has 
 to be sure a clearness no one can miss his way 
 in, even at first, but this clearness is not all. 
 
276 Books and Things 
 
 All he has, all he is — this no one can know who 
 has not lived long in the Ile-de-France, who is 
 not in love with its looks and its ways. A 
 Frenchman, one who loves French literature 
 and whose ear is nice, he and no one else can 
 hear all the echoes in Anatole France's prose, 
 echoes repeated in a voice subtly new, of Marot 
 and Montaigne, so they say, of Racine and of 
 La Fontaine, of La Bruyere and Voltaire. Even 
 among Frenchmen such readers are not many, 
 and fewer still must be his perfect readers, who 
 can distinguish all the other elements his art 
 has " si bien fondu qu'on ne les distingue 
 plus." 
 
 When one is trying to use a writer's short- 
 comings so as to define his genius one must stick 
 to his relevant shortcomings, to those that one 
 notices while reading, as things that lessen one's 
 pleasure. Of these Anatole France has, so far 
 as I am concerned, exactly three. A learning 
 which sometimes interests the writer more than 
 the reader — there is no trace of this in " Le Petit 
 Pierre," where I do notice, however, that Pierre 
 at birth and Pierre at ten years old seem a little 
 disconcertingly of the same age. Except in the 
 case of myth, as in " Putois," Anatole France has 
 
" Le Petit Pierre" 277 
 
 always taken a more attentive interest in being 
 than in becoming. Far away in every imagina- 
 tive writer is the obscure seat of his greater 
 inclination to things as they are or to the 
 process by which they have become what they 
 are, of his choice between representing the 
 flowers of life and representing their growing. 
 Artists who are fascinated by the way in which 
 imperceptible changes work the changes that all 
 may see — it is among these that we find the 
 masters of composition, the makers of organic 
 wholes. Few goldsmiths are designers in the 
 large. Anatole France is not. None of his beau- 
 tifully ordered books has a deeper order than 
 that of time, a deeper unity than that of texture 
 and tone, any unity except in its author's feeling 
 and thought. 
 
 This is obvious enough, but do I after all feel 
 its truth at any moment of reading? Not often. 
 What I notice oftenest as a diminisher of my 
 joy, as a breaker of his spell, is the frequency 
 with which he remembers that he is a disciple 
 of Pyrrho, who taught that all things are equally 
 uncertain, that nothing can be known. Yes, I 
 could wish the explicit expressions of this 
 skepticism fewer in Anatole France, where they 
 
278 Books and Things 
 
 come at last to seem like self-indulgence in a 
 habit, like compliance with a convention adopted 
 years ago and never again looked at closely. To 
 repeat the same gesture of doubt, even if a new 
 grace freshens each repetition, is to do less than 
 justice to a real intricacy in things. The dif- 
 ference between ignorance and learning our ut- 
 most may be as interesting as the difference 
 between this utmost and absolute knowledge, 
 and to be unaware of either difference is to see 
 too few planes in the landscape life flows 
 through. His skepticism, however, although 
 when precipitated it tends to obliterate distinc- 
 tions worth retaining, does no more when in a 
 state of suspension than lightly to azure the 
 atmosphere which envelops all his men and 
 women, and in which each is free to keep his 
 bodily and moral uniqueness. Anatole France 
 sees them, these men and women, with caressing 
 and negligent precision. He sees at the same 
 instant their two motions, their common fatal 
 drift downstream, down a river nobody knows 
 the source of and ending or never ending in 
 nobody knows what sea, and also the motion 
 given to each by his private wishes. In sen- 
 tences which lie more lightly on their page 
 
" Le Petit Pierre" 279 
 
 than anybody else's he passes his judgment of 
 value upon each of his creatures and of God's. 
 These judgments are never explicit. He lets 
 us know them indirectly, by varying the pro- 
 portion of pity to derision, of affection to 
 mockery, in his feeling toward each of the men 
 and women in his books. His hand has taught 
 elegance and measure to delineate with the last 
 sharpness, his grotesques and gargoyles even 
 being as expressive as his loveliest landscapes 
 of his preference for classic art; but the finest 
 of all the instruments he works with upon hu- 
 man nature is this derisive sense of tears in 
 mortal things. Never, we say at one moment, 
 was a sense of mankind's absurdity expressed 
 more tenderly, and never, we say again, did 
 affection etch such comic figures. His prefer- 
 ence among men and women is for simple and 
 candid souls. These are sometimes learned and 
 meditative, sometimes ignorant dwellers in 
 bodies the laborious years have worn and 
 twisted. Among thoughts he distrusts those 
 that are built upon other thoughts, preferring, 
 as likely to be more lifelike and less vain, the 
 thoughts which memory and the senses bring, 
 and his own profoundest thoughts come to him 
 
280 Books and Things 
 
 not at the end of a train of reasoning, but as 
 immediately and easily as his simplest. 
 
 Perfect readers of Anatole France are rare, 
 as I have said. Sometimes I wonder whether 
 they exist, for they must have taken part in 
 all the migrations of his soul, must have lived 
 in all its traditions. It is a large order. He was 
 born on an Ionian island, has looked long at 
 reliefs on Greek temples, has listened to Attic 
 words and to Alexandrine. He has spent a 
 lifetime in Middle Age monasteries, has pored 
 upon the ingenuities of theologians and the 
 lives of the saints, understanding with friendly 
 incredulity the thirst of those passionate hearts 
 at rest now, which once panted after miracle and 
 dogma. He has lingered over the violence and 
 learning of the Renaissance, its superb and 
 cruel joy of living, its medals and painting and 
 smaller bronzes. He has been at home in oldest 
 and in eighteenth-century France, although 
 Racine is the Frenchman he loves best. In the 
 France of yesterday he has been an exile and 
 suddenly a soldier with a sharp sword. Never 
 did gentleness make cleaner wounds. 
 
 It is years ago now that Anatole France 
 looked out of his window, watched the crowds 
 
"Le Petit Pierre" 281 
 
 going along the quais that border the Seine, 
 saw them as the posterity of the great French 
 writers, and thought the chance slight of their 
 appreciating these masters with justice. I have 
 a little more faith in the men and women of 
 the future, in the posterity of Anatole France. 
 With imperfect understanding and a stumbling 
 tongue one of these will say to him, upon put- 
 ting down one of his books a few hundred years 
 hence: "Your eyes saw at the same instant, and 
 your mind often recorded in two adjectives, no 
 further than a conjunction apart, those contra- 
 dictory aspects of man which most of us can 
 see only by making a long journey from one per- 
 ception to the other. Your words keep all their 
 beauty, your sentences are refined gold, you 
 are wise in all times, your place in our hearts 
 is certain; and since, having had it so long, it 
 is impossible you should ever lose it, our debt 
 of gratitude must rest unpaid for ever and ever." 
 Or if, dissatisfied with his own words, as he 
 well may be, he looks elsewhere for better words 
 of praise and gratitude, he will not have to look 
 long. Anatole France has described again and 
 again, most of all when least thinking of him- 
 self, when looking at the clear and delicate lines 
 
282 Books and Things 
 
 of some landscape that he loves, the impression 
 left by his books. Which of these landscapes 
 shall we choose, from Egypt, from Ionia, Italy 
 or France? You remember how Therese, in " Le 
 Lys Rouge," leans on the balustrade at Fiesole, 
 breathes the spring air and looks at Florence, 
 and you remember what is said to her: 
 " Regardez, regardez encore, ce que vous voyez 
 est unique au monde. Nulle part la nature n'est 
 a ce point subtile, elegante et fine. Le dieu qui 
 fit les collines de Florence etait artiste. Oh!, il 
 etait joaillier, graveur en medailles, sculpteur, 
 fondeur en bronze et peintre; c'etait un Flor- 
 entin. II n'a fait que cela au monde. Le reste 
 est d'une main moins delicate, d'un travail 
 moins parfait. Comment voulez-vous que cette 
 colline violette de San Miniato, d'un relief si 
 ferme et si pur, soit de l'auteur du Mont Blanc? 
 Ce n'est pas possible. Ce paysage a la beaute 
 d'une medaille ancienne et d'une peinture pre- 
 cieuse. II est une parfaite et mesuree oeuvre 
 d'art." 
 
 Anatole France has long been attached to the 
 belief that wherever our eyes may fall we see 
 only ourselves, and never has he seen himself 
 in a clearer light than when, thinking only of 
 
" Le Petit Pierre " 283 
 
 Florence, he wrote these lines, although they 
 give us no idea of the fighter that he has been, 
 no idea of that kindly derision which is too hon- 
 est to disappear at the sight of goodness, and 
 which nothing but beauty has made him forget. 
 
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