LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 AND OTHERS
 
 Literary Statesmen 
 
 And Others 
 Essays on Men seen from a Distance 
 
 BY 
 
 NORMAN HAPGOOD 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & CO. 
 CHICAGO y NEW YORK 
 
 MDCCCXCVII
 
 COPYRIGHT 1897 BY 
 HERBERT S. STONE & CO.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. LORD ROSEBERY 3 
 
 II. MR. JOHN MORLEY 19 
 
 III. MR. BALFOUR SEEN FROM A DISTANCE 43 
 
 IV. STENDHAL 69 
 
 V. MRIME AS A CRITIC 115 
 
 VI. AMERICAN ART CRITICISM .... 133 
 
 VII. AMERICAN COSMOPOLITANISM . . . 175 
 
 VIII. HENRY JAMES 193 
 
 2090476
 
 LORD ROSEBERY
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 AND OTHERS 
 
 I 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 LORD ROSEBERY, who has naturally been 
 studied mainly as a statesman, appears, in 
 the little he has written with an eye to 
 literary form, as an artist of marked quali- 
 ties, of talents which are high, although they 
 do not combine into genius. A reader of 
 the "Life of Pitt," or of various addresses, 
 or even of some of the political speeches, 
 must feel that the most significant element 
 of the style is charm, composed largely of 
 humor which is gay but not frivolous, of 
 seriousness which is usually far from solemn, 
 and of a taste which, never obtrusive, gives 
 the suggestion of culture to every phrase. 
 
 Of these elements the humor is the most 
 
 individual, and so near akin to other qualities 
 
 that it will bear dwelling on. It is never 
 
 caustic, but friendly and pervasive, often even 
 
 3
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 merry, altogether inspired by temperament. 
 " The son of the respected family physician, 
 who had prescribed colchicum to the elder 
 and port to the younger Pitt, Addington 
 carried into politics the indefinable air of a 
 village apothecary inspecting the tongue of 
 the State." These words are spontaneous, 
 real fun, expressing the overflow of a person- 
 ality, not at all the studied wit of a clever 
 man, and therefore not at all consistent with 
 the popular notion that Lord Rosebery used 
 to sit in his office in the House of Lords, in 
 a chair tipped back, looking into vacancy for 
 happy phrases. If he were seen in that oc- 
 cupation the enjoyment would be greater and 
 the effort less than a description of the atti- 
 tude would suggest. " A strategist of unal- 
 loyed incompetency and unvaried failure," 
 although less expansive than the other quo- 
 tation, has the true ring of fun in it. 
 
 " ' You should forget party,' said the Duke of 
 Argyll. . . . The Duke of Argyll cannot forget 
 his party, because his party is himself. Whatever 
 may be your wishes, however noble may be your 
 aspirations, when you have a party in that compact 
 and singular, I might almost say that portable, form, 
 it is one of which you cannot divest yourself, and 
 it is one of which I think the Duke, on reflection, 
 would be unwilling to divest himself." 
 4
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 In the same speech he said : 
 
 " Now, if all hope of union has not fled before 
 this, it is due, in my opinion, mainly to the patience 
 of our leaders, who, when they have been buffeted 
 on one cheek, have meekly offered the other. But 
 I am bound to say this, that the time may come 
 when we shall come to an end both of our patience 
 and of our cheeks." 
 
 It is only fair, since his treatment of humor 
 is to be used as an indication of Lord Rose- 
 bery's general character, to put in contrast to 
 these expressions of easy and genial amuse- 
 ment an example of his crudities, which a're 
 extremely rare, and sometimes comical, in 
 spite of their artificiality. " By a strange 
 accident, he became the leader of the no- 
 bility; but they supported him on their 
 necks, for his foot was there." 
 
 That humor may fairly be called a central 
 point of Lord Rosebery's character is indicated 
 by the kinship between that quality and the 
 others in which he is attractive. Next to 
 brilliancy of isolated perceptions, taste is the 
 most essential element of humor, and Lord 
 Rosebery's seldom errs. In his frequent 
 references to art and literature there is no 
 suggestion of pedantry. In his most earnest 
 passages there is seldom declamation. Pad- 
 5
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 ding of all kinds, repetitions, adjectives em- 
 ployed to give sound, all the ordinary faults, 
 are absent. There is no great subtlety, no 
 pretentious paradox, no lack of calm and 
 sure literary judgment. Dulness, above all, 
 is a thing the writer abhors, even more, if 
 possible, than grossness. In the " Life of 
 Pitt," perhaps, of all the excellences the 
 most conspicuous is a speed of style result- 
 ing altogether from this avoidance of clog- 
 ging or distracting errors, a speed which 
 suggests not haste but clearness of thought 
 and the restraint of culture, and is as 
 noticeable in the comment as in the pure 
 narrative. The felicity of phrase, although 
 varying in degree, is always prominent enough 
 to add to the faultlessness of the style a con- 
 stant positive charm. " But these are like 
 the wars of Marlborough and Turenne, 
 splendid achievements, which light up the 
 epoch, without exercising a permanent influ- 
 ence on the world ; to us, at any rate, the 
 sheet-lightning of history." No single phrase 
 could be found to give the quality of Lord 
 Rosebery's half-humorous imagination better 
 than this metaphor. His characterizations of 
 persons, also, even when they are serious, 
 have a dash allied to wit. " He charmed 
 equally the affections of Carlyle and Fitz- 
 6
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 patrick, the meteoric mind of Burke, the 
 pedantic vanity of Parr, the austere virtue 
 of Horner, and the hedgehog soul of Rogers." 
 Any number of passages to show this pervad- 
 ing, graceful, friendly irony might be found. 
 
 " The uneasy whisper circulated, and the joints 
 of the lords became as water. The peers, who 
 yearned for lieutenancies or regiments, for stars or 
 strawberry leaves ; the prelates, who sought a larger 
 sphere of usefulness ; the minions of the bed-cham- 
 ber and the janissaries of the closet ; all, temporal 
 or spiritual, whose convictions were unequal to their 
 appetite, rallied to the royal nod." 
 
 Certainly these genial touches do not lack 
 picturesqueness. They must please a culti- 
 vated man with a combination of grace and 
 vividness which comes just to the edge of 
 imagination, near enough to borrow some of 
 its attractiveness. It might be said, perhaps, 
 that Lord Rosebery appreciates imagination, 
 and has some of it, but is unable to give it to 
 his style. A passage coming as near to it as 
 any is this : 
 
 " It was in Holland that his first complication 
 arose. On that familiar board all the great powers 
 of Europe were moving their pawns, the fitful 
 philanthropist, Joseph the Second, who had opened 
 the games with his usual disastrous energy ; the old 
 - ^ 7 --
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 fox at Berlin ; the French monarchy, still bitten 
 with the suicidal mania of fermenting republics 
 against Great Britain ; and the crafty voluptuary of 
 St. Petersburg." 
 
 Lord Rosebery comes within sight both of 
 literary and political imagination, and is kept 
 from reaching them by traits which are at 
 once his powers and his limitations. Taste 
 and appreciation can take him no farther than 
 this. Clearness and measure put him down 
 at a point from which he should be carried 
 on by emotion and will, if he were to add to 
 the intelligence which he has the power which 
 he lacks. Some passages reach nobility, 
 none reaches grandeur ; many are persuasive, 
 none is compelling. What is lacking is as 
 necessary to a philosopher or a poet as it is 
 to a man of action. It is easiest, perhaps, to 
 see it as a moral weakness, although it is 
 of equal importance from the aesthetic and 
 the practical sides. It is a want of unity, 
 of strong single feeling, of purpose. His 
 perceptions, like his efforts, are unsustained 
 and unrelated, lacking in concentration and 
 therefore in force. There is honesty, frank- 
 ness, generosity; there are convictions; but 
 there is no single unifying conviction or con- 
 ception, no faith, or passion, or need of ac- 
 complishment. So it is that the more serious 
 8
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 the subject, the farther removed from the 
 spectacular intellectual world, the nearer to a 
 reality demanding action, the less adequate is 
 Lord Rosebery in speaking or writing. As 
 long as the tone is light, the unrelated bril- 
 liant flashes, the frequent pleasant places, 
 seem sufficient; but when the moral sense is 
 aroused, when force and massing power are 
 needed, impressiveness is called for. From 
 the last citation, which was a success, it is but 
 a step to others just as well written, but none 
 the less, on account of their subjects, failures. 
 Fairness, truth, and clearness, are pleasing 
 always, but color and warmth, the inspira- 
 tion of a character, are needed to make some 
 ideas live. The political aspect of this very 
 general truth has been stated, somewhat un- 
 sympathetically, by Lord Rosebery himself: 
 
 " Few supreme parliamentary speeches have per- 
 haps ever been delivered by orators who have been 
 unable to convince themselves, not absolutely that 
 they are in the right, but that their opponents are 
 absolutely in the wrong, and the most abandoned 
 of scoundrels to boot, for holding a contrary opin- 
 ion. No less a force, no feebler flame than this, 
 will sway or incense the mixed temperaments of 
 mankind." 
 
 But that is only the more paltry side of the 
 
 popular demand for a strong and lasting 
 
 9
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 faith, and for devotion to its requirements. 
 Again Lord Rosebery speaks for himself: 
 " Fox could, indeed, lay down principles for 
 all time ; but the moment the game was afoot, 
 they ceased to govern his conduct." With 
 this may be put his assertion that " the Eng- 
 lish love a statesman whom they can under- 
 stand, or at least think they can understand." 
 What they sympathetically comprehend is 
 rather earnestness and power than grace and 
 neutral justice. After a paragraph in which 
 he sums up the most important influences 
 on Pitt's childhood, Lord Rosebery remarks, 
 " All this does not amount to much ; " and he 
 repeats identically the same phrase after talk- 
 ing of Pitt's literary tastes. It is not true ; it 
 is an expression of self-consciousness, and a 
 small thing could hardly illustrate more clearly 
 the weakness of mere refinement, judged even 
 by literary standards. 
 
 To reconcile the assertion that Lord Rose- 
 bery is serious with the assertion that his 
 greatest failure is moral, would be to draw a 
 line with exactness about his character. Not 
 only is he gifted, refined, and elegant, but he 
 has qualities more distinctly moral, such as 
 courage and openness ; but these moral ele- 
 ments are what might be called negative. 
 His virtues are inactive, and therefore depress- 
 
 10
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 ing to most men. Like the famous creation 
 of Buridan, he sees so clearly the reasonable- 
 ness of opposite courses that he stands mo- 
 tionless. It is easy to see a relation between 
 the enthusiasm, the spirit, the self abandon- 
 ment that are necessary to a moving style and 
 the power of final decision in action ; and the 
 literary as well as the practical defect is con- 
 spicuous in Lord Rosebery. Nothing could 
 make him commit a wrong. Not even popu- 
 larity, which he likes, could lead him to 
 speak a disingenuous word, or do the small- 
 est act in which he did not believe. His 
 speech at Edinburgh, after his resignation 
 from the leadership, was strong in calm vera- 
 city and generosity. It is easy to grow en- 
 thusiastic in thinking of such virtues, and it 
 is with sadness that one who is won as much 
 by his integrity as by his culture sees how 
 little these things avail to give greatness or 
 importance when the possessor lacks moral 
 authority. 
 
 Certainly mere grace could hardly be more 
 perfect than it is in the Edinburgh speech. 
 What could have a better tone than the 
 reference to the old leader who had just 
 helped to show the world his 
 failure ? 
 
 ii
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 " Perhaps Mr. Gladstone has been the indirect 
 cause, or the latest indirect cause, of the action that 
 I have thought right to take, and to which you have 
 alluded. But let none think that for that reason I 
 have regretted his intervention in the Armenian 
 question. It is now seventeen years ago since Mr. 
 Gladstone came to Midlothian. I remember then 
 making a speech in which I said that we welcomed 
 the sight of a great statesman, full of years and full 
 of honors, coming down at his advanced period of 
 life to fight one supreme battle on behalf of liberty 
 in Europe. Little did I think then that seventeen 
 years later I should see a still nobler sight a states- 
 man the same statesman fuller still of years, 
 and, if possible, still fuller of honors, coming out 
 and leaving a well-earned retirement, which the 
 whole nation watches with tenderness and solic- 
 itude, to fight another battle, but I hope not the 
 last, on behalf of the principles in which his life 
 has been spent" 
 
 The cartoons show us Lord Rosebery 
 quietly reading in his study, while the Arme- 
 nians perish. Under the brutal exaggeration 
 is the truth that in no emergency does he lose 
 his literary interest, that it is his distinction 
 and his limitation to be always in the artistic 
 attitude. In this same speech, in one of its 
 most earnest and significant passages, he can 
 stop to give his hearers a piece of literary 
 
 counsel : 
 
 12
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 " Cromwell interfered, it is true, on behalf of 
 people oppressed much as these Armenians are. He 
 wrote, or rather he signed, some letters on that sub- 
 ject, which were written by John Milton and signed 
 by Oliver Cromwell, an august conjunction, 
 which in their agony and vehemence of pathos still 
 thrill our hearts across the generations that separate 
 us. And, gentlemen, if this Eastern question has no 
 other result than this to you, I hope it will make 
 you betake yourselves to those sublime despatches." 
 
 In prose, in short, Lord Rosebery is im- 
 peccable. Seldom has he tried to leap be- 
 yond this boundary ; but the one time I know 
 of when he did endeavor to glorify his feel- 
 ing and his language, to put into his words 
 the color of poetry, he failed with pitiable 
 completeness. When he tried to put ex- 
 plicitly the deeper feelings, which to be con- 
 vincingly expressed must be spoken in quite 
 a different tone, he produced something of 
 which it is hardly too much to say that, honest 
 in feeling as it is, it is in the result mere 
 declamation. 
 
 " In this place, and in this day, it all seems pres- 
 ent to us, the house of anguish, the thronged 
 churchyard, the weeping neighbors. We feel our- 
 selves part of the mourning crowd ; we hear their 
 volleys and their muffled drums ; we bow our heads 
 as the coffin passes, and acknowledge with tears the
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 inevitable doom. Pass, heavy hearse, with thy 
 weary freight of shattered hopes and exhausted 
 frame ; pass with thy simple pomp of fatherless 
 bairns, and sad, moralizing friends ; pass with the 
 sting of death to the victory of the grave ; pass with 
 the perishable, and leave us the eternal." 
 
 There is no passion in all this, there is only 
 calm observation, trying to speak a language 
 more affecting than its own. It is not the 
 real Rosebery at all. 
 
 Or, rather, it is not the Rosebery his fairest 
 admirers spontaneously think of. Their Rose- 
 bery comes back to them when, in the same 
 speech, he calls puff and advertisement " in- 
 tellectual cosmetics," frail and fugitive, rarely 
 surviving their subject. This is the laughing 
 Lord Rosebery, easy, happy in wit and shrewd 
 perceptions, pleasing gifts, and attractive per- 
 sonality ; the man who in his boyhood is said 
 to have planned out his future as a brilliant 
 show, calmly deciding to be Prime Minister 
 and to win the Derby ; the statesman whose 
 whole career has been an illustration of the 
 futility in large action of a mind which in 
 sport is so charming. What more natural 
 than that his shrewdness and elegance should 
 even trouble the average Englishman, should 
 certainly be no compensation, since the aver- 
 age Englishman is so much that Lord Rosc-
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 bery is not? The average Englishman is a 
 man of action, of unconscious poetry in senti- 
 ment but of little artistic feeling, positive, 
 prejudiced, and efficient. Lord Rosebery's is 
 in an extreme degree the critical tempera- 
 ment, and three doubters, as some French- 
 man put it, do not equal one believer. The 
 detached, sceptical, literary temperament has, 
 as a rule, been distrusted by the masses ; and 
 England as a whole, although it has followed 
 men who enjoyed artistic pursuits as side 
 issues, has never followed anybody in whom 
 the artistic qualities were more prominent 
 than the moral and active ones. The people 
 do not admire a man who hates to move until 
 he is convinced on logical grounds, any more 
 than they admire in their intellectual world a 
 thinker who has only rationality. Doubtless 
 men of Lord Rosebery's kind, " corrective 
 sceptics," help to increase culture ; but as in- 
 dividuals they are seldom important in life or 
 letters. "A constitutional statesman," says 
 Bagehot, " is in general a man of common 
 ideas and uncommon abilities." Of Lord 
 Rosebery the reverse would be more nearly 
 true. He has the virtues of the cultivated 
 few, and lacks the abilities that alone can 
 reach the many. 
 1896.
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY
 
 II 
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 MR. MORLEY'S interest to the observer is 
 largely in his distinctness ; for seldom is a 
 man of importance so clear in outline until 
 after his death, when time has wiped out de- 
 tails and placed the individual. Mr. Morley 
 has no details; he has no blurred edges, no 
 puzzles ; he represents a familiar type, and 
 he is distinct, partly for that reason, partly 
 because he is expressive in words, but in a 
 large degree because, since few men of his 
 kind rise so high, he stands apart in the spec- 
 tator's eye alike from other British statesmen 
 and from other English critics. To gain a 
 position of influence in politics, and to assure 
 himself a place in criticism, without the aid of 
 instinct for action, charm of style, personal 
 magnetism, wit, or eloquence, he has certainly 
 kept his gifts employed at a higher rate of 
 interest than is earned by most men of as few 
 talents. His somewhat limited field has been 
 cultivated with a thoroughness that has brought
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 a larger crop than many a richer and broader 
 area. In the moralism where we find so readily 
 the boundaries of his personality we must find 
 also a partial explanation of his accomplish- 
 ment. The difference between him and many 
 other critics caged in the straitness of their 
 convictions lies somewhat in his intellectual 
 mistrust of many of the qualities which limit 
 him, which leads him to avoid some of their 
 worst results and to get out of them as much 
 as they can do. His clear-headed scholarship 
 gains much from this check of his perceptions 
 on his instincts, and so does his statesmanship. 
 Mr. Morley's dozen volumes have given him 
 a settled rank as a critic who is valued by the 
 scholar as highly as by the general reader; 
 and this rank is due largely to his moral 
 nature, to the ethical seriousness which in 
 its extreme is his artistic failure, to his 
 moral nature, which made his attention loyal 
 to a few large facts and principles, and helped 
 him to give order to all of his studies, at 
 whatever sacrifice of vivacity. His misfor- 
 tune is that these principles are not timely, 
 that they do not form a message needed and 
 welcomed by the times, like that of Matthew 
 Arnold, for instance, or that of Ruskin, and 
 of course also because they are not set in a 
 style of distinction, but rather in one soured 
 20
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 by moralism and desiccated by science; so 
 that the row of books stand on the shelf of 
 the temporarily useful merely, read because 
 they give certain information more intelli- 
 gently than any other summary treatises now 
 obtainable. " Historia quoquo modo scripta 
 est semper legitur." Mr. Morley himself 
 finds history always interesting. He handles 
 large subjects with a sincerity and a dignity 
 that testify to their importance. 
 
 Naturally such qualities show at their best 
 in his larger books ; and the lives of Diderot, 
 Rousseau, and Cobden are almost satisfying. 
 In the first two Mr. Morley has allowed the 
 subjects themselves to supply the elements 
 of vividness and beauty in generous quota- 
 tions, while he himself showed judgment in 
 marshalling the surrounding facts. In the 
 life of Cobden he dealt with matters well 
 within the scope of his mind and tempera- 
 ment, and no better work on the subject 
 could be desired. The letters are connected 
 by a narrative and comment written in their 
 own spirit, which is Mr. Morley's in its 
 general tone, while Cobden has the natural 
 grasp of the concrete which Mr. Morley lacks, 
 and lacks the power of abstraction which Mr. 
 Morley has. In succinct narrative Mr. Morley 
 is staccato and dry. He expands only in the 
 
 21
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 region of the general, and there are conse- 
 quently many dreary wastes in his political 
 speeches which are rare in his books. In 
 the life of Rousseau he scolds a little, but he 
 lets the man paint himself, as he does Diderot, 
 while he as editor tells the most important 
 things which these men brought into the world. 
 These three books are the truest foundation 
 of the writer's interest for the world, however 
 much more discussion arbitrary and radical 
 arguments like those in " Compromise " may 
 have aroused. The treatment may seem thin 
 when we have read them all, but in reading 
 them we can hardly fail to find constant food 
 for the interest in serious principles of human 
 progress which Pliny thought strong enough 
 to make all history readable. They tell us 
 almost nothing that is not worth knowing. 
 
 Another superiority of these longer works 
 is that the author's faults are less insistent 
 in them than in the shorter political and lit- 
 erary studies, to say nothing of the political 
 speeches, which will hardly enter into the 
 judgment of the future. The first of these 
 faults or limitations is that in no degree is 
 history a picture to Mr. Morley, it is merely 
 a problem. The past is not brought before 
 the imagination, except in some quotations ; 
 it is only given, like a demonstration in 
 22
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 geometry, to the eye of reason. He him- 
 self speaks in the life of Rousseau of "the 
 greatest question that ever dawns upon any 
 human intelligence that has the privilege of 
 discerning it, the problem of a philosophy 
 and body of doctrine." It is perhaps neces- 
 sary to say of this judgment nothing more 
 than that it is characteristic of its author not 
 only in its sweeping generality but in its 
 frank avowal of his own dominant interest. 
 Mr. Morley has his own body of doctrine com- 
 pact and unchanging, and other quotations 
 will serve to show where it leads him. The 
 scolding at religion; the irrelevant jeers, 
 such as his suggestion that Hume's seasick- 
 ness is probably a satisfaction to the ortho- 
 dox ; the famous small " g," the translation 
 in Goethe's poem of " das uebrige Gott " by 
 " the master power ; " such violent speech 
 inserted parenthetically as " the fatuous opti- 
 mism which insists that somehow justice and 
 virtue do rule in the world," these little 
 offences against taste are obviously part 
 of a larger limitation. The sharpness of his 
 partisanship not only makes his speech 
 bitter; it makes breadth and sympathy of 
 imagination on some aspects of literature 
 impossible to him, just as in some of his 
 speeches he seems to have thrown away 
 23
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 moderation and the critical attitude, and 
 become the mere advocate, endeavoring to 
 gain force by violence and persuasion by 
 contempt. So far does his own panacea 
 carry him that he makes for it claims that 
 in one who has so fiercely pointed out the 
 exaggerations of the claims of revealed reli- 
 gion and the slightness of the connection 
 between belief and character are almost sur- 
 prising : 
 
 " A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual 
 pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine 
 grace in which one may be a larger participant than 
 another ; he can have no incentives to that mutila- 
 tion with which every branch of the church, from 
 the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its 
 degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because the 
 key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of 
 every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, con- 
 templative, in pursuit of a visible common good ; 
 and he can be plunged into no fatal and paralyzing 
 despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active 
 faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, 
 discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, 
 and the work that may be done for men in the 
 fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their 
 burdens by manful hope." 
 
 A part of this philosophy or creed is his 
 constant preaching, in season and out, that 
 24
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 the social is the only worthy point of view, 
 which naturally leads him to revel in the 
 eighteenth century of France, since no period 
 has had more greatness with less individuality, 
 and no modern literature has as strong a 
 social quality with such a dearth of original 
 genius as the French. In his life of Diderot, 
 Mr. Morley points out clearly how the par- 
 ticular sympathies of the great Frenchman 
 in art and letters are the natural result of 
 his social point of view, his liking for 
 Greuge, for instance, and for Richardson. 
 The remarks which Mr. Morley interjects 
 on every opportunity about the family re- 
 lations make a rather picturesque, perhaps 
 a diverting, commentary on similar results, 
 less artistic to be sure, from his own em- 
 phatic social morality. In his Cobden is this 
 judgment, in his sweeping manner : " the great- 
 est of political morals, that ' domestic com- 
 fort is the object of all reforms.' " And in 
 his Voltaire is this still more daring generali- 
 zation: "To have really contributed in the 
 humblest degree, for instance, to a peace 
 between Prussia and her enemies in 1759, 
 would have been an immeasurably greater 
 performance for mankind than any given 
 book which Voltaire could have written." 
 From the same volume is an illustration 
 25
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 which might be paralleled in almost any 
 chapter Mr. Morley has written, for it is 
 a belief so near his heart that it cannot be 
 preached too much : " the general moral 
 that active interest in public affairs is the 
 only sure safeguard against the inhuman 
 egotism, otherwise so nearly inevitable, and 
 in anywise so revolting, of men of letters and 
 men of science." 
 
 Obviously this absorption in ethical stand- 
 ards, in the directly social, leads Mr. Morley 
 much farther than it could lead those more 
 vivid imaginations which play freely and dar- 
 ingly with many aspects of the world ; but 
 it is hard to forbear giving one more example, 
 because, detail though it is, it is so sharp an 
 illustration that it is perhaps worth the space 
 it takes. Everybody remembers with what 
 scorn Mr. Morley attacked religious con- 
 formity, however quiet, in his treatise on 
 compromise. Is it not almost ridiculous 
 after pages of biting reproaches to those 
 who, for one reason and another, deem it 
 best to keep their belief to themselves, to find 
 a passage telling us, in language which is its 
 own comment on the effect of thought on 
 style, in language which has at once the 
 faults of the bar and those of that pulpit foj 
 which he has such a never silent contempt, of 
 26
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 the one case in which we are not to act on 
 the principles which he has been laying down : 
 
 "Where it would give them deep and sincere 
 pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the 
 inspiration of the Bible and so forth, it seems that 
 the younger person is warranted in refraining from 
 saying that he or she does not accept such and such 
 doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or 
 daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to 
 the parent. Where the parent has not earned this 
 attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, 
 the title to the special kind of forbearance of which 
 we are speaking can hardly exist. In an ordinary 
 way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no 
 other person in the world can have, and a man's 
 self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds 
 himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his 
 own father and mother. 
 
 " If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other 
 method over which neither he nor she has any con- 
 trol, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might 
 with some plausibleness contend that he owed her 
 certain limited deference and reserve, just as we 
 admit that he may owe them to his parents. But 
 such is not the case." 
 
 With this truly ingenuous doctrine of the 
 wife compare this little piece of rhetoric : 
 
 " The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable 
 puzzle of those who have no eye for the fact that 
 27
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 such choice is the great match of cajolery between 
 purpose and invisible hazard, with the blessedness 
 of many lives for stake, as intention happens to 
 cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When the 
 match is once over, deep criticism of a game of 
 chance is time wasted." 
 
 It would hardly pay to go too deep into the 
 conflicts of these two extracts, nor is deep 
 search necessary to see in them some of the 
 dangers into which the prophet who can give 
 us solemn assurances in absolute form about 
 the facts of our lives is likely to fall. Nothing, 
 however, leads him into quite such impossible 
 promulgations as these relations, which also 
 lead him nearest to pure sentimentality in 
 expression : 
 
 " So sharp are the goads in a divided house ; so 
 sorely with ache and pain and deep-welling tears do 
 men and women rend into shreds the fine web of 
 one another's lives. But the pity of it, oh, the pity 
 of it!" 
 
 It should be said, however, that this sen- 
 sitiveness sometimes finds more pleasing 
 expression : 
 
 " It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of 
 human life that the time-worn eyes to which a son's 
 success would have brought the purest gladness are 
 so often closed forever before success has come." 
 28
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 Evidently it is in such cases as these not 
 the thing said so much as the way of saying it 
 that makes the weakness. If Mr. Morley had 
 more appreciation of beauty, even if he had 
 not the gifts to express it, he would avoid 
 some of his softest moralizations. His pref- 
 erence of the ethical to the aesthetic point of 
 view is entirely conscious. " I like the drab 
 men best; " and again: "Truth is quiet. . . . 
 Moderation and judgment are, for most pur- 
 poses, more than the flash and glitter even of 
 the genius." The scientific and the ethical 
 spirits have such complete possession of him 
 that it is no wonder that when we read his 
 Voltaire we see very little of the flash and 
 glitter of the genius. " That he values knowl- 
 edge only as a means to social action is one 
 of the highest titles to our esteem that any 
 philosopher can have." Then he has carried 
 this line of thought so far that the definitions 
 of art fixed by centuries of experience are 
 undone to do homage to science : " tragedy to 
 the modern is not rv^rj, but a thing of cause 
 and effect, invariable antecedent and invari- 
 able consquent." The present reaction against 
 the excessive claims of science is not without 
 its analogies to the reaction against the preten- 
 sions of revealed religion. Whatever tragedy 
 may be to the fictitious individual here called 
 29
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 the modern, invariable antecedent and invari- 
 able consequent have yet to justify them- 
 selves in the drama. In the novel they 
 have done much, as they always have; but 
 where is the play that has stood any test of 
 time in which the point of view is not just 
 the opposite, the strangeness of the powers 
 that help or impede the course of man, 
 mystery, not the clearness of the scientific 
 treatise? The wrongs done in the name of 
 science have been no greater to religion 
 than they have been to art and the criticism 
 of art. 
 
 Not the least of the evil results of letting 
 science out of bounds is its injury to language. 
 Mr. Morley's large vocabulary, the result of 
 wide reading in several languages, is made up 
 indiscriminately of words that are formal and 
 lifeless, and words that have real blood in 
 them. His imagery shows the same influence. 
 In the following passage from the essay on 
 Condorcet the "less picturesquely" thrown 
 in parenthetically from a mere passion for 
 passing judgments is full of suggestion about 
 the critic who threw it in ; but the quotation 
 is made especially to show the chilling anti- 
 climax of the non-conducting metaphor after 
 the pictures which preceded it.
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 " ' Cordorcet,' said D'Alembert, 'is a volcano 
 covered with snow.' Said another, less pictur- 
 esquely, * He is a sheep in a passion.' ' You may 
 say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to 
 his person,' wrote Madame Roland, 'that it is a 
 subtle essence soaked in cotton.' The curious 
 mixture disclosed, by sayings like these, of warm 
 impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, 
 only shows that he of whom they were spoken 
 belonged to the class of natures which may be 
 called non-conducting." 
 
 This lack of artistic feeling for language, 
 which accompanies so naturally the cloud 
 of moral judgments which checker all of 
 Mr. Morley's writings, shows itself amus- 
 ingly in single epithets. Turgot, whenever 
 he is mentioned, however casually, is always 
 "the great" or " the wise Turgot; " "justly," 
 " admirably," " rightly," are constantly stuck 
 on to quoted judgments, with no other effect 
 than to destroy the charm ; a swarm of things 
 in the world happen " too often ; " unpleasant 
 words like " hateful " hover over the pages ; 
 if the laxities of genius are mentioned, the 
 English nation is immediately dubbed with 
 an unpleasant adjective for its supposed cen- 
 sures on the genius's conduct ; " only partly 
 true " is fastened like an icicle on to an inter- 
 esting quotation, and so on as long as one
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 chose to continue the task of showing speci- 
 fically the evil wrought in literary execution 
 by the subordination of artistic to moral 
 sensibility. Mr. Morley is well able to see 
 this truth in others. " Macaulay's pages," he 
 says, " are the record of sentences passed, not 
 the presentation of human characters in all 
 their fulness and color." The moralist has 
 his excuse for being and for writing, but it is 
 a commonplace that the laws of art apply to 
 his work also. 
 
 One of the most curious manifestations of 
 the moralistic spirit, more entertaining per- 
 haps than displeasing, the confident dealing 
 in superlatives, has already been mentioned, 
 but the examples of it which Mr. Morley fur- 
 nishes are so numerous and so extreme that 
 the temptation to collect a few of them is 
 irresistible. Voltaire is " the greatest worker 
 that has ever lived," " the most graceful of all 
 courtiers," and " the most trenchant writer in 
 the world ; " his letters " are wittier than any 
 other letters in the world," and his Akakia is 
 " the wittiest and most pitiless of all the purely 
 personal satires in the world." Cicero is " the 
 most eloquent of consuls or men," and 
 Milton's Areopagitica is "the noblest de- 
 fence that was ever made of the noblest of 
 causes." 
 
 3*
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 "The completeness of Catholicism as a self- 
 containing system of life and thought is now harder 
 for Protestants or Sceptics to realize than any other 
 fact in the whole history of human society." 
 
 " These transformations of religion by leavening 
 elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are 
 the most interesting process in the history of truth." 
 
 If we are tempted to ask what is the use of 
 such infallibility, Mr. Morley can tell us by 
 condemning the opposite, which he does, usu- 
 ally sarcastically, with a persistence equal to 
 his untiring statement of universals. He 
 speaks of " the marvellously multiplying be- 
 liefs of which we hear that they may be half 
 right and half wrong;" and of "our lofty 
 new idea of rational freedom as freedom from 
 conviction, and of emanicipation of under- 
 standing as emancipation from the duty of 
 settling whether important propositions are 
 true or false." It is not necessary to decide 
 whether that lofty ideal is new or older than 
 Ecclesiastes, or whether or not it is wiser 
 than its opposite, in order to dispose of the 
 paradox sometimes put forward that Mr. 
 Morley is at heart a Conservative, or of his 
 own assertion that he is " a cautious Whig by 
 temperament." Does he or the nation which 
 he scolds come nearest to deserving this 
 diatribe : 
 
 3 33
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 " This inability to conceive of conduct except as 
 either right or wrong, and, correspondingly in the 
 intellectual order, of teaching except as either true 
 or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit oiparti- 
 pris which has led to the noting of so much injus- 
 tice, disorder, immobility, and darkness in English 
 intelligence." 
 
 The greatest of these limitations, the lack 
 of a message, is perhaps what justified his 
 turning his strength from literature to poli- 
 tics, where his lack of beauty and of free play 
 is a less absolute bar, where concentration 
 and will can do more. The fixed principles 
 without which he would never feel safe were 
 required before he came near to concrete life, 
 while he still saw things from afar; which 
 marks him out clearly from the men whose 
 principles seem to be imbibed unconsciously 
 from the air about them, so that they become 
 the spokesmen of some spirit of the time, 
 changing often to express varying phases of 
 the unseen forces that guide them. The far- 
 reaching results in moulding issues, especially 
 through his influence on a more creative per- 
 sonality, are known ; but even in his steady 
 onward march some of the same qualities 
 that hold him back in literature show them- 
 selves. An American philosopher, in conver- 
 sation, once spoke with enthusiasm of Mr. 
 34
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 Morley's character. " I do not understand 
 your ardor," answered a Liberal statesman. 
 " He is a very sensible man, but he is a pessi- 
 mist." Even when Mr. Morley tells us cheer- 
 ful things, he does not cheer us. There is 
 something dreary about his pictures of im- 
 provements in the human lot. He has learned 
 to talk more of good than of evil, but even 
 when he scolds Mr. Lecky for pessimism 
 there is something disheartening in his words 
 of hope. That he should ever actually lead 
 the nation is not easy to imagine, when we 
 listen to a tone like this : 
 
 " It is the mark of the highest kind of union be- 
 tween sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, 
 and a warm and steadfast glow of feeling, when a 
 man has learnt how little the effort of the individual 
 can do either to hasten or direct the current of 
 human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest 
 pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe 
 honor to that social endeavor which is stimulated 
 and sustained by an enthusiastic confidence in 
 speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more 
 to those who, knowing how remote and precarious 
 and long beyond their own days is the hour of 
 fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than 
 bare hope, and in this strive and endeavor, and still 
 endeavor. Here lies the true strength." 
 
 35
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 The moralizings of the man of action are 
 short and occasional, and they are never reit- 
 erated complaints against the whole nation 
 which they lead. One example of this nether 
 side of the moralist spirit in Mr. Morley must 
 suffice: 
 
 " A community, in short, where the great aim of 
 all classes and orders with power is, by dint of rig- 
 orous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern 
 stopping of the ears, somehow to keep the social 
 pyramid on its apex, with the fatal result of pre- 
 serving for England its glorious fame as a paradise 
 for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a 
 hell for the poor." 
 
 For the statesman who is content to take 
 most of the faults of the nation and the race 
 for granted, to offer no panacea but merely 
 to do in a free spirit what seems best from 
 day to day, Mr. Morley has still little respect, 
 though more perhaps than he had when he 
 spoke of " that sceptical and centrifugal state 
 of mind which now tends to nullify organized 
 liberalism and paralyze the spirit of improve- 
 ment," which perhaps is not unlike his own 
 in content, though with less storm and stress. 
 Yet this very spirit, which takes the world 
 artistically and serenely, often finds much to 
 please it in the graceless but sterling com- 
 batant. Nobody of intelligence would fail to 
 36
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 see Mr. Morley's attractions within the limi- 
 tations of the species to which he belongs. 
 His personality stands out as something real, 
 something impressive. The same persistence 
 that makes him talk forever against such fixed 
 machinery as diplomacy, for instance, made 
 him risk defeat to speak his belief on the eight- 
 hour law. The faithfulness that made him 
 thorough in his historical studies forced him 
 into politics in middle life, because he could 
 not preach one thing and do another. The 
 declamation against book culture borrows 
 a dignity when the declaimer bears up with 
 such courage, after almost total failure, that he 
 gains the ear of the nation. The world has 
 one competent statesman more, and, instead 
 of the hope that Mr. Morley's last literary 
 work might surpass his first, it has the 
 speeches and a few essays in which the old 
 faults are missing, and with them the old 
 virtues. There seems to be even less light 
 in the struggle than at first ; and the pursuit 
 of the higher qualities of style is gone. Yet 
 even from the literary standpoint we can 
 hardly fail to be satisfied that he did what so 
 few do, left his tastes to follow where his rea- 
 son pointed. When we stand off and look at 
 him in this generalized way, his faults are lost 
 in the spectacle. The two characters of states- 
 37
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 man and moralist, he has told us, " are always 
 hard to reconcile, as perhaps any parliamen- 
 tary candidate might tell us. The contrast 
 between lofty writing and slippery policy has 
 been too violent for Seneca's good fame, as 
 it was for Francis Bacon's. It is ever at his 
 own proper risk and peril that a man dares 
 to present high ideals to the world." The 
 inspiration for us in Mr. Morley's case is in 
 the inconceivability of his failure to stand by 
 his ideals. His arduous success marks out 
 the superiority of the true scholar, who is not 
 much out of place anywhere, while his par- 
 ody the pedant, in Mr. Morley's own words, 
 " cursed with the ambition to be a ruler of 
 men, is a curious study. He would be glad 
 not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is 
 lest he be left behind. His consciousness 
 of pure aims allows him to become an ac- 
 complice in the worst of crimes. Suspecting 
 himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens 
 to clear his character as a man of practice by 
 conniving at an enormity." No rational per- 
 son doubts that he is speaking in the tone 
 that most truly represents his deepest feeling 
 when he says : " There are causes that de- 
 mand and deserve fury and energy and the 
 public is to be got at upon no other terms, 
 say Anti-Slavery, or Reform; and men are 
 38
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 
 
 properly adjured to strip off coat and waist- 
 coat, charm or no charm." Certainly there 
 is little of what is properly called charm, but 
 a quality has developed itself gradually which 
 perhaps comes nearer to it than anything 
 else, the tone of quiet sadness in which 
 he sometimes sums up his new experiences, 
 when he speaks of the failure of democracy 
 to lead toward universal peace, or when he 
 says : " It is one of the inscrutable perplex- 
 ities of human affairs, that in the logic of 
 practical life, in order to reach conclusions 
 that cover enough for truth, we are constantly 
 driven to premises that cover too much, and 
 that in order to secure their right weight to 
 justice and reason, good men are forced to 
 fling the two-edged sword of passion into the 
 same scale." 
 
 John Morley's fanaticism, wrote James Rus- 
 sell Lowell, " is always exhilarating to me, 
 though I feel that it would have the same 
 placidly convinced expression if my head 
 were rolling at his feet at the exigence of 
 some principle." That judgment certainly 
 strikes the key-note. Although lack of art 
 or genius has followed Mr. Morley from let- 
 ters into politics, although his love of abso- 
 lute principle is in opposition to the spirit 
 of a time that has no creed, the persistence 
 39
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 which has helped him to escape failure and 
 the straightness of his course make a picture 
 that has some of the stimulus of the heroic. 
 In spite of the distinctness of his qualities, 
 their relative importance changes so readily 
 with the mood of the observer that it is not 
 easy to keep together appreciation of his 
 worth and understanding of his limits. Low- 
 ell, by the humorous choice of words, has 
 been able to suggest the amusing in naming 
 the impressive. On the one hand is the man 
 whose writing is full of the perversities of the 
 dogmatist and the closet philosopher, whose 
 statesmanship lacks instinct and sensitiveness 
 to facts that are too complex for statement, 
 whose whole spirit seems thin and quarrel- 
 some ; and on the other hand is the serious 
 and rather sad thinker who has measured 
 himself without vanity and taken the harder 
 path from a sense of duty, who thinks he sees 
 some changes that will make men happier, 
 and who follows them without fear ; who took 
 up his new fight not to complete his own 
 experience but to obey that truth which ex- 
 ists for him in a more tangible and discerni- 
 ble, and perhaps in a more limited form than 
 it does for most men of his size in our 
 generation. 
 1897. 
 
 40
 
 MR. BALFOUR SEEN FROM 
 A DISTANCE
 
 Ill 
 
 MR. BALFOUR SEEN FROM A 
 DISTANCE 
 
 ALTHOUGH it is difficult to judge fairly from 
 his books alone a man whose activity has 
 taken many forms, the proverb that the style 
 is the man is not an empty phrase. What 
 the written words tell us is truth, though often 
 not the whole truth. Though the traits picked 
 out of the expression of abstract thought may 
 not be the traits that would be prominent in 
 the same man in action, in his social or politi- 
 cal environment, they may be none the less 
 intimately an outline of the whole personality. 
 Many persons who have no opportunity to 
 watch Mr. Balfour in Parliament, in society, 
 in recreation ; no opportunity to know the 
 facts of his early training and of his present 
 life, have by necessity been driven, when they 
 wished to make more definite their idea of 
 the picturesque young leader, to pick up sug- 
 gestions in his books ; and of these many 
 persons, a number get less from examining 
 43
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 technically his system of philosophy than they 
 do from looking with some minuteness at his 
 habits of expression. 
 
 To many a college student in America the 
 name of A. J. Balfour, which he discovers on 
 the shelves of the Department of Philosophy, 
 is almost unknown. By a class of students 
 which is in our larger universities consider- 
 able in size, the discovery of a " Defence of 
 Philosophic Doubt " is almost invariably wel- 
 comed with enthusiasm, as doubtless hereafter 
 his later and more popular book will be wel- 
 comed. The young student whose love of 
 logic has made him a personal enemy of some 
 of the present scientists is delighted at the 
 trenchant style in which his newly discovered 
 ally attacks the inconsistencies of the leaders 
 of thought. Mr. Balfour does not make con- 
 verts, but he gives welcome weapons to think- 
 ers whose attitude is the same and whose 
 strength is less. The young metaphysician 
 who has not been able to crystallize his pre- 
 judice into a critical system finds in the books 
 of Mr. Balfour much help in stating reasons 
 for his rejection of the various systems of 
 philosophy, and thus, being able to accom- 
 plish that necessary work, he is able, if other 
 things are in him, to go on more quickly. " If 
 speculations which do nothing but destroy 
 44
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 seem to be, as indeed they are, unsatisfactory 
 even from a practical point of view," says Mr. 
 Balfour in " A Defence of Philosophic Doubt," 
 " the reader must recollect that definite and 
 rational certainty is not likely to be obtained 
 unless we first pass through a stage of definite 
 and rational doubt." 
 
 A rational certainty, however, though it 
 may be a good we get from Mr. Balfour, is 
 not the one we go to him for. His readers, 
 far from seeking the removal of difficulties, 
 revel in them. The attraction is less in the 
 final result of his thought than in the adroit- 
 ness with which he exposes inconsistency in 
 established thought. Naturally a youth of 
 logical and critical bent, who has become 
 irritated at the deference shown to men of 
 more fertility than coherence, revels in a pas- 
 sage like this : 
 
 "Looking back over the nineteen chapters we 
 have been considering, and over the earlier half of 
 the ' First Principles,' it is impossible not to regret 
 that the ambition to produce a ' System of Philoso- 
 phy ' should have forced our author into paths where 
 his remarkable powers of mind show to compara- 
 tively small advantage. Could he have been con- 
 tent with giving to the world ' Suggestions toward 
 a Theory of the Universe on the Basis of the Ordi- 
 nary Scientific Postulates,' his astonishing faculty 
 
 45
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 for collecting from every department of knowledge 
 the facts which seem to tell in his favor would have 
 had free scope, while his somewhat blunted sensi- 
 bilities in the matter of difficulties and contradic- 
 tions might have been of actual advantage. In 
 trespassing on metaphysical grounds, the virtues 
 which he possesses as a thinker his extraordinary 
 range of information and his ingenuity in framing 
 original and suggestive hypotheses become com- 
 paratively useless, while the robust faith in his 
 methods and results by which he is animated 
 necessary as I admit it to be in order that he may be 
 sustained through his protracted labors is from a 
 speculative point of view an almost unmixed evil." 
 
 Certainly such cutting summaries, in which 
 he seems to rejoice in a vocabulary fitted to 
 his critical acuteness, are from an artistic 
 standpoint the best things he does. This, 
 like his other powers, is more obvious than 
 his defects, and it may be for this reason, as 
 well as for the purpose of exhibiting an easy 
 magnanimity, that the many reviewers who 
 have attacked his results have passed off his 
 literary qualities with a few words of praise. 
 Yet the defects of his style, though less salient, 
 are as undeniable as its merits. Indeed, in 
 literary skill he is often so deficient as to 
 surprise the reader who has a taste for close 
 examination. 
 
 46
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Balfour's highest literary merits 
 may be roughly summarized as subtlety and 
 originality. It is his subtlety in analysis that 
 makes his satire, whether or not it is backed 
 by conclusive arguments, go for a point at 
 which it will hurt, and where it will be diffi- 
 cult to parry. Although it is, for instance, 
 possible to believe that there is progress in 
 human understanding, and that this belief is 
 final and needs no support, it is not easy, in 
 reading the following dialogue, to avoid the 
 feeling that the scientist is involved in a 
 fallacy : 
 
 "Evolutionist: However great the superiority of 
 my views may be over those of my remote ancestors, 
 or, indeed, over those of my contemporaries who 
 are still under the influence of tradition, there is 
 every reason to suppose that the causes which have 
 produced this superiority are still in operation, and 
 that we may look forward to a time when the opin- 
 ions of mankind will bear the same relation to ours 
 as ours bear to those of primitive man. 
 
 " Inquirer : A glorious hope ! One, neverthe- 
 less, which would seem to imply that many of our 
 present views are either entirely wrong, or will 
 require profound modification. 
 
 "Evolutionist: Doubtless. 
 
 " Inquirer : It would be interesting to know which 
 of our opinions, or which class of them, is likely to 
 be improved in this way off the face of the earth. 
 47
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 For example, is the opinion you have just expressed, 
 that beliefs are developed according to law, is 
 that opinion likely to be destroyed by develop- 
 ment?" 
 
 Of course Mr. Balfour himself is not con- 
 fused. No one knows better than he that, as 
 some beliefs must be final, it is possible, with 
 clearness at least, to take one's final stand 
 on a belief in human progress. To say that 
 progress may remove the belief in progress 
 is simply to express a disagreement with the 
 final assumption. It is like disagreeing with 
 Mr. Balfour's belief in God. He believes in 
 God because the belief unifies a number of 
 other beliefs which, for working purposes, he 
 wishes to hold. The scientist's belief in prog- 
 ress has the same foundation. 
 
 Although, however, Mr. Balfour can thus 
 use his subtlety in support of an argument 
 known by him to be unsound, he is even 
 stronger in expression when he supports prin- 
 ciples in which he believes. To say that 
 these principles are negative is not to sug- 
 gest any dislike of them. When the author's 
 strong tastes are attacked as unprogressive, 
 he resents the attack with a tu quoque argu- 
 ment of such vividness that it comes nearer 
 than anything else in his books to emotional 
 power. Sometimes the thrust is delicate, as 
 48
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 in this reference to Matthew Arnold's substi- 
 tute for the established faith : 
 
 " There are those, again, who reject in its ordinary 
 shape the idea of divine superintendence, but who 
 conceive that they can escape from philosophic 
 reproach by beating out the idea yet a little thinner, 
 and admitting that there does exist somewhere a 
 'power which makes for righteousness.' " 
 
 Sometimes it is rough, even crude, especially 
 when he speaks of the positivists : 
 
 " Mr. Spencer, who pierces the future with a surer 
 gauge than I can make the least pretence to, looks 
 confidently forward to a time when the relation of 
 man to his surroundings will be so happily contrived 
 that the reign of absolute righteousness will prevail ; 
 conscience, grown unnecessary, will be dispensed 
 with ; the path of least resistance will be the path 
 of virtue ; and not the ' broad ' but the * narrow 
 way ' will ' lead to destruction.' These excellent 
 consequences seem to me to flow very smoothly 
 and satisfactorily from his particular doctrine of 
 evolution, combined with his particular doctrine 
 of morals. But I confess that my own personal 
 gratification at the prospect is somewhat dimmed 
 by the reflection that the same kind of causes which 
 make conscience superfluous will relieve us from 
 the necessity of intellectual effort, and that by the 
 time we are all perfectly good we shall also be all 
 perfectly idiotic." 
 
 4 49
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 The insertion of such sign-posts of irony as 
 " excellent " consequences, " his particular " 
 doctrine, and the pretentious final phrase 
 which covers the venerable contention that 
 the struggle with evil is necessary for intelli- 
 gent life, is characteristic of his rougher satire. 
 Though the satire is rather refreshing, even 
 to one who laughs at it rather than at its ob- 
 ject, it is hardly dignified, and it is a contrast 
 to the style in which he expresses, with no 
 enemy in mind, his own beliefs. 
 
 Critics of his philosophy often assert that 
 he has no beliefs. They charge him with 
 insincerity, and attempt to prove the charge 
 by showing him stating at one time one truth 
 and at another its opposite. It is undoubt- 
 edly easy to bring together passages on both 
 sides of all of the philosophic controversies 
 which he discusses. A striking contrast, for 
 instance, might be made between his pictures 
 of the bad effects of the over emphasis of 
 science, and his explanations of the absolute 
 impossibility of knowing what present tend- 
 encies are for good and what for bad. It is no 
 cause for wonder that some readers feel an in- 
 consistency between the author's confident 
 statements of the ultimate results that will fol- 
 low from certain beliefs or from certain failures 
 to believe, and such a passage as this : 
 5
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 " The ceaseless conflict, the strange echoes of 
 long-forgotten controversies, the confusion of pur- 
 pose, the success in which lay deep the seeds of 
 future evils, the failures that ultimately divert the 
 otherwise inevitable danger, the heroism which 
 struggles to the last for a cause predoomed to 
 defeat, the wickedness which sides with right, and 
 the wisdom which huzzas with the triumph of folly, 
 fate, meanwhile, amidst this turmoil and per- 
 plexity, working silently towards the predestined 
 end, all these form together a subject the con- 
 templation of which need surely never weary." 
 
 Why, then, one might well ask, may we not 
 look at the confused efforts of the scientist as 
 an interesting part of this incalculable specta- 
 cle, instead of quarrelling with him over some 
 immediate consequences that we think bad? 
 Of course the answer is really simple. Con- 
 sistency, to quote Emerson, is a vice of small 
 minds. The fact that Mr. Balfour's argu- 
 ments do not all pull in the same direction is 
 not an argument against, but for his sincerity. 
 His desires and his beliefs are various. He 
 likes to use his acuteness in pointing out the 
 incongruities in the creeds of others, and he 
 is aware, also, of the flaws in his own doc- 
 trines, although, as part of the game, he pro- 
 tects as well as he can the vulnerable points 
 in his own creed. His insincerity is superfi-
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 cial. He is perfectly frank with himself. That 
 he knows that his own vulnerable points are 
 much like those of his adversaries, and covers 
 this fact for forensic purposes, is no reason to 
 doubt his earnestness. Though the talk occa- 
 sionally made about his ardent faith by the 
 orthodox persons whom he supports is some- 
 what absurd, he has a strong sincerity of his 
 own sceptical kind, a sincerity as strong as 
 that of any of his positivist opponents, and 
 to one seeking the incongruous equally gro- 
 tesque. Sincerity as a matter of temperament, 
 of general attitude toward life, he has in abun- 
 dance. Life to him is serious in a high degree. 
 With any detail of it, a religion, a personality, 
 a science, he deals lightly in some moods; 
 but toward existence as a whole he is never 
 flippant; through all his doubt and satire is 
 a genuine sense of wonder, interest, and igno- 
 rance, a feeling of the complexity and awful- 
 ness of life, the feeling that gives dignity 
 to the ablest sceptics. One feels this less in 
 single passages than in the books as a whole. 
 The reason for this is that Mr. Balfour's single 
 passages usually show more his weakness than 
 his strength. However, this sense of wonder, 
 resignation, and powerlessness is frequently 
 shown, sometimes with rhetoric, sometimes 
 simply. It is seen less convincingly in his 
 5 2
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 direct exhortations and statements of belief 
 than in indirect ways, such as his tone in his 
 appreciations of character, especially his 
 appreciation of noble men engaged in futile 
 efforts. In such estimates, where it is not the 
 fighter but the man of taste who speaks, his 
 style loses its crudity, and gains a warmth and 
 simplicity that touch the feelings and gain the 
 approval of the reader who can take in the 
 flights of militant rhetoric only an ironical 
 interest. This side of Mr. Balfour is in the 
 last part of this passage from his latest book : 
 
 " Metaphysicians are poets who deal with the 
 abstract and the supersensible instead of the con- 
 crete and the sensuous. To be sure, they are poets 
 with a difference. Their appropriate and char- 
 acteristic gifts are not the vivid realization of that 
 which is given in experience ; their genius does not 
 prolong, as it were, and echo through the remotest 
 regions of feeling the shock of some definite emo- 
 tion ; they create for us no new worlds of things and 
 persons ; nor can it be often said that the product 
 of their labors is a thing of beauty. . . . Yet, in 
 spite of all this, they can only be justly estimated by 
 those who are prepared to apply to them a quasi- 
 aesthetic standard. . . . For claims to our admira- 
 tion will still be found in their brilliant intuitions, in 
 the subtlety of their occasional arguments, in their 
 passion for the Universal and _the Abiding, in their 
 53
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 steadfast faith in the rationality of the world, in 
 the devotion with which they are content to live 
 and move in realms of abstract speculation too far re- 
 moved from ordinary interests to excite the slightest 
 sympathy in the breasts even of the cultivated few." 
 
 This passage illustrates what I called his 
 second power, originality. He has generally 
 most originality where he has least obvious 
 subtlety. Originality in this sense is direct- 
 ness of thought, freshness of point of view, 
 individuality. To be original, said Goethe, 
 is to say and do, as though it had never been 
 done before, what many say and do every 
 day. It is in his tastes, his enjoyments, and 
 his sympathies, that Mr. Balfour shows most 
 of this individual thought and feeling. The 
 sympathetic picture of the metaphysician 
 illustrates it. It is illustrated also, for in- 
 stance, in his sympathy with the average 
 man's motiveless curiosity. Of the many 
 men who recognize that the consequences of 
 an interest are not the only standard of ap- 
 preciation, that there is the direct aesthetic 
 standard also, few give an expression to these 
 immediate values of more convincing sincerity 
 than the expression of Mr. Balfour : 
 
 " We hear much of what is called ' idle curiosity, 1 
 but I am loath to brand any form of curiosity as 
 54
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 necessarily idle. Take, for example, one of the 
 most singular, but in this age one of the most uni- 
 versal, forms in which it is accustomed to manifest 
 itself, I mean that of an exhaustive study of the 
 morning and evening papers. It is certainly 
 remarkable that any person who has nothing to get 
 by it should destroy his eyesight and confuse his 
 brain by a conscientious attempt to master the dull 
 and doubtful details of the European diary daily 
 transmitted to us by ' Our Special Correspondent.' 
 But it must be remembered that this is only a some- 
 what unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love 
 of knowledge which moves men to penetrate Polar 
 snows, to build up systems of philosophy, or to 
 explore the secrets of the remotest heavens. ... I 
 admit, of course, at once that discoveries the most 
 apparently remote from human concerns have often 
 proved themselves of the utmost commercial or 
 manufacturing value. But they require no such 
 justification for their existence, nor were they striven 
 for with any such object." 
 
 This sympathy with a thing for itself, not 
 for its consequences, is the one element of 
 imagination that Mr. Balfour has. He lacks 
 the creative, the expressive elements. He 
 cannot give life to a character sketch, or pas- 
 sion to an argument, although his sympathy 
 with the logic of many points of view is keen. 
 " Argument is all I have to offer," he says in 
 closing his " Defence of Philosophic Doubt." 
 55
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 The phrase has the sound of grave resignation 
 to a limitation. His arguments sometimes 
 make us feel that the author has warmth, con- 
 viction, sympathy. The warmth is for many 
 things, excessive for none; the conviction is 
 of the absolute values of certain temperaments 
 and attitudes, apart from any outside standard 
 of worth ; the sympathy is with the rational 
 essence of a character, not with its details, its 
 concrete embodiment. This personality, lack- 
 ing as it is in brilliant colors, is one for which 
 it is possible to have strong affection and deep 
 respect, for it is earnest and it is individual. 
 One may care little for Mr. Balfour's skilful 
 force, and much for his breadth of sympathy 
 and for the first-hand quality of his thought. 
 The happiest illustrations of his personality 
 in his style are in homely similes : 
 
 " Do they follow, I mean, on reason qua reason, 
 or are they, like a schoolboy's tears over a proposi- 
 tion of Euclid, consequences of reasoning, but not 
 conclusions from it?" 
 
 This is Mr. Balfour at his best, exact, ready, 
 at once harmonious and grave, with a simpli- 
 city of illustration well suited to his subtlety 
 of distinction : 
 
 "... the right of every individual to judge for 
 himself is like the right of every man who possesses 
 56
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 a balance at his banker's to require its immediate 
 payment in sovereigns. The right may be un- 
 doubted, but it can only be safely enjoyed on 
 condition that too many persons do not take it 
 into their heads to exercise it together." 
 
 Sometimes, though less often, there is the 
 same felicity in his more serious, or rather 
 more solemn, expressions. The felicity is 
 naturally rarer in expressing moods that are 
 taken with effort. Religion, in the sense in 
 which he defends it, is not an emotion with 
 Mr. Balfour. He has not even a feeling of 
 congeniality and companionship with it. He 
 is only its protector. It is religion as a branch 
 of aesthetics, and religion as a conclusion of 
 logic, that are spontaneous interests for him. 
 When he takes a high, solemn tone about it, 
 he is flowery and stilted. It is when he talks 
 with his native ease and irony that his fresh- 
 ness, urbanity, and clearness appear : 
 
 " We do not, for example, step over a precipice 
 because we are dissatisfied with all the attempts 
 to account for gravitation. In theology, however, 
 experience does lean too timidly on theory. . . . 
 Because they cannot contrive to their satisfaction 
 a system of theological jurisprudence which shall 
 include Redemption as a leading case, Redemption 
 is no longer to be counted among the consolations 
 of mankind." 
 
 57
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Mr. Balfour is, then, at his best remarkably 
 keen, apt, simple, and individual. Of the 
 faults to be set opposite these merits the 
 largest is effort Not only is the argument 
 often perfunctory and dry, but the rhetoric 
 with which it is supported is forced and flat. 
 Perhaps a satisfactory proof of this is in 
 the last half of a passage which has been 
 praised more than any other Mr. Balfour 
 has written : 
 
 " Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to 
 teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, 
 the heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His 
 very existence is an accident, his story a brief and 
 transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of 
 the planets. Of the combination of causes which 
 first converted a dead organic compound into the 
 living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as 
 yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such 
 beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit 
 nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually 
 evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience 
 enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough 
 to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, 
 and see that its history is of blood and tears, of 
 helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acqui- 
 escence, of empty aspirations." 
 
 One of the most striking examples of his 
 weak efforts for literary effect is in the middle 
 58
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 of one of his most interesting passages. In 
 speaking of Handel he is trying to suggest a 
 quality, "the one most valued in modern 
 art," which Handel lacks : 
 
 "Pathos hardly renders it; for though it can 
 hardly be cheerful, it need be impregnated with 
 no more than the faintest and most luxurious flavor 
 of melancholy. There is in it something indirect, 
 ambiguous, complex." 
 
 Thus far all is well ; but now comes an ab- 
 surd statement absurdly illustrated : " Though 
 in itself positive enough, it is, perhaps, most 
 easily described by negatives. It is not grief, 
 nor joy, nor despair, nor merriment." Obvi- 
 ously the statement that it is best described 
 by negatives is put in to introduce the string 
 of words in the next sentence. To say that 
 this vague melancholy is not grief is well 
 enough; it is not altogether absurd to say 
 that it is not despair ; but the statement that 
 it is not joy or merriment is born of the desire 
 to make a sounding sentence. The rest of the 
 exposition is done more intelligently : 
 
 " It is no simple emotion struck direct out of the 
 heart by the shock of some great calamity or some 
 unlooked for good fortune. If it suggests, as it 
 often does, an unsatisfied longing, it is a longing 
 vague and far off, which reaches toward no defined 
 59
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 or concrete object. It is the product and the de- 
 light of a highly-wrought civilization, but of a civili- 
 zation restless and tormented, neither contented 
 with its destiny nor at peace with itself." 
 
 In beginning the explanation, Mr. Balfour 
 thus prefaced his way : 
 
 " To describe this with accuracy, nay, to describe 
 it at all, is scarcely possible. Even to indicate 
 vaguely its nature is not easy ; since music, not 
 literature, has been its chief exponent, and for these 
 fine shades of sentiment language scarcely provides 
 a terminology of sufficient delicacy and precision." 
 
 It may make vivid Mr. Balfour's entire lack 
 of strong and simple strokes in any writing 
 but the ironical or the purely logical to com- 
 pare all this mixture of sense and nonsense 
 with a few words on the same subject from 
 Turgenieff 's " Fathers and Sons " : 
 
 "But since I have just pronounced this word 
 ' happiness,' I must ask you a question. Why, even 
 when we enjoy music, for example, a fine evening, 
 or a conversation with one who sympathizes with us, 
 why does the enjoyment appear to us an allusion 
 to some unknown happiness to be found somewhere 
 else, much rather than real happiness, a happiness 
 that we are ourselves enjoying? Answer me. . - ." 
 60
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 Taken even more in detail, Mr. Balfour's 
 style shows a similar lack of firmness. To 
 one who knows his history before he reads 
 his books, it is a surprise to find ineffective 
 words, faults of grammar, and awkward con- 
 structions in his style. Not only his known 
 interest in literature, but the quality of his 
 thought when he analyzes politics, ethics, or 
 persons, would lead one to expect from him 
 an instinct for the structure of language, its 
 technique. Yet his pages are full of the most 
 elementary mistakes. These things are the 
 more surprising that his style suggests much 
 care and revision. This shows how little 
 instinct he has for form in writing. There 
 seems to be only one of the grammatical 
 errors that usually come from a lack of liter- 
 ary training that he avoids. He never uses 
 the split infinitive. As this error, though less 
 awkward and illogical than the mistakes Mr. 
 Balfour makes constantly, has been more dis- 
 cussed, his avoidance of it shows that he is 
 willing to write correctly when he is told how, 
 but that he is himself without the instinct. 
 
 Allied to his incorrectness in construc- 
 tion is a use of superfluous and weakening 
 words. It is almost grotesque to find an 
 explanatory "rightly," "fortunately," or 
 61
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 "unhappily," wherever it can possibly be 
 inserted. The frequent underscorings, and 
 the absurdly numerous superlatives, are 
 other similar weaknesses in his style. He 
 seldom speaks long of any one without 
 giving him a superlative of some kind. 
 
 It is, perhaps, useless to argue that a 
 multitude of small weaknesses of this kind 
 have a marked effect on the power of the 
 style as a whole. It is certainly seldom 
 that a man so keen in criticism and so familiar 
 with all the arts has had so few of the tech- 
 nical merits and so many of the elementary 
 faults of style. His sentences have none 
 of the architectural elements of style. There 
 is no force, no charm gained by the sound 
 or the rhythm, no sonority or majesty. 
 Therefore, there is no emotional force in 
 Mr. Balfour's language, and no artistic at- 
 traction. It is awkward, jerky, inaccurate, 
 and inelegant. Of course it would be easy 
 to deduce too much from this entire lack of 
 taste in composition. It would hardly lead 
 to truth to use the qualities of Mr. Balfour's 
 style so radically as he himself uses the style 
 of another writer : 
 
 " Shaftesbury is not, to me at least, an attractive 
 writer. His constant efforts to figure simultane- 
 ously as a fine gentleman and a fine writer are 
 62
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 exceedingly irritating ; and the very moderate suc- 
 cess which attended his efforts in the latter charac- 
 ter suggests the doubt, justified by his later style, 
 whether he can really have shone in the former." 
 
 Of course that is absurd. Shaftesbury may 
 or may not have been a fine gentleman, how- 
 ever little relation there was between the 
 pretensions and the actual value of his style. 
 Mr. Balfour is certainly a man of the best 
 taste in some ways; and the fact that he 
 sometimes produces bombast, when he at- 
 tempts to produce eloquence, is but a proof 
 that his critical power, keen as it is, is 
 limited in its range. Perhaps the most 
 general judgment one draws from Mr. Bal- 
 four' s style is that what there is of the 
 author is attractive, but that the personality 
 is not a very large one. He says of 
 Berkeley : 
 
 " Berkeley's early work is distinguished not only 
 by the admirable qualities of originality, lucidity, 
 and subtlety, but by a less excellent characteristic, 
 which I can only describe as a certain thinness of 
 treatment. At the time when he produced these 
 immortal speculations he had read little and felt 
 little. No experience of the weary entanglements 
 of concrete facts had yet suggested to him that a 
 perfect solution of the problem of the universe is 
 beyond our reach." 
 
 63
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Mr. Balfour has seen the difficulties of facts, 
 and he has read a good deal, but of the kind 
 of emotion that makes strong literature he 
 has known nothing. Like Berkeley's early 
 work, his books are original, lucid, subtle, 
 and rather thin. 
 
 When Mr. Balfour's political career began 
 we used to read ironical criticisms of him 
 as a dilettante, a literary man, a youth with- 
 out vigor, loving music and art, incapable 
 of stern practical work. He has now proved 
 that it is in practical activity that his strength 
 lies. His importance is neither in literature 
 nor in philosophy, but in the field from 
 which his tastes seemed at one time farthest 
 removed. He has the power of dealing with 
 the complex facts, guided partly by general 
 theories, partly by instinct, a power more 
 interesting in him than in most statesmen, 
 because there are few successful men of 
 action who understand the instincts on 
 which they act as well as Mr. Balfour under- 
 stands his. He puts into practical politics 
 a subtler, broader, more complicated intel- 
 ligence than is usually found there, a 
 thorough scepticism, combined with thorough 
 earnestness. His beliefs and his doubts alike 
 strengthen him in this branch of his activity, 
 though they are not beliefs and doubts that 
 64
 
 BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 
 
 form a great style or a great philosophy. He 
 is an object of uncommon interest to many 
 to-day, not because he is remarkable as a 
 writer, a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a dilet- 
 tante, but because he has become strong in 
 political action, with no loss of his less prac- 
 tical interests. It is a rather singular figure 
 that rises out of his books, a character of 
 much fineness and force, with general, broad 
 fairness mixed with some strong prejudices ; a 
 mind without exuberant powers, though with 
 rare keenness, interested always, and never 
 excited. It is a mind of logic primarily, with 
 little passion or sense of form. It is probably 
 altogether a combination that exists seldom, 
 if ever, outside of England, where the power 
 of action has more often than elsewhere been 
 combined with the temperament that looks 
 out on the world as a panorama. It is in 
 England that we see most often the uncom- 
 promising critic of the final ends of life in the 
 man who has the keenest taste for the battles 
 about him, and the combination has seldom 
 been seen in so striking a form as it can be 
 seen in Mr. Balfour. 
 1895.
 
 STENDHAL
 
 IV 
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 THE fact that none of his work has been 
 translated into English is probably a source 
 of amused satisfaction to many of the 
 lovers of Beyle. Though he exercised a 
 marked influence on Merimee, was wildly 
 praised by Balzac, was discussed twice by 
 Sainte-Beuve, was pointed to in Maupas- 
 sant's famous manifesto-preface to "Pierre 
 et Jean ; " though he has been twice eulo- 
 gized by Taine, and once by Bourget; and 
 though he has been carefully analyzed 
 by Zola, he is read little in France, 
 and scarcely at all elsewhere. While his 
 name, at his death scarcely heard beyond 
 his little circle of men of letters, has be- 
 come rather prominent, his books are still 
 known to very few. His cool prophecy 
 that a few leading spirits would read him 
 by 1880 was justified, and the solution 
 of his doubt whether he would not by 1930 
 have sunk again into oblivion seems now 
 69
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 at least as likely as it was then to be an 
 affirmative. "To the happy few" he dedi- 
 cated his latest important novel, and it will 
 be as it has been for the few, happy in 
 some meanings of that intangible word, that 
 his character and his writings have a serious 
 interest. 
 
 In one of the "Edinburgh Review's" 
 essays on Mme. du Deffand is a rather 
 striking passage in which Jeffrey sums up 
 the conditions that made conversation so 
 fascinating in the salons of the France 
 of Louis XV. In "Rome, Florence, et 
 Naples," published shortly afterwards by 
 Beyle under his most familiar pseudonym 
 of "Stendhal," is a conversation, with all 
 the marks of a piece of genuine evidence 
 on the English character, between the 
 author and an Englishman ; and yet a large 
 part of what is given as the opinion of this 
 acquaintance of Beyle is almost a literal 
 translation of Jeffrey's remarks on the con- 
 ditions of good conversation. Such a strik- 
 ing phrase as " Where all are noble all are 
 free " is taken without change, and the 
 whole is stolen with almost equal thorough- 
 ness. This trait runs through all of his 
 books. He was not a scholar, so he stole 
 his facts and many of his opinions, with 
 70
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 no acknowledgments, and made very pleas- 
 ing books. 
 
 Related, perhaps, to this quality, are the 
 inexactness of his facts and the unreliability 
 of his judgments. Berlioz, somewhere in 
 his memoirs, gives to Stendhal half a dozen 
 lines, which run something like this : 
 
 " There was present also one M. Beyle, a short 
 man, with an enormous belly, and an expression 
 which he tries to make benign and succeeds in 
 making malicious. He is the author of a ' Life of 
 Rossini,' full of painful stupidities about music." 
 
 Painful indeed, to a critic with the enthu- 
 siasm and the mastery of Berlioz, a lot of 
 emphatic judgments from a man who was 
 ignorant of the technique of music, who 
 took it seriously but lazily, and who could 
 make such a - comment at the end of a 
 comparison of skill with inspiration, as, 
 " What would not Beethoven do, if, with his 
 technical knowledge, he had the ideas of 
 Rossini ? " Imagine the passionate lover of 
 the noblest in music hearing distinctions 
 drawn between form and idea in music, 
 with condescension for Beethoven, by a 
 man who found his happiness in Cimarosa 
 and Rossini. Imagine Beyle talking of 
 grace, sweetness, softness, voluptuousness,
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 ease, tune, and Berlioz running away to hide 
 from these effeminate notions in Beetho- 
 ven's harmonies! Imagine them crossing 
 over into literature and coming there at the 
 height to the same name, Shakespeare ! 
 What different Shakespeares they are! 
 Berlioz, entranced, losing self-control, feel- 
 ing with passion the glowing life of the 
 poet's words, would turn, as from some- 
 thing unclean, from the man whose love 
 for Macbeth showed itself mostly in the 
 citation of passages that give fineness to 
 the feelings which the school of Racine 
 thought unsuited to poetry. "You use it 
 as a thesis," the enthusiast might cry. 
 " The grandeur, the wealth, the terror of it, 
 escape you. You see his delicacy, his pro- 
 portion, a deeper taste than the classic 
 French taste, and it forges you a weapon. 
 But you are not swept on by him, you never 
 get into the torrent, you are cool and 
 shallow, and your praise is profanation." 
 Stendhal read Shakespeare with some direct 
 pleasure, no doubt, but he was always on the 
 look-out for quotations to prove some thesis ; 
 and he read Scott and Richardson, probably 
 all the books he read in any language, in the 
 same unabandoned, restricted way. 
 
 In painting it is the same. It is with 
 72
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 a narrow and dilettante intelligence that he 
 judges pictures. The painter who feeds 
 certain sentiments, he loves and thinks 
 great. Guido Reni is suave; therefore 
 only one or two in the world's history can 
 compare with him. One of them is Cor- 
 reggio, for his true voluptuousness. These 
 are the artists he loves. Others he must 
 praise, as he praised Shakespeare, to sup- 
 port some attack on French canons of art; 
 therefore is Michelangelo one of the gods. 
 The effort is apparent throughout ; and as he 
 recalls the fact that Mme. du Deffand and 
 Voltaire saw in Michelangelo nothing but 
 ugliness, and notes that such is the attitude 
 of all true Frenchmen, the lover of Beyle 
 smiles at his effort to get far enough away 
 from his own saturated French nature to love 
 the masculine and august painter he is prais- 
 ing. Before the Moses, Me'rime'e tells us, 
 Beyle could find nothing to say beyond 
 the observation that ferocity could not be 
 better depicted. This vague, untechnical 
 point of view was no subject of regret to 
 Stendhal. He gloried in it. " Foolish as 
 a scholar," he says somewhere; and in an- 
 other place, "Vinci is a great artist, pre- 
 cisely because he is no scholar." 
 
 Add to lack of truthfulness, lack of thor- 
 73
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 oughness and lack of imagination, a total dis- 
 regard for any moral view of life, in the 
 sense of a believing, strenuous view, and 
 you have, from the negative side, the gen- 
 eral aspects of Stendhal's character. He 
 was not vicious, far from it, though he 
 admires many things that are vicious. He 
 is not indecent, for " the greatest enemy of 
 voluptuousness is indecency," and voluptu- 
 ousness tests all things. The keen Duclos 
 has said that the French are the only people 
 among whom it is possible for the morals 
 to be depraved without either the heart 
 being depraved or the courage being weak- 
 ened. It would be almost unfair to speak 
 of Beyle's morals as depraved, as even in 
 his earliest childhood he seems to have been 
 without a touch of any moral quality. " Who 
 knows that the world will last a week?" he 
 asks, and the question expresses well the 
 instinct in him that made him deny any 
 appeal but that of his own ends. Both 
 morals and religion really repel him. It is 
 impossible to love a supreme being, he says, 
 though we may perhaps respect him. In- 
 deed, he believes that love and respect 
 never go together, that grace, which he 
 loves, excludes force, which he respects; 
 and thus he loves Reni and respects Michel- 
 74
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 angelo. Grace and force are the opposite 
 sides of a sphere, and the human eye cannot 
 see both. As for him, he fearlessly takes 
 sympathy and grace and abandons nobility. 
 In the same manner that he excludes stren- 
 uous feelings of right altogether, he makes 
 painting, which he thinks the nobler art, 
 secondary to music, which is the more com- 
 fortable. For a very sensitive man, he goes 
 on, with real coherence to the mind of a 
 Beylian, painting is only a friend, while 
 music is a mistress. Happy indeed he who 
 has both friend and mistress. In some of 
 his moods the more austere, the nobler and 
 less personal tastes and virtues, interest 
 him, for he is to some extent interested in 
 everything ; but except where he is support- 
 ing one of his few fundamental theses, he 
 does not deceive himself into thinking he 
 likes them, and he never takes with real 
 seriousness anything he does not like. Ele- 
 vation and ferocity are the two words he 
 uses over and over again in explaining that 
 Michelangelo alone could paint the Bible; 
 and the very poverty of his vocabulary, so 
 discriminating when he is on more congenial 
 subjects, suggests how external was the 
 acquaintance of Beyle with elevation or 
 ferocity, with Michelangelo or the Bible. 
 75
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 He has written entertainingly on such sub- 
 jects, but it all has the sound of guesswork. 
 These two qualities, with which he sums up 
 the sterner aspects of life, are perhaps not 
 altogether separable from a third, dignity; 
 and his view of this last may throw some 
 light on the nature of his relations with 
 the elevation and ferocity he praises. Here 
 is a passage from " Le Rouge et le Noir " : 
 " Mathilde thought she saw happiness. 
 This sight, all-powerful with people who 
 combine courageous souls with superior 
 minds, had to fight long against dignity 
 and all vulgar sentiments of duty." Equally 
 lofty is his tone towards other qualities that 
 are in reality part of the same attitude, 
 a tone less of reproach than of simple con- 
 tempt. The heroine of " Le Rouge et le 
 Noir " is made to argue that " it is necessary 
 to return in good faith to the vulgar ideas 
 of purity and honor." Two more of the 
 social virtues are disposed of by him in 
 one extract, which, by the way, illustrates 
 also the truly logical and the apparently 
 illogical nature of Stendhal's thought. It 
 will take a little reflection to see how he gets 
 so suddenly from industry to patriotism in the 
 following judgment, but the coherence of the 
 thought will be complete to the Beylian: 
 76
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 " It is rare that a young Neapolitan of fourteen is 
 forced to do anything disagreeable. All his life he 
 prefers the pain of want to the pain of work. The 
 fools from the North treat as barbarians the citizens 
 of this country, because they are not unhappy at 
 wearing a shabby coat. Nothing would seem more 
 laughable to an inhabitant of Crotona than to sug- 
 gest his fighting to get a red ribbon in his button- 
 hole, or to have a sovereign named Ferdinand or 
 William. The sentiment of loyalty, or devotion to 
 dynasty, which shines in the novels of Sir Walter 
 Scott, and which should have made him a peer, is 
 as unknown here as snow in May. To tell the 
 truth, I don't see that this proves these people 
 fools. (I admit that this idea is in very bad taste.) " 
 
 For himself, he hated his country, as he 
 curtly puts it, and loved none of his rela- 
 tives. Patriotism, for which his contempt 
 is perhaps mixed with real hatred, is in 
 his mind allied to the worst of all stupid 
 tyrants, propriety, or, as he more often 
 calls it, opinion, his most violent aversion. 
 Napoleon, he thinks, in destroying the 
 custom of cavaliere serviente, simply added 
 to the world's mass of ennui by ushering into 
 Italy the flat religion of propriety. He is 
 full of such lucid observations as that the 
 trouble with opinion is that it takes a hand 
 in private matters, whence comes the sad- 
 77
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 ness of England and America. To this 
 sadness of the moral countries and the moral 
 people he never tires of referring. His 
 thesis carries him so far that he bunches 
 together Veronese and Tintoretto under the 
 phrase, "painters without ideal," in whom 
 there is something dry, narrow, reason- 
 able, bound by propriety; in a word, inca- 
 pable of rapture. This referring to some 
 general standard, this lack of directness, of 
 fervor, of abandonment, is illustrated by 
 the Englishman's praise of his mistress, 
 that there was nothing vulgar in her. It 
 would take, Beyle says, eight days to explain 
 that to a Milanese, and then he would have 
 a fit of laughter. 
 
 These few references illustrate fairly the 
 instincts and beliefs that are the basis of 
 Stendhal's whole thought and life. The 
 absolute degree of moral scepticism that is 
 needed to make a sympathetic reader of 
 him is especially among people refined 
 and cultivated enough to care for his sub- 
 jects everywhere rare. I call it a moral 
 rather than an intellectual scepticism, be- 
 cause, while he would doubtless deny the 
 possibility of knowing the best good of the 
 greatest number, a more ultimate truth is 
 that he is perfectly indifferent to the good 
 78
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 of the greatest number. It is unabashed 
 egotism. The assertion of his individual 
 will, absolute loyalty to his private tastes, 
 is his principle of thought and action, and 
 his will and his tastes do not include the 
 rest of the world and its desires : 
 
 "What is the ME? I know nothing about it. 
 One day I awoke upon this earth ; I found myself 
 united to a certain body, a certain fortune. Shall I 
 go into the vain amusement of wishing to change 
 them, and in the mean time forget to live ? That is 
 to be a dupe. I submit to their failings. I submit 
 to my aristocratic bent, after having declaimed for 
 ten years, in good faith, against all aristocracy. I 
 adore Roman noses, and yet, if I am a Frenchman, 
 I resign myself to having received from heaven only 
 a Champagne nose : what can I do about it ? The 
 Romans were a great evil for humanity, a deadly 
 disease which retarded the civilization of the 
 world. ... In spite of so many wrongs, my heart 
 is for the Romans." 
 
 Thus, in all the details of his extended 
 comparison, Beyle tries to state with fairness 
 the two sides, the general good and the 
 personal, the need of obedience to its rules 
 if some general ends of society are to be 
 attained, and the individual's loss from 
 obedience. He states with fairness, but his 
 79
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 own choice is never in doubt. He goes 
 to what directly pleases him: 
 
 " Shall I dare to talk of the bases of morals ? 
 From the accounts of my comrades I believe that 
 there are as many deceived husbands at Paris as at 
 Boulogne, at Berlin as at Rome. The whole differ- 
 ence is that at Paris the sin is caused by vanity, and 
 at Rome by climate. The only exception I find is 
 in the middle classes in England, and all classes at 
 Geneva. But, upon my honor, the drawback in 
 ennui is too great. I prefer Paris. It is gay." 
 
 His tastes, his sympathies, are unhesitat- 
 ingly with the Roman in the following 
 judgment: 
 
 " A Roman to whom you should propose to love 
 always the same woman, were she an angel, would 
 exclaim that you were taking from him three quar- 
 ters of what makes life worth while. Thus, at 
 Edinburgh, the family is first, and at Rome it is 
 a detail. If the system of the Northern people 
 sometimes begets the monotony and the ennui that 
 we read on their faces, it often causes a calm and 
 continuous happiness." 
 
 This steady contrast is noted by his mind 
 
 merely, his logical fairness. His mind is 
 
 judicial in a sort of negative, formal sense; 
 
 judicial without weight, we might say. 
 
 80
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 He does not feel, or see imaginatively, 
 sympathetically, the advantages of habitual 
 constancy. He feels only the truths of the 
 other side, or the side of truth which he 
 expresses when he says that all true pas- 
 sion is selfish; and passion and its truth 
 are the final test for him. This selfishness, 
 which is even more self-reliance than it is 
 self-seeking, which has his instinctive ap- 
 proval in all moods, is directly celebrated 
 by him in most. The more natural genius 
 and originality one has, he says, the more 
 one feels the profound truth of the remark 
 of the Duchesse de Ferte, that she found 
 no one but herself who was always right. 
 And not only does natural genius, which we 
 might sum up as honesty to one's instincts, 
 or originality, make us contemptuous of all 
 judgments- but our own; it leads us (so far 
 does Beyle go) to esteem only ourselves. 
 Reason makes us see, and prevents our act- 
 ing, since nothing is worth the effort it 
 costs. Laziness forces us to prefer our- 
 selves, and in others it is only ourselves 
 that we esteem. 
 
 With this principle as his broadest gener- 
 alization, it is not unnatural that his pro- 
 foundest admiration was for Napoleon. I 
 am a man, he says in substance, who has 
 6 81
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 loved a few painters, a few people, and 
 respected one man, Napoleon. He re- 
 spected a man who knew what he wanted, 
 wanted it constantly, and pursued it fear- 
 lessly, without scruples and with intelli- 
 gence, with constant calculation, with lies, 
 with hypocrisy, with cruelty. Beyle used 
 to lie with remarkable ease even in his 
 youth. He makes his almost autobiograph- 
 ical hero, Julien Sorel, a liar throughout, 
 and a hypocrite on the very day of his 
 execution. Beyle lays down the judgments 
 about Napoleon, that he liked argument, 
 because he was strong in it; and that he 
 kept his peace, like a savage, whenever 
 there was any possibility of his being seen 
 to be inferior to any one else in grasp of 
 the topic under discussion. It is in his " Life 
 of Napoleon " that Beyle dwells as persist- 
 ently as anywhere on his never-ceasing 
 principle, examine yourself; get at your 
 most spontaneous, indubitable tastes, de- 
 sires, ambitions; follow them; act from 
 them unceasingly; be turned aside by 
 nothing. 
 
 It is possible, in going through Beyle's 
 
 works for that purpose, to find a remark here 
 
 and there that might possibly indicate a 
 
 basis of faith under this insistence, a belief 
 
 82
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 that in the end a thorough independence of 
 aim in each individual would be for the good 
 of all; but these passing words really do 
 not go against the truth of the statement 
 that Beyle was absolutely without the moral 
 attitude; that the pleasing to himself imme- 
 diately was all he gave interest to, and that 
 of the intellectual qualities those that had 
 beauty for him were the crueller ones, 
 force, concentration, sagacity, in the ser- 
 vice of egotism. But here are a few of the 
 possible exceptions. "Moliere," he says, 
 in a dispute about that writer's morality, 
 "painted with more depth than the other 
 poets. Therefore he is more moral. Noth- 
 ing could be more simple." With this 
 epigram he leaves the subject ; but it is 
 tolerably clear that he means to deny any 
 other moral than truth, not to say that the 
 truth is an inevitable servant of good. If 
 it did mean the latter, it was thrown off at 
 the moment as an easy argument; for his 
 belief is pronounced through his works, 
 that his loves are the world's banes, and 
 that any interest in the world's good, in 
 the moral law, is bourgeois and dull. Here 
 is another phrase that perhaps might suggest 
 that the generalization was unsafe : " He is 
 the greatest man in Europe because he is 
 83
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 the only honest man." This, like the other, 
 is clear enough to a reader of him; and it 
 is really impossible to find in him any iden- 
 tification of the interesting, the worthy, with 
 the permanently and generally serviceable. 
 Where the social point of view is taken for 
 a moment, it is by grace of logic purely, for 
 a formal fairness. A more unmitigated 
 moral rebel, a more absolute sceptic, a more 
 thoroughly isolated individual than the 
 author of " Le Rouge et le Noir " could not 
 exist. Nor could a more unhesitating dog- 
 matist exist, despite his sneering apologies ; 
 for dogmatism is as natural an expression of 
 absolute scepticism as it is of absolute faith. 
 When a man refuses to say anything further 
 than, "This is true for me, at this moment," 
 or perhaps, "This is true of a man exactly 
 such as I describe, in exactly these cir- 
 cumstances," he is likely to make these 
 statements with unshakable firmness. This 
 distinctness and coherence of the mind 
 which is entirely devoted to relativity, is 
 one of the charms of Stendhal for his lovers. 
 It makes possible the completeness and the 
 originality of a perfect individual, of an 
 entirely unrestrained growth. It is the kind 
 of character that we call capricious or 
 fantastic when it is weak; but when it is 
 84
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 strong, it has a value for us through its 
 emphasis of interesting principles which 
 we do not find so visible and disentangled 
 in more conforming people. The instincts 
 which in Stendhal have such a free field to 
 expatiate seem to some readers rare and 
 distinguished, and to these readers it is a 
 delight to see them set in such high relief. 
 This, in its most general aspect, is what 
 gave him his short-lived glory among the 
 young writers of France. They hailed him 
 as the discoverer of the doctrine of relativity, 
 or as the first who applied it to the particu- 
 lar facts they wished to emphasize the 
 environment and its influence on the indi- 
 vidual. This has been overworked by great 
 men and little men until we grow sad at the 
 sound of the word; but it was not so in 
 Beyle's time, and he used the principle with 
 moderation, seldom or never forgetting the 
 incalculable and inexplicable accidents of 
 individual variations. He does not forget 
 either that individuals make the environ- 
 ment, and he is really clearer than his suc- 
 cessors in treating race-traits, the climate 
 and the local causes, individual training, 
 and individual idiosyncrasies, as a great 
 mixed whole, in which the safest course is 
 to stick pretty closely to the study of the 
 85
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 completed product. For this reason Zola 
 very properly removed him from the pedes- 
 tal on which Taine had put him, for what is 
 a solvent of all problems to the school for 
 which Taine hoped to be the prophet is in 
 Stendhal but one principle, in its place on 
 an equality with others. Zola's analysis of 
 this side of Beyle is really masterly; and he 
 proves without difficulty that the only con- 
 nection between Beyle and the present nat- 
 uralists is one of creed, not of execution 
 that Beyle did not apply the principle he 
 believed in. The setting of his scenes is 
 not distinct. Sometimes it is not even 
 sketched in; and here Zola draws an illus- 
 tration from a strong scene in " Le Rouge et 
 le Noir," and shows how different the setting 
 would have been in his own hands. Beyle is 
 a logician, abstract; Zola thinks himself 
 concrete, and concrete he is often by main 
 force. This is a sad failure to apply the 
 doctrine of relativity to one's self. Beyle 
 errs sometimes in the same way, and some of 
 his attempts at local color are very tiresome, 
 but on the whole he remains frankly the 
 analyzer, the introspective psychologist, the 
 man of distinct but disembodied ideas. He 
 recognized the environment as he recognized 
 other things in his fertile reflections, but he 
 86
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 was, as a rule, too faithful to his own prin- 
 ciples to spend much time in trying to repro- 
 duce it in details which did not directly 
 interest him. It was therefore natural that 
 his celebration by the extremists should be 
 short-lived. Most of them do him what 
 justice they can with effort, like Zola, or 
 pass him over with some such word as the 
 " dry " of Goncourt. His fads were his own. 
 None of them have yet become the fads 
 of a school, though some principles that 
 were restrained with him have become 
 battle-cries in later times. His real fads 
 are hardly fitted to be banners, for they are 
 too specific. In very general theories he 
 generally kept rather sane. His real differ- 
 ence from the school that claimed him for a 
 father half a century after his death, is well 
 suggested in the awkward word that Zola is 
 fond of throwing at him, "ideologist." The 
 idea, the abstract truth and the intellectual 
 form of it, its clearness, its statableness, 
 its cogency and consistency, is the final 
 interest with him. The outer world is only 
 the material for the expression of ideas, only 
 the illustrations of them, and the ideas are 
 therefore not pictorial or dramatic, but 
 logical. The arts are ultimately the expres- 
 sion of thought and feeling, and color and 
 87
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 plastic form are means only. You never 
 find him complaining, as his friend Merimee 
 did, that the meaning of the plastic arts 
 cannot be given in words, because for a 
 slight difference in shade or in curve there 
 is no expression in language. All that 
 Beyle got out of art he could put into 
 words. He made no attempt to compete 
 with the painter, like the leading realists 
 of the past half-century. Other arts inter- 
 ested him only as far as they formed, with- 
 out straining, illustrations for expression in 
 language of the feelings they appeal to. It 
 was with him in music as it was in painting, 
 and often his musical criticism is as charm- 
 ing to the unattached dilettante as it is 
 annoying to the technical critic who judges 
 it in its own forms. Beyle names the sen- 
 sation with precision always. His vocabu- 
 lary has fine shades without weakening 
 fluency. In choosing single words to name 
 single sensations is his greatest power, and 
 it is a power which naturally belongs to a 
 man whose eye is inward, a power which the 
 word-painters of the environment lack. 
 Everything is expression for Beyle, and 
 within the limits of the verbally-expressible 
 he steadfastly remains. His truth is truth 
 to the forms of thought as they exist in the 
 88
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 reason the clear eighteenth-century reason 
 disembodied truth. 
 
 " It is necessary to have bones and blood in the 
 human machine to make it walk. But we give 
 slight attention to these necessary conditions of life, 
 to fly to its great end, its final result to think and 
 to feel. 
 
 " That is the history of drawing, of color, of light 
 and shade, of all the various parts of painting, com- 
 pared to expression. 
 
 " Expression is the whole of art." 
 
 This reminds one again of Merimee's 
 statement, that Beyle could see in the 
 Moses nothing but the expression of ferocity ; 
 and an equally conclusive assertion (for it is 
 in him no confession) is made by Beyle in 
 reference to music, which he says is excel- 
 lent if it gives him elevated thoughts on the 
 subjects that are occupying him, and if it 
 makes him think of the music itself it is 
 mediocre. Thus Beyle is as far from being 
 an artist as possible. He cares for the forms 
 of the outer world, he spends his life in 
 looking at beauty and listening to it, but 
 only because he knows that that is the way 
 to call up in himself the ideas, the sensa- 
 tions, the emotions that he loves almost 
 with voluptuousness. The basis of genius, 
 89
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 he says, in speaking of Michelangelo, is 
 logic, and if this is true as in the sense in 
 which he used it, it probably is Beyle's 
 genius was mostly basis. 
 
 Merim6e says that though Beyle was con- 
 stantly appealing to logic, he reached his 
 conclusions not by his reason but by his 
 imagination. This is certainly making a 
 false distinction. Beyle was not a logician 
 in the sense that he got at conclusions 
 indirectly by syllogisms. He did not forget 
 his premises in the interest of the inductive 
 process. What he calls logic is an attitude 
 or quality of the mind, and means really 
 abstract coherence. Of what he himself calls 
 ideology, with as much contempt as Zola 
 could put into the word, he says that it is a 
 science not only tiresome but impertinent. 
 He means any constructive, deductive sys- 
 tem of thought. He studied Kant and other 
 German metaphysicians, and thought them 
 shallow superior men ingeniously building 
 houses of cards. His feet seldom if ever got 
 off the solid ground of observations into the 
 region of formal, logical deduction. " Facts ! 
 facts ! " he cried, and his love of facts at first 
 hand keeps him from some of the defects of 
 the abstract mind. Every statement is inde- 
 pendent of the preceding and the succeeding 
 90
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 ones, each is examined by itself, each illus- 
 trated by anecdote, inexact enough, to be 
 sure, but clear. There is no haze in his 
 thought. When Merimee says that it is 
 Beyle's imagination and not his logic that 
 decides, he is right, in the sense that Beyle 
 has no middle terms, that his vision is direct, 
 that the a priori process is secondary and 
 merely suggestive with him. " What should 
 we logically expect to find the case here?" 
 he will ask before a new set of facts; but 
 if his expectation and his observation differ, 
 he readjusts his principles. It is no para- 
 dox to call a mind both abstract and empiri- 
 cal, introspective and scientific; and Beyle's 
 was both. 
 
 This quality of logic without construc- 
 tiveness shows, of course, in his style. 
 There is lucidity of transition, of connec- 
 tion, of relation, among the details, but 
 the parts are not put together to form an 
 artistic whole. They fall on to the paper 
 from his mind direct, and the completed 
 book has no other unity than has the mind 
 of the author. As he was a strong admirer 
 of Bacon and his methods, it is safe enough 
 to say that he would have accepted entirely 
 this statement about composition as his own 
 creed : 
 
 9 1
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 " Thirdly, whereas I could have digested these 
 rules into a certain method or order, which, I know, 
 would have been more admired, as that which would 
 have made every particular rule, through its coher- 
 ence and relation unto other rules, seem more 
 cunning and more deep ; yet I have avoided so to 
 do, because this delivering of knowledge in distinct 
 and disjoined aphorisms doth leave the wit of man 
 more free to turn and toss, and to make use of that 
 which is so delivered to more several purposes and 
 applications." 
 
 He is the typical suggestive critic, form- 
 less, uncreative, general and specific, precise 
 and abstract: chaotic to the artist, satisfac- 
 tory to the psychologist. It makes no differ- 
 ence where the story begins, whether this 
 sentence follows that, or where the chapter 
 ends. There are no rules of time and place. 
 His style is a series of epigrams, and the 
 order^of their presentation is almost acci- 
 dental. "To draw out a plot freezes me," 
 he says, and one could guess it from his 
 stories, which are in all essentials like his 
 essays. To this analytic, unplastic mind 
 the plot, the characters, are but illustrations 
 of the general truths. The characters he 
 draws have separate individual life only so 
 far as they are copies. There is no in- 
 vention, no construction, no creation. More- 
 92
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 over, there is no style, or no other quality of 
 style than lucidity. He not only lacks other 
 qualities, he despises them. The "neatly 
 turned" style and the rhetorical alike have 
 his contempt. Most rhetoricians are "em- 
 phatic, eloquent, and declamatory." He 
 almost had a duel about Chateaubriand's 
 "cime indeterminee des forets." Rousseau 
 is particularly irritating to him. "Only a 
 great soul knows how to write simply, and 
 that is why Rousseau has put so much rhet- 
 oric into the 'New Eloise, ' which makes it 
 unreadable after thirty years." In another 
 place he says he detests, in the arrangement 
 of words, tragic combinations, which are 
 intended to give majesty to the style. He 
 sees only absurdity in them. His style fits 
 his thought, and his failure to comprehend 
 color in style is not surprising in a man 
 whose thought has no setting, in a man who 
 remarks with scorn that it is easier to de- 
 scribe clothing than it is to describe move- 
 ments of the soul. He cares only for 
 movements of the soul. The sense of form 
 might have given his work a larger life, but 
 it is part of his rare value for a few that he 
 talks in bald statements, single-word sugges- 
 tions, disconnected flashes. This intellec- 
 tual impressionism, as it were, is more 
 93
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 stimulating to them than any work of art. 
 These are not poetic souls, it is needless to 
 say, however much they may love poetry. 
 Beyle is the essence of prose, and it is his 
 strength. He loved poetry, but he got from 
 it only the prose, so much of the idea as is 
 independent of the form. Merimee tells us 
 that Beyle murdered verse in reading aloud, 
 and in his treatise "De 1' Amour" Beyle in- 
 forms us that verse was invented to help the 
 memory, and to retain it in dramatic art is a 
 remnant of barbarity. The elevation, the 
 abandon, the passion of poetry all but the 
 psychology were foreign to this mind, 
 whose unimaginative prose is its distinction. 
 Perhaps this limitation is kin to another : 
 that as novelist Beyle painted with success 
 only himself. Much the solidest of his 
 characters is Julien Sorel, a copy trait for 
 trait of the author, reduced, so to speak, to 
 his essential elements. Both Julien and 
 Beyle were men of restless ambition, clear, 
 colorless minds, and constant activity. 
 Julien turned this activity to one thing, 
 the study of the art of dominating women, 
 and Beyle to three, of which this was the 
 principal, and the other two were the com- 
 prehension of art principles and the expres- 
 sion of them. In his earlier days he had 
 94
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 followed the army of Napoleon, until he 
 became disgusted with the grossness of the 
 life he saw. What renown he won in the 
 army was for making his toilet with com- 
 plete care on the eve of battle. From the 
 Moscow army he wrote to one of his friends 
 that everything was lacking which he 
 needed, "friendship, love (or the sem- 
 blance of it), and the arts." For simplicity, 
 friendship may be left out in summing up 
 Beyle's interests, for while his friendships 
 were genuine they did not interest him much, 
 except as an opportunity to work up his 
 ideas. Of the two interests that remain, the 
 one expressed in Julien, the psychology of 
 love, illustrated by practice, is much the 
 more essential. Julien too had Napoleon 
 for an ideal, and when he found he could 
 not imitate him in the letter he resigned 
 himself to making in his spirit the conquests 
 that were open to him. The genius that 
 Napoleon put into political relations he 
 would put into social ones. All the princi- 
 ples of war should live again in his intrigues 
 with women. 
 
 This spirit is well enough known in its 
 outlines. Perhaps the most perfect sketch 
 of it in its unmixed form is in " Les Liai- 
 sons Dangereuses," a book which Beyle knew 
 95
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 and must have loved. He must have ad- 
 mired and envied the Comte de Valmont 
 and the Marquise de Merteuil. There is 
 here none of the grossness of the Restoration 
 comedy in England. It is the art of satisfy- 
 ing vanity in a particular way, in its most 
 delicate form. It is an occupation and an 
 art as imperative, one might almost say as 
 impersonal, were not the paradox so violent, 
 as any other. What makes Stendhal's 
 account of this art differ from that of Dela- 
 clos and the other masters is the fact that, 
 deeply as he is in it, he is half outside of it : 
 he is the psychologist every moment, seeing 
 his own attitude as coldly as he sees the 
 facts on which he is forming his campaign. 
 Read the scene, for instance, where Julien 
 first takes the hand of the object of his de- 
 signs, absolutely as a matter of duty, a disa- 
 greeable move necessary to the success of 
 the game. The cold, forced spirit of so 
 much of intrigue is clearly seen by Beyle 
 and accepted by him as a necessity. He 
 used to tell young men that if they were 
 alone in a room five minutes with a beautiful 
 woman without declaring they loved her, it 
 proved them poltroons. Two sides of him, 
 however, are always present ; for this is the 
 same man who repeats forever in his book 
 96
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 the cry that there is no love in France. He 
 means that this science, better than no love 
 at all, is inferior to the abandon of the Ital- 
 ians. The love of 1770, for which he often 
 longs, with its gayety, its tact, its discretion 
 "with the thousand qualities of savoir-vivre" 
 is after all only second. Amour-gout, to 
 point out the distinction in two famous 
 phrases of his own, is forever inferior to 
 amoiir-passion. Stendhal, admiring the lat- 
 ter, must have been confined to the former, 
 though not in its baldest form, for to some 
 of the skill and irony of Valmont he added 
 the softness, the sensibility, of a later gen- 
 eration, and he added also the will to feel, so 
 that his study of feeling and his practice of 
 it grew more successful together. Psychol- 
 ogy and sensibility are mutual aids in him, 
 as they not infrequently are in " observers of 
 the human heart," to quote his description 
 of his profession. " What consideration can 
 take precedence, in a sombre heart, of the 
 never-flagging charm of being loved by a 
 woman who is happy and gay ? " The volup- 
 tuary almost succeeds in looking as genuine 
 as the psychologist. "This nervous fluid, 
 so to speak, has each day but a certain 
 amount of sensitiveness to expend. If you 
 put it into the enjoyment of thirty beautiful 
 7 97
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 pictures you shall not use it to mourn the 
 death of an adored mistress." You cannot 
 disentangle them. Love, voluptuousness, 
 art, psychology, sincerity, effort, all are 
 mixed up together, whatever the ostensible 
 subject. It is a truly French compound, 
 perhaps made none the less essentially 
 French by the author's constant berating of 
 his country for its consciousness and vanity: 
 a man who would be uneasy if he were not 
 exercising his fascinating powers on some 
 woman, and a man whose tears were ready ; 
 a man who could not live without action, 
 soaking in the do Ice far niente; a man all 
 intelligence, and by very force of intelli- 
 gence a man of emotion. He would be 
 miserable if he gave himself up to either 
 side. " In the things of sentiment perhaps 
 the most delicate judges are found at Paris 
 but there is always a little chill." He 
 goes to Italy ; and as he voluptuously feels 
 the warm air and sees the warm blood and 
 the free movements, the simplicity of heed- 
 lessness and passion, his mind goes back 
 longingly to the other things. 
 
 " All is decadence here, all in memory. Active 
 life is in London and in Paris. The days when I 
 am all sympathy I prefer Rome ; but staying here 
 98
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 tends to weaken the mind, to plunge it into stupor. 
 There is no effort, no energy, nothing moves fast. 
 Upon my word, I prefer the active life of the North 
 and the bad taste of our barracks." 
 
 But among these conflicting ideals it is 
 possible perhaps to pick the strongest, and I 
 think it is painted in this picture: "A 
 delicious salon, within ten steps of the sea, 
 from which we are separated by a grove of 
 orange-trees. The sea breads gently, Ischia 
 is in sight. The ices are excellent." The 
 last touch is all Beyle. What is more subtle 
 to a man whose whole life is an experiment 
 in taste, what more suggestive, what more 
 typical, than an ice? There is a pervading 
 delight in it, in the unsubstantiality, the 
 provokingness, the refinement of it. "In 
 the boxes, toward the middle of the evening, 
 the cavaliere servante of the lady usually 
 orders some ices. There is always some 
 wager, and the ordinary bets are sherbets, 
 which are divine. There are three kinds, 
 gclati, crept, and pezzidiere. It is an excel- 
 lent thing to become familiar with. I have 
 not yet determined the best kind, and I 
 experiment every evening." Do not mistake 
 this for playfulness. The man who cannot 
 take an ice seriously cannot take Stendhal 
 sympathetically. 
 
 99
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Such, in the rough, is the point of view 
 of this critic of character and of art. Of 
 course the value of judgments from such a 
 man in such an attitude is dependent entirely 
 on what one seeks from criticism. Here is 
 what Stendhal hopes to give: 
 
 " My end is to make each observer question his 
 own soul, disentangle his own manner of feeling, 
 and thus succeed in forming a judgment for him- 
 self, a way of seeing formed in accord with his own 
 character, his tastes, his ruling passions, if indeed 
 he have passions, for unhappily they are necessary 
 to judge the arts." 
 
 The word "passion," here as elsewhere, 
 is not to be given too violent a meaning. 
 " Emotion " would do as well sincere 
 personal feeling. That there is no end 
 of art except to bring out this sincere 
 individual feeling is his ultimate belief. 
 He is fond of the story of the young girl who 
 asked Voltaire to hear her recite, so as to 
 judge of her fitness for the stage. Aston- 
 ished at her coldness, Voltaire said: "But, 
 mademoiselle, if you yourself had a lover 
 who abandoned you, what would you do ? " 
 " I would take another, " she answered. 
 That, Stendhal adds, is the correct point 
 of view for nineteen-twentieths of life, but 
 100
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 not for art. "I care only for genius, for 
 young painters with fire in the soul and 
 open intelligence." For disinterested, cool 
 taste, for objective justness and precision, 
 he has only contempt. Indeed, he accepts 
 Goethe's definition of taste as the art of 
 properly tying one's cravats in things of the 
 mind. Everything that is not special to the 
 speaker, personal, he identifies with thinness, 
 insincerity, pose. " The best thing one can 
 bring before works of art, is a natural mind. 
 One must dare to feel what he does feel." 
 To be one's self, the first of rules, means to 
 follow one's primitive sentiments. "In- 
 stead of wishing to judge according to liter- 
 ary principles, and defend correct doctrines, 
 why do not our youths content themselves 
 with the fairest privilege of their age, to 
 have sentiments ? " There is no division 
 into impersonal judgment and private senti- 
 ment. The only criticism that has value is 
 private, personal, intimate. 
 
 Less special to Stendhal now, though 
 rare at the time in which he lived, is the 
 appeal to life as the basis of art. "To find 
 the Greeks, look in the forests of America. " 
 Go to the swimming-school or the ballet to 
 realize the correctness and the energy of 
 Michelangelo. Familiarity is everything. 
 
 101
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 " The work of genius is the sense of conver- 
 sation," and as "the man who takes the word 
 of another is a cruel bore in a salon," so is 
 he as a critic. "What is the antique bas- 
 relief to me? Let us try to make good 
 modern painting. The Greeks loved the 
 nude. We never see it, and moreover it 
 repels us." This conclusion shows the 
 weakness, or the limitation, of this kind of 
 criticism, which as Stendhal applies it 
 would keep us from all we have learned 
 from the revived study of the nude, because 
 the first impression to one unused to seeing 
 it is not an artistic one. But the limitations 
 of Stendhal and his world are obvious enough. 
 It is his eloquence and usefulness within his 
 limits that are worth examination. 
 
 "Beauty," to Stendhal, "is simply a 
 promise of happiness," and the phrase sums 
 up his attitude. Here is his ideal way of 
 taking music. He asked a question of a 
 young woman about somebody in the audi- 
 ence. The young woman usually says noth- 
 ing during the evening. To his question 
 she answered, " Music pleases when it puts 
 your soul in the evening in the same posi- 
 tion that love put it in during the day." 
 
 Beyle adds: "Such is the simplicity of 
 language and of action. I did not answer, 
 1 02
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 and I left her. When one feels music in 
 such a way, what friend is not importunate ? " 
 When he leaves this field for technical judg- 
 ments, he is laughable to any one who does 
 not care for the texture of his mind, what- 
 ever his expression; for music to him is 
 really only a background for his sensibil- 
 ity. "How can I talk of music without 
 giving the history of my sensations? " This 
 is, doubtless, maudlin to the sturdy mascu- 
 line mind, this religion of sensibility, this 
 fondling of one's sentimental susceptibili- 
 ties, and it certainly has no grandeur and 
 no morality. 
 
 " Sensibility," Coleridge says, " that is, a consti- 
 tutional quickness of sympathy with pain and 
 pleasure, and a keen sense of the gratifications that 
 accompany social intercourse, mutual endearments, 
 and reciprocal preferences . . . sensibility is not 
 even a sure pledge of a good heart, though among 
 the most common meanings of that many-meaning 
 and too commonly misapplied expression." 
 
 It leads, he goes on, to effeminate sensi- 
 tiveness by making us alive to trifling mis- 
 fortunes. This is just, with all its severity, 
 and the lover of Stendhal has only to smile, 
 and quote Rousseau, with Beyle himself: 
 "I must admit that I am a great booby; for 
 I get all my pleasure in being sad." 
 103
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Naturally enough, ennui plays a great 
 part in such a nature, thin, intelligent, sen- 
 sitive, immoral, self-indulgent. It lies be- 
 hind his art of love and his love of art. 
 "Ennui, this great motive power of intelli- 
 gent people," he says; and again: "I was 
 much surprised when, studying painting out 
 of pure ennui, I found it a balm for cruel 
 sorrows." He really loves it. "Ennui! 
 the god whom I implore, the powerful god 
 who reigns in the hall of the Fran$ais, the 
 only power in the world that can cause the 
 Laharpes to be thrown into the fire. " Hence 
 his love for Madame du Deffand, the great 
 expert in ennui, and for the whole century 
 of ennui, wit, and immorality. Certainly 
 the lack of all fire and enthusiasm, the lack 
 of faith, of hope, of charity, does go often 
 with a clear, sharp, negative freshness of 
 judgment, which is often seen in the colder, 
 finer, smaller workmen in the psychology 
 of social relations. It is a great exposer 
 of pretence. It enables Stendhal to see 
 that most honest Northerners say in their 
 hearts before the statues of Michelangelo, 
 " Is that all ? " as they say before their ac- 
 complished ideal, " Good Lord ! to be happy, 
 to be loved, is it only this ? " 
 
 But just as Stendhal keeps in the border- 
 104
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 land between vice and virtue, shrinking 
 from grossness, and laughing at morality, 
 so he cannot really cross into the deepest 
 unhappiness any more than he could into 
 passionate happiness. Tragedy repelled him. 
 "The fine arts ought never to try to paint 
 the inevitable ills of humanity. They only 
 increase them, which is a sad success. 
 . . . Noble and almost consoled grief is the 
 only kind that art should seek to produce." 
 To these half-tones his range is limited 
 through the whole of his being. Of his 
 taste in architecture, of which he was tech- 
 nically as ignorant as he was of music, 
 Merimee tells us that he disliked Gothic, 
 thinking it ugly and sad, and liked the 
 architecture of the Renaissance for its ele- 
 gance and coquetry; that it was always 
 graceful details, moreover, and not the gen- 
 eral plan that attracted him; which is a 
 limitation that naturally goes with the other. 
 Of course the charm and the short-comings 
 that are everywhere in Beyle's art criticism 
 are the same in his judgments of national 
 traits, which form a large part of his work. 
 Antipathy to the French is one of his fixed 
 ideas, thorough Frenchman that he was; 
 for his own vanity and distrust did not 
 make him hate the less genuinely those
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 weaknesses. Vanity is bourgeois, he thinks, 
 and there is for him no more terrible word. 
 It spoils the best things, too conversation 
 among others; for the French conversation 
 is work. 
 
 " The most tiresome defect in our present 
 civilization is the desire to produce effect." 
 So with their bravery, their love, all is cal- 
 culated, there is no abandonment. This 
 annoys him particularly in the women, who 
 are always the most important element to 
 him. He gives them their due, but coldly: 
 " France, however, is always the country 
 where there are always the most passable 
 women. They seduce by delicate pleasures 
 made possible by their mode of dress, and 
 these pleasures can be appreciated by the 
 most passionless natures. Dry natures are 
 afraid of Italian beauty." Of course this 
 continual flinging at the French is only 
 partly vanity, self-glorification in being 
 able, almost alone of foreigners, to appre- 
 ciate the Italians. It is partly contempt for 
 his leading power, for mere intelligence. 
 In his youth he spoke with half-regret of 
 his being so reasonable that he would go to 
 bed to save his health even when his head 
 was crowded with ideas that he wanted to 
 write. It was his desperate desire to be as 
 1 06
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 Italian as he could, rather than any serene 
 belief that he had thrown off much of his 
 French nature, that made him leave orders 
 to have inscribed on his tombstone : 
 
 Qui Giace 
 
 Arrigo Beyle Milanese 
 Visse, scrisse, am6. 
 
 It comes dangerously near to a pose, perhaps, 
 and yet there is genuineness enough in it to 
 make it pathetic. He praises the Italians 
 because they do not judge their happiness. 
 He never ceased to judge his. Nowhere 
 outside of Italy, he thinks, can one hear 
 with a certain accent, " O Dio ! com' e 
 bello ! " But the implication is quite unfair. 
 I have heard a common Frenchwoman ex- 
 claim, under her breath, before an ugly 
 peacock, "Dieu! comme c'est beau," with 
 an intensity that was not less because it 
 was restrained. But restraint was Beyle's 
 bugbear. From his own economical, calcu- 
 lating nature he flew almost with worship to 
 its opposite. He is speaking of Julien and 
 therefore of himself, when he says, in "Le 
 Rouge et le Noir:" "Intellectual love has 
 doubtless more cleverness than true love, but 
 it has only moments of enthusiasm. It 
 knows itself too well. It judges itself 
 107
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 unceasingly. Far from driving away thought, 
 it exists only by force of thought." He calls 
 Julien mediocre, and he says of him, "This 
 dry soul felt all of passion that is possible 
 in a person raised in the midst of this ex- 
 cessive civilization which Paris admires." 
 Beyle saves Julien from contempt at the end 
 (and doubtless he consoled himself with 
 something similar) by causing him, while 
 remaining a conscious hypocrite, to lose his 
 life unhesitatingly, absurdly, perversely, for 
 the sake of love. Once he has shown him- 
 self capable of the divine unreason, of exal- 
 tation, he is respectable. Where the enthu- 
 siasm is he is blinded; he cannot see the 
 crudity and stupidity of passion. Before 
 this mad enthusiasm the French fineness 
 and proportion is insignificant. He loses 
 his memory of the charm he has told so 
 well. "Elsewhere there is no conception 
 of this art of giving birth to the laugh of the 
 mind, and of giving delicious joys by unex- 
 pected words." 
 
 As might be expected, Beyle is even more 
 unfair to the Germans than he is to his 
 countrymen ; for the sentiment of which he 
 is the epicure and the apologist, has nothing 
 in common with the reverent and poetic 
 sentiment in which the Germans are so rich. 
 1 08
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 This last Beyle hates as he hates Rousseau 
 and Madame de Stael. It is phrase, moon- 
 shine, and the fact that it is bound up in a 
 stable and orderly character but makes it 
 the more irritating. They are sentimental, 
 innocent, and unintelligent, he says, and he 
 quotes with a sneer, as true of the race, " A 
 soul honest, sweet, and peaceful, free of 
 pride and remorse, full of benevolence and 
 humanity, above the nerves and the pas- 
 sions." In short, quite anti-Beylian, quite 
 submissive, sweet, and moral. For England 
 he has much more respect, and even a slight 
 affection. He likes their anti-classicism, 
 and he likes especially the beauty of their 
 women, which he thinks second only to that 
 of the Italians. The rich complexions, the 
 free, open countenances, the strong forms 
 rouse him sometimes almost to enthusiasm ; 
 but of course it is all secondary in the inevi- 
 table comparison. " English beauty seems 
 paltry, without soul, without life, before 
 the divine eyes which heaven has given to 
 Italy." The somewhat in the submissive 
 faces of the Englishwomen that threatens 
 future ennui, Stendhal thinks has been 
 ingrained there by the workings of the ter- 
 rible law of propriety which rules as a despot 
 over the unfortunate island. It is the vision 
 109
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 of caprice in the face of the Italian woman 
 that makes him certain of never being bored. 
 It is not surprising that women should be 
 the objects through which Beyle sees every- 
 thing. A man who sees in relativity, arbi- 
 trariness, caprice, the final law of nature, 
 and who feels a sympathy with this law, not 
 unnaturally finds in the absolute, personal, 
 perverse nature of women his most congenial 
 companionship. He finds in women some- 
 thing more elemental than reasonableness. 
 He finds the basal instincts. They best 
 illustrate his psychology of final, absolute 
 choice. Of course there is the other side 
 too, the epicure's point of view, from which 
 their charm is the centre of the paradise of 
 leisure, music, and ices. His hyperbole in 
 praising art is "equal to the first hand- 
 shake of the woman one loves." In politics 
 he sees largely the relations of sex ; and in 
 national character it is almost always of the 
 women he is talking. Their influence marks 
 the advance of civilization. "Tenderness 
 has made progress among us because society 
 has become more perfect," and tenderness 
 here is this soft or, if you choose, effeminate, 
 sensibility. 
 
 "The admission of women to perfect equality 
 would be the surest sign of civilization. It would 
 no
 
 STENDHAL 
 
 double the intellectual forces of the human race 
 and its probabilities of happiness. ... To attain 
 equality, the source of happiness for both sexes, the 
 duel would have to be opeu to women ; the pistol 
 demands only address. Any woman, by subjecting 
 herself to imprisonment for two years, would be able, 
 at the expiration of the term, to get a divorce. 
 Towards the year Two Thousand these ideas will 
 be no longer ridiculous." 
 
 In this passage is the whole man, intelli- 
 gent and fantastic, sincere and suspicious, 
 fresh, convincing, absurd. He is rapidly 
 settling back into obscurity, to which he is 
 condemned as much by the substance of his 
 thought as by the formlessness of its expres- 
 sion. Entirely a rebel, and only slightly 
 a revolutionist, he is treated by the world 
 as he treated it. A lover of many interest- 
 ing things inextricably wound up together, 
 his earnest talk about them will perhaps for 
 some time longer be an important influence 
 on the lives of a few whose minds shall be 
 of the kind to which a sharp, industrious, 
 capricious, and rebellious individual is the 
 best stimulant to their own thought. 
 1894. 
 
 in
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC
 
 V 
 
 MERIME AS A CRITIC 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE, perhaps the most skilful 
 of French short story-tellers, has talked of 
 his art preferences in essays little inferior 
 in execution to his tales, and revealed in 
 them the most attractive side of his own 
 nature, and yet most of them lie hidden in 
 the files of "Le Constitutionel," "Le 
 Temps," " Les Debats," and " La Revue des 
 Deux Mondes." Indeed, the powers which 
 charm the lover of deftness in literature 
 sometimes appear even more distinctly when 
 he is speaking his critical opinion than they 
 do when he is telling a story. For this reason 
 the essays are almost unique in form. It 
 would be hard to find another example of an 
 art of this kind, the kind that has gone 
 into the best short fiction, the art in which 
 the execution is the most prominent merit, 
 the perfectly chiselled miniature, shown in 
 miscellaneous critical essays. Why, then, 
 does no one study his criticism ? 
 "5
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 We know his irony in his stories. When, 
 after the death of Carmen, the reader comes 
 suddenly to a comment on certain gypsy 
 words, he feels it. He feels it at the death 
 of Arsene, surrounded by the doctor, her 
 lover, and the great lady who with her piety 
 has deprived the dying peasant of her lover, 
 and is herself in danger of falling, with all 
 her virtue, a prey to the same man. He 
 feels it as, after this scene, he reads this last 
 chapter; with the epitaph written by the 
 woman of prayer over the grave of the girl 
 who had known only one love, and had had 
 that taken from her as immoral by the vir- 
 tuous woman who appropriated it. 
 
 " Well, madam, you tell me that my story is fin- 
 ished and that you do not care to hear more. I 
 should think you would be curious to know whether 
 or not M. de Salligny made his trip to Greece ; 
 whether but it is late, and you have had enough. 
 So be it. At least avoid hasty judgments, for I 
 protest that I have said nothing to authorize them. 
 Especially, do not doubt the truth of my story. 
 Are you sceptical ? Go to Pere Lachaise ; twenty 
 feet to the left of the tomb of General Foy, you 
 will find a very simple lias stone, surrounded by 
 flowers that are always well tended. On the stone 
 you can read the name of my heroine cut in large 
 letters : ARSENE GUILLOT. And if you bend 
 116
 
 MRIME AS A CRITIC 
 
 over this tomb you will see, if the rain has not 
 already erased it, a line written with a lead-pencil, 
 in a very fine hand : 
 
 " ' Poor Arsene ! She is praying for us.' " 
 
 The charm of the irony is, like the charm 
 of the execution, in distance, in delicacy of 
 suggestion. In his essays, this preference 
 for less obvious methods of suggestion, the 
 dislike of the easy and the explicit, is stated. 
 "He found her piqtiante, to use one of those 
 expressions that I hate." And in his essay 
 on Nicholas Gogol he wrote a passage that 
 is at once a good illustration of his essay 
 style, and an open expression of his im- 
 patience with commonplace methods in 
 literature: 
 
 " I think the study well done and graphically 
 depicted, as M. Diaforus would say, but I don't 
 like the kind ; madness is one of the misfortunes 
 which move us, but also disgust. Doubtless by 
 putting a madman into his story a writer is sure ot 
 making an effect. He moves a cord always sensi- 
 tive, but the means is vulgar, and the talent of M. 
 Gogol is not one of those that need to descend to 
 these trivialities. Let us leave madmen to begin- 
 ners, with the dogs, those characters of an equally 
 irresistible effect. What a glory to wring tears from 
 your reader if you break a poodle's leg ! Homer, 
 in my opinion, is excusable for making us weep 
 117
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 at the mutual recognition of the dog Argus and 
 Ulysses only because he was, I believe, the first to 
 discover the resources offered by the canine race to 
 an author at the end of expedients." 
 
 Thus the essays have the same severity 
 that distinguishes the art of his stories. 
 More important, however, to the student of 
 Merimee is the fact that they give another 
 side of him, a side that a careful reader 
 might guess from the stories, a side that is 
 more openly suggested in his letters, but 
 which even in the letters shows itself only 
 timidly and indirectly. It is a rather sin- 
 gular fact that straightforward seriousness 
 should show itself clearly in the essays 
 alone. In them he tells without sarcasm 
 the principles of art in which he believes. 
 He describes the art that charms him and 
 moves him. He talks of friendship, too, 
 in a tone that he would shrink from using 
 in a letter. It seems as if he knew the pub- 
 lic expected this, and would not laugh at him 
 for it as a friend might. The Me'rime'e of 
 the letters and stories is an artist of bril- 
 liancy, force, and elegance, but a man who 
 is always on the defensive, protecting him- 
 self from ridicule by distance. Timidity or 
 taste makes him avoid always a serious 
 tone. The Merimee of the essays is the 
 118
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 skilful artist still, and he is besides a man 
 of broad comprehension and sympathy. It 
 would be hard to find in his letters or stories 
 as simple a tone as the one in these words 
 about a story of Gogol's : 
 
 " I hasten to come to a little masterpiece, ' An 
 Oldtime Household.' In a few pages M. Gogol 
 tells us the lives of two good old people, husband 
 and wife, living in the country, persons in whose 
 heads there is no grain of malice, deceived and 
 adored by their peasants, ingeniously egotistic be- 
 cause they believe all the world happy, as they are 
 themselves. The wife dies. The husband, who 
 had seemed to live only to eat, fails and dies a few 
 months after his wife. We laugh and cry in reading 
 this charming tale, where the art of the story-teller 
 is hidden in the simplicity of the story. All is true, 
 natural. There is no detail which is not charming 
 and a part of the general effect." 
 
 In personal affection it is the same. He 
 shrank from speaking seriously of affection, 
 orally or in letters, and yet there is in his 
 essay on Victor Jacquemont sincere feeling, 
 entirely undisguised and unclothed in irony. 
 He dwells with fondness over some of the 
 various traits of the character, and when he 
 comes to speak of his voice, he uses a quo- 
 tation singularly warm for him : " When I 
 119
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 heard him speak I used to think of these 
 lines of Shakespeare : 
 
 " ' Oh ! it came on my ears like the sweet South 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets.' " 
 
 An essay that shows strong literary affec- 
 tion is one on Madame du Deffand in " Le 
 Moniteur" for April 29, 1867. Nobody has 
 entered with more accurate sympathy into 
 the character of the famous wit. Merim^e 
 speaks simply a real love of the woman and 
 of the period. He does not garble the facts, 
 but he is lenient because he feels the elo- 
 quence of Madame du Deffand from her own 
 point of view; he feels her loyalty to her 
 first impressions, her frankness, her desire 
 to please, the simplicity and elevation of 
 her intellectual tastes. He felt, too, the 
 genuineness of her ephemeral affections, 
 and he knew the sincerity in the seeming 
 frivolity. It is a passing book review, and 
 yet it shows better than anything else he 
 has written his appreciation of one kind of 
 mind. 
 
 Simple liking for certain things and cer- 
 tain people is not the only trait of character 
 which is seen clearly only in the essays. 
 Another trait, allied to it, is intellectual 
 charity. In his letters, Merimee's criti- 
 
 I2O
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 cisms of things he does not like are sharp 
 and contemptuous. That he could speak 
 with more reserve in his r61e of a profes- 
 sional critic is shown in an essay on the 
 English pre-Raphaelite art in " La Revue 
 des Deux Mondes " for October 15, 1857. 
 Nothing could be further from his sympathy; 
 nothing could be in sharper contrast with 
 his skill in economy and convergence of parts 
 than their pointless details; nothing more 
 different from his restraint and fineness than 
 their efforts for literary symbolism. Of 
 course he saw their weaknesses, but he also 
 saw their merits. The weaknesses are 
 described, for him, with little bitterness or 
 sarcasm. Here is a description of a picture 
 by Hunt : 
 
 "A young woman is singing before an open 
 piano. She holds in her hand a sheet of music. 
 Behind her is a young man in morning dress, with 
 his arm passed gayly about her waist. Her mouth 
 is open ; probably she is running a division ; but 
 she has a frightful grimace, and, moreover, as I 
 learned by putting on my spectacles, she has tears 
 in her eyes. Beside this group, in an easy-chair, is 
 a cat which shares the taste of Harlequin, of whom 
 it is well known that he liked only those serenades 
 at which there is food. This cat has procured for 
 itself a canary, and is in the process of killing it. 
 121
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 ... I wished to know why this fair singer wept 
 while her companion was so gay. Unfortunately 
 the title was very laconic, ' Conscience Awakened.' 
 I admit that I was more puzzled than I had been 
 before I had resorted to the catalogue. Fortunately 
 I met an English artist, who gave me the following 
 explanation : ' You certainly see that the two per- 
 sons in this picture are not demeaning themselves 
 properly. Look at the hand of the young woman. 
 . . You will notice that she has no marriage ring, 
 and is therefore unmarried. The arm passed about 
 her waist shows that she has a lover. She is singing 
 one of Moore's melodies, which you ought to know 
 by heart, and of which you can easily read the title 
 by standing on your head. This title will remind 
 you that in the third couplet the unfortunate woman 
 meets an allusion to her own false position, and this 
 allusion chokes her in the midst of the roulade. It 
 is then that her conscience is awakened, and there 
 you have what Mr. Hunt has expressed.' 'And the 
 cat ? ' I asked. ' The cat is at once an interesting 
 detail and a moral. It represents the bad instincts, 
 and the canary represents innocence, two well-chosen 
 emblems.' " 
 
 Yet even in a school so ridiculous to him 
 Me'rim^e finds good, and points out the 
 various technical merits with fairness. Even 
 in Mr. Ruskin he sees a use. He says Mr. 
 Ruskin has a few ideas that are sane, even 
 practicable, and that these ideas have been 
 
 122
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 made more effective in England by the vio- 
 lence of their expression. His general 
 impression of the pre-Raphaelites is thus 
 put : " Habits of reflection, a taste for 
 subtlety, pretension to depth, mixed with a 
 great deal of inexperience," and, he adds 
 later, an entire lack of comprehension of 
 the noble style. 
 
 His technique in the essays is worth as 
 much study by young critics as young novel- 
 ists put on his stories. It is almost impos- 
 sible to see the logic of the arrangement, 
 and quite impossible not to feel that there 
 is logic. Though there is no apparent 
 synthesis, the man of whom he writes stands 
 out; the picture is finished, given in a few 
 strokes. He is abrupt, but not incomplete. 
 His bold unity is beyond analysis. There 
 are few introductions, no conclusions, and 
 no obvious ornament. His dislike of the 
 opposite method of express transition and 
 setting he has suggested in "Charles IX." 
 in an imaginary dialogue between the reader 
 and the author : 
 
 " Ah, Mr. Author, what a fine chance you have 
 here to draw portraits ! And such portraits ! You 
 will take us to the castle at Madrid, in the midst of 
 the court and such a court ! Are you going to 
 show it to us, this French-Italian court? Introduce 
 123
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 us in turn to all the distinguished characters. How 
 much we shall learn, and how interesting will be the 
 day spent among such grand persons ! 
 
 "Alas, Mr. Reader, what a request you are 
 making ! I would fain have the talent to write a 
 history of France ; I should not then be telling 
 stories. But tell me, why do you wish me to intro- 
 duce to you persons who play no part in my 
 novel ? 
 
 " You do a great wrong in not giving them parts 
 in it. What, you take me back to the year 1572, 
 and then pretend to escape the portrayal of so 
 many remarkable men ! Come, you cannot hesi- 
 tate. Begin, and I shall give you the first 
 phrase : The door of the salon opened, and there 
 appeared . . . 
 
 " But, Mr. Reader, there were no salons in the 
 castle of Madrid. Salons . . . 
 
 " Well. The great hall was filled with a crowd, 
 . . . etc. . . . among whom might be distinguished 
 . . . etc. 
 
 " What do you wish to have distinguished ? 
 
 " Of course, in the first place, Charles IX ! ... 
 
 " And in the second ? 
 
 " Not so fast. First you must describe his cos- 
 tume, then you will give a portrait of his appearance, 
 and finally of his character. That is to-day the high 
 road for all novelists. 
 
 "His costume? He was in hunting dress, with 
 a great huntsman's horn about his neck. 
 
 " You are short ..." 
 124
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 Merimee then yields and gives a sketch 
 in his own manner: 
 
 " Well, imagine a young man rather well formed, 
 with his head a little sunk into his shoulders, his 
 neck stretched out, and his face thrown awkwardly 
 forward. His nose is rather large, the lips are fine 
 and long, the upper one protruding. His com- 
 plexion is wan, and his large green eyes never look 
 at the person to whom he is talking. Moreover, it 
 is impossible to read in his eyes Saint Bartholomew, 
 or anything like it. No, his expression is rather 
 stupid and restless than hard or savage." 
 
 In the historical essays Me'rime'e's art 
 does not work as well as in the literary 
 essays. 
 
 " I like in history only anecdotes, and among the 
 anecdotes I prefer those in which I think I see a 
 true picture of the customs and characteristics of 
 the epoch. This is not a noble taste, but I admit 
 to my shame that I would freely give up Thucydides 
 for some authentic memoirs of Aspasia or of one 
 of the slaves of Pericles ; for memoirs, which are 
 familiar talks of the author with the reader, alone 
 furnish those portraits of man which amuse and 
 interest me." 
 
 As an example, he quotes this "concise 
 note" from "L'fitoile " : 
 I2 S
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 "The young lady of Chateauneuf, one of the 
 favorites of the king before he went to Poland, 
 having made a love marriage with Antinotti, a 
 Florentine, an overseer of galley slaves at Mar- 
 seilles, and having found him wantoning, killed him 
 like a man with her own hands. . . . Out of this 
 story and the many others of which Brantome is 
 full my imagination builds a character, and I call to 
 life a woman of the court of Henry the Third." 
 
 This taste makes M crime" e a success as a 
 writer of historical essays only where the 
 subject is fitted to concise narrative, where 
 the bearing is apparent without explanation. 
 In some essays, " Les Cosaques d'Autrefois 
 and les Faux Demetrius," for instance, he is 
 hard to read, for the stories are long and not 
 interesting in outline, and the dulness of 
 them is only emphasized by Merimee' s bare- 
 ness of statement. One feels as Merimee 
 himself felt of Sallust : 
 
 " In a long work his style might weary, on 
 account of a conciseness which is perhaps not 
 sufficiently free from mannerism. Applied to short 
 tales it produces the deepest impression, by com- 
 bining energy of thought with sobriety of setting. 
 Art sometimes shows itself in this style a little too 
 openly, in spite of the affectation of disorder in the 
 composition, and one frequently forgets the interest 
 of the story to admire the skill of the story-teller." 
 126
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 The opinions expressed in the essays make 
 us like Merimee far more than do the trucu- 
 lent condemnations of the letters. Some- 
 times, of course, he is unsympathetic, but 
 seldom or never caustic. 
 
 " Michelangelo," he says, " has conceived his Moses 
 as an athlete. I will be bold enough to say that 
 this savage giant, with arms like a porter's and a 
 beard of ropes, does not to me represent the guide 
 and prophet of the Hebrews. He is a man whom 
 no one would care to meet in the woods, but who 
 would not know how to force obedience from a stiff- 
 necked race." 
 
 He does not like what he thinks the exag- 
 gerated grandeur that Plutarch and Shake- 
 speare give to Caesar, but he likes still less 
 the method of Suetonius. 
 
 " Very different from Plutarch, who gives all his 
 heroes the grand air, Suetonius seems to have de- 
 lighted in belittling his. His is a low and spiteful 
 mind that cannot understand genius. He has neither 
 indignation for vice nor enthusiasm for virtue, but 
 he seeks everywhere ridicule, because ridicule levels 
 all reputations and destroys both terror and admira- 
 tion. Suetonius shows his whole nature in his 
 life of Caesar. He gives but a few pages to his 
 many remarkable deeds, but he finds space to 
 127
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 repeat in full the devilish songs of the soldiers 
 who accompanied in his triumph the conqueror 
 of the world." 
 
 This last quotation has the tone that can 
 seldom be found in any of Merime'e's work 
 but his essays. Apparently he enjoyed 
 them less than his stories and his letters, 
 so it may be that the tone of seriousness, 
 here even severe, is one that represents 
 him less intimately than his pervading irony. 
 Yet his character is the broader, that he 
 could speak in that tone so well. And it 
 is not at all certain, merely because he was 
 usually half contemptuous in his art and in 
 his personal relations, that he did not have 
 as genuinely the gentler and simpler emo- 
 tions and preferences that can be seen in his 
 criticism. It is not unlikely that his own 
 words about Beyle apply to himself : 
 
 "... the fear of being through a dupe, and the 
 constant care to avoid this misfortune ; hence this 
 factitious hardening, this despairing analysis of low 
 motives in all generous action, this resistance to the 
 first impulses of the heart, much more affected than 
 real with him, it seems to me." 
 
 Certainly this timid narrowing is, what- 
 ever the cause, much less constant in his 
 128
 
 MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 
 
 essays. Therefore, to read Merimee's criti- 
 cism after knowing his letters and stories, 
 is to see an expression of the more generous 
 side of him. It is to be able, in judging 
 him, to see him less limited to irony, to see 
 him as a man of wider range. 
 1895. 
 
 129
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM
 
 VI 
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 IN contrast to the common assertion that the 
 American race is developing in its feelings for 
 life and expression some traits prominent in 
 the French is the fact that in our contem- 
 porary literature we are almost weakest where 
 the French are strongest. We who in the arts 
 which are less generally followed here, in paint- 
 ing and sculpture, have contributed to the 
 first rank of artists, and are respectable at 
 least in fiction, are in an art which is much 
 more practised here, that of criticism, really 
 insignificant. Although in no country do 
 people read more, in no country of impor- 
 tance is the current comment on books more 
 lacking in thought and workmanship. In 
 short stories we are doing something firm 
 and individual, but in the art of which in a 
 nation of readers we might expect high de- 
 velopment, we are to-day as far behind France 
 and even England as we are in poetry. In
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 comment on the drama, the same low level is 
 unbroken. Although we are a theatre-going 
 nation we have nobody with the knowledge 
 of the stage which makes experts of Sarcey, 
 Archer, and Lemaitre; nobody with the 
 literary charm put into dramatic criticism 
 of Walkley or Anatole France. Strangely 
 enough, the most interesting criticism of the 
 day is put upon those arts of which our peo- 
 ple know least. Are there many present 
 commentators on books in the United States 
 who have the subtlety, the fine edge, the 
 intellectual fineness shown in Mr. Brownell's 
 criticism of art? Is there to be found in 
 much of our literary criticism the grave cer- 
 tainty and elevation of Mr. La Farge, or the 
 results of study, contact, energy, and high 
 aim which meet in the style of Mrs. Van 
 Rensselaer and make it alive even when it is 
 rough? These critics in their speech sound 
 important, they have the undertone of feeling 
 and understanding, they stand for grasp and 
 choice. How often can they be matched 
 among the living American writers whose 
 volumes deal with books? To add one other 
 to the list, who of our literary critics gives 
 the clear, informal explanations of technical 
 faults and successes that are thrown off in 
 anonymous judgments of contemporary pic-
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 tures and books on painting by the strict 
 and lawyerlike pen of Mr. Cox? 
 
 The explanation of these seemingly anoma- 
 lous conditions is to be found in what at first 
 sight appears to constitute the anomalies. It 
 is the size of our reading public that keeps 
 our literary criticism lower than our creative 
 work in literature and the plastic arts and lower 
 than our art criticism. We read not only 
 more books than the people of other coun- 
 tries, but more newspapers also ; and it is the 
 newspaper which partly sets and entirely rep- 
 resents average American standards. The 
 large amount of space given in the dailies to 
 literature and drama forms a contrast to the 
 quality of the treatment. They must give 
 the crowd what it will take immediately. 
 They, the newspapers, aiming at great circu- 
 lations; the plays, aiming at popular runs; 
 the books, aiming at immediate sale, are all 
 largely formed by the taste of that part of 
 humanity which in other countries, where 
 there is no popular education, has little to do 
 with literature. Small and few indeed among 
 us are the sets yet formed which raise and 
 nourish men who care more for the mild ap- 
 proval of the judicious than for the money 
 and the notoriety of popular success. Sup- 
 pose that an American understood the mech-
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 anism of the drama as well as M. Sarcey, 
 say, or Mr. Archer, would he be found out and 
 encouraged by our journals? For a critic as 
 erudite as M. Brunetiere what respect, what 
 dignity is there here compared to what France 
 offers to solid work? What newspaper in 
 America would not call an unknown Walkley 
 or Anatole France " too literary " ? How 
 many editors frankly tell contributors that 
 literary excellence is nothing; that popu- 
 larity of subject is everything ! Thus it is 
 that the size of the audience which listens to 
 the critic here makes him speak like a stump- 
 orator. The very possibilities of criticism keep 
 from it healthy encouragement. The crowd 
 will not be led too fast. We support literary 
 criticism in but one weekly of the same class 
 with the French and English, and in but one 
 daily. Expert handling of what we all feel 
 capable of handling bores us, and even in- 
 sults us. There is a story, probably true, 
 that the owner of a great New York paper 
 discharged his dramatic editor and openly 
 announced his preference for ordinary re- 
 porters as critics of the theatre; and book- 
 reviews in that as in most of our publications 
 are the side issues of untrained men. The 
 principal exception consists of the careless 
 opinions of men who are famous for other 
 136
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 things, and these opinions, being bought for 
 the signature, are almost always miserable. 
 How many readers know of the existence of 
 Mr. Brownell compared to the number who 
 read the trivialities published by prominent 
 novelists whose critical faculties are so feeble 
 that they are rightly treated with condescen- 
 sion by even the newspapers? When one 
 of these prominent men does write criticisms 
 he is careful not to go over the heads of his 
 readers or to hurt the man who says, as 
 so many say, " Perhaps I don't know what is 
 good, but I know what I like," meaning that 
 his opinion is as good as another's. The 
 action of the committee of the Army of the 
 Tennessee, overruling as unintelligent the 
 decision of the Sculptors' Society, to which 
 they had submitted designs for a statue of 
 Sherman, is fresh in our minds. We will 
 accept facts from experts, but our opinions 
 are our own. 
 
 It is his own opinion, therefore, that the aver- 
 age reader has reflected back to him by the 
 newspapers and magazines. One characteris- 
 tic of his opinion is that it is not artistic but 
 ethical. For instance, we do not find exposi- 
 tions of the methods of Ibsen, Pinero, or 
 Dumas, to take three men remarkable for 
 technical qualities, but homilies on the char-
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 acter of Mrs. Tanqueray or on the fitness of 
 showing " certain things " to the public. In- 
 stead of enthusiasm like that of the elder 
 Dumas over his son's skill in getting his 
 heroine back to Paris after the third act of 
 La Dame aux Camelias, we have soliloquies 
 on the possibility of Marguerite's being so 
 refined in her occupation. Of the few dailies 
 most read by cultivated Americans, two have 
 for dramatic critics men whose moral tone is 
 so high that they are actually unacquainted 
 with the unwholesome plays of France ; and 
 I have seen a musical critic of prominence 
 leave the opera-house after the first act at the 
 first presentation of " Manon," because it 
 followed the novel too closely, to write the 
 next day a scathing dismissal of the opera. 
 Nowhere do we get the detachment, penetra- 
 tion, and learning that must combine to make 
 an equipped critic of books or plays. The 
 only one among those New York papers 
 worthy of notice which is free from Jeromiac 
 concern lacks artistic seriousness, too, and 
 aims only at jocosity. Our critics do not 
 study foreign models, they do not study their 
 subjects, and they do not have the general 
 attitude of culture which is more needed by 
 the critic than by any other artist. Without 
 these difficult acquirements they can, with 
 138
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 instincts compounded of ethical obsessions 
 and carelessness of art, mirror a few prejudices, 
 and that is all they need to do. 
 
 To remain cheerful, however, one need 
 only remember that criticism as an art is 
 always a late development, which truth is 
 too general to grieve over. Winslow Homer 
 can be a powerful artist on the solitary coast 
 of Maine, Miss Wilkins can make pictures 
 in forlorn New England towns, but a gen- 
 eral excellence in criticism, much more than 
 in any other art, is dependent on the for- 
 mation of groups of intelligent people, which 
 is dependent on social stratification. Criti- 
 cism, which is immediately the voice of 
 culture, will appear only when part of the 
 general intelligence now unsifted in our raw 
 mass of democracy is freed and crystallized 
 in smaller classes independent of everything 
 save their own tastes. It is, indeed, not 
 impossible that when these necessary divi- 
 sions are made, the culture which will result 
 will be broader on account of the influence 
 of democracy, which must still be felt; 
 because that influence, destructive now, may 
 then tend to give a deeper human tone, to 
 give to the ordinary critic, the mere spokes- 
 man of his environment, something of that 
 wide interest tempered with humor, that
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 free play with his material, the average 
 mind, which has usually been the exclusive 
 possession of the great critic of life, the 
 Rabelais, Cervantes, or Moliere. Much as 
 we need instruction and technical under- 
 standing, requisites to any advance, we shall 
 of course be lucky if our culture, when it 
 comes, is slower to run the ordinary his- 
 torical course into formulism, and one may 
 at least hope that the narrowness of the 
 barrier which will separate our future culti- 
 vated class from the masses behind it, will 
 keep it on the move and prevent hardening 
 into forms. Just now, however, it is natural 
 to think less of possible safeguards for our 
 prospective civilization than of the changes 
 needed to begin the refining process. There- 
 fore, any growth of social distinctions, of a 
 leisure class, of respect for tradition and 
 authority, is an encouraging sign, the danger 
 of the sequence of bookishness, rigidity, and 
 deviation from the constants of human 
 nature being too remote to think of yet. In 
 the mean time there is more immediate 
 promise in the criticism of art than there is 
 in that of literature, probably because the 
 public, recognizing the technical difficulties 
 of painting and sculpture, sees more often 
 the need of training for the critic of pictures 
 140
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 and statues than it sees the need of train- 
 ing and natural fitness in a man who does 
 merely what almost any reading American 
 feels capable of doing. 
 
 II 
 
 KENYON Cox once wrote : 
 
 " Nothing could show more curiously than does 
 this book the advantages and disadvantages of artis- 
 tic criticism of art ; nothing could exhibit more 
 completely the qualities and defects of the artist 
 turned critic. The introduction opens with the 
 statement that ' only the writing on art by one who 
 has technical knowledge of it is of practical value,' 
 and, scattered through the pages, there are many 
 contemptuous flings at ' a certain class of writers on 
 art ' whose ' ignorance of the technique of any art is 
 only equalled by their ability to write on it.' No 
 doubt the sneer is often justified, yet of many of the 
 artists who make it, it would hardly be too much to 
 say that ' their knowledge of their subject is only 
 equalled by their inability to write clearly of it.' " 
 
 The combination of a knowledge of their 
 subject with talent for expression exists in 
 two of the many painters who write, and the 
 qualities which they have shown tell what 
 is best in criticism in the United States 
 141
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 and what is needed by most of their fellow 
 critics. John La Farge stands at the head 
 of those painters who are American both by 
 birth and residence, and his " Considerations 
 on Painting " and " Letters from Japan " 
 give the most typical artist criticism in the 
 country, that is, criticism most typical of 
 the devoted artist, for he has never sacrificed 
 an hour to perfunctory writing or painting. 
 
 Looking down the list of painters who 
 have left their thoughts in prose, from 
 Fromentin and Delacroix and Millet at the 
 top, through Vasari and Reynolds and Cou- 
 ture and Hunt, to Breton and Whistler, 
 nearer the bottom, one finds always a keen 
 interest in general principles, very differ- 
 ently expressed, to be sure, poetically by 
 Millet, ridiculously by Whistler, sentimen- 
 tally by Breton, clumsily by Couture, but 
 in one way or another always emphasized, 
 except in the very rare cases, where the 
 author cared for execution only. The 
 average artist is interested in life and 
 likes to generalize about it, so that the talk 
 of the studio, apart from the class room, is 
 general, human, and untechnical. " Sin- 
 cerity " will be heard many times where 
 " values " is spoken once. Mr. La Farge is 
 typical also of the modern painter, in being 
 142
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 a man of experience outside of art. He has 
 done many things, studied law, travelled, 
 gone into society, read largely in philosophy, 
 science, and literature, painted, and been an 
 inventor in stained glass. Although some 
 of his psychological explanations border on 
 pedantry, most of his culture is digested, 
 and the experience of the man of the world 
 makes stronger what the artist says. 
 
 His most general virtue is appreciation. 
 He is never bored or even sleepy. There is 
 always a mass of meaning in the world for 
 him, an interest rather in the subject-matter 
 of art than in its processes, for he has escaped 
 entirely the fads of his day, and knows how 
 much like other men the strongly original 
 man must be. As Couture says of painting : 
 "Still later, in Poussin, it reaches maturity; 
 it has become grave and reserved; it re- 
 turns to the past, gathers everything to- 
 gether, and gives a beautiful lesson." Sim- 
 ilar praise is deserved by the writings of 
 Mr. La Farge. Respect for the permanent 
 good, gravity, reserve, the love of a beauti- 
 ful lesson, are in him, and he follows his 
 own advice: 
 
 " First, therefore, see that your methods are 
 respectful. Never make light of difficulties or slip 
 easily over what you find to be obstacles. Better be
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 gawky than flippant in your work. Imitate in your 
 methods the methods of religious life, even if they 
 oblige you to the lengthiest preparations. And if a 
 passionate impulse carries you away, your expression 
 will still have the accent that comes of previous 
 respectful meditation." 
 
 His appreciation, sure and full as it is, 
 and attractive as it makes what he says of 
 other men, sometimes destroys the unity of 
 his own entirely uncreative criticism, as 
 where the great figure which passes through 
 one of his books, present always, although 
 sometimes in the background, overshadows 
 the author himself. It was like Mr. La 
 Farge, however, to pick out for a guide the 
 most admirable of art critics, the sanest, the 
 most penetrating, the one who by his depth 
 and certainty of thought and splendor of 
 expression can stir up the emotions while 
 appealing directly to the reason. La Farge 
 is above artistic trivialities of every kind, 
 caring only for the good, wise in his judg- 
 ment, showing his standards as inevitably by 
 what he quotes as by what he says. Just 
 as Fromentin stands out as his instructor in 
 criticism, the great personalities are his 
 landmarks in painting, men like Ruysdael, 
 of whom he says that " his grave and solemn 
 mind gives to the simplest and most common 
 144
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 place of landscapes a look of sad importance," 
 men like Rembrandt, Millet, and Michel- 
 angelo. He resembles his master from afar, 
 like him filled with enthusiasm for large 
 personalities and the noble style in art, dis- 
 dainful of triviality and all digression, of 
 tricks of execution, of any technical accom- 
 plishment that is not part of its subject, full 
 of restrained poetry. So elevated are these 
 virtues in themselves that one can read the 
 lesser writer after the greater, and think 
 rather of the distinction which imagination 
 gives even to modest literary powers than 
 of the differences which make "Maitres 
 d'Autrefois " great and "Considerations on 
 Painting" only admirable. 
 
 Like Ruysdael's, La Farge's mind, al- 
 though not sad, is grave and solemn enough 
 to give to the common truths the impor- 
 tance which they alone can have. The name 
 of death is frequent in his pages, and humil- 
 ity, the knowledge of limitation, the melan- 
 choly of mature happiness, are always present : 
 "With the fatigue and repetition of the in- 
 numerable beauties of gold and color and 
 carving and bronze, the sense of an exquisite 
 art brings the indefinable sadness that be- 
 longs to it, a feeling of humility and of the 
 nothingness of man." The reader of artists' 
 10 145
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 books and letters will feel how typical this 
 is of the creative painter, who loves to 
 moralize, and who does it often better than 
 the literary man. Sometimes Mr. La 
 Farge's moral izings get away from him ; but 
 usually, with all their openness, they have a 
 reserve and grace that put them high for 
 literary art. To show how naturally they 
 weave themselves into the subject, and at 
 the same time to show the best of the author's 
 style, take this passage from the letters from 
 Japan : 
 
 " And I listened, until the blaze of the sun passed 
 under the green film of the trees, to the fluting of 
 the priests in the sanctuary on the hill. It was like 
 a hymn to nature. The noise of the locusts had 
 stopped for a time ; and this floating wail, rising and 
 falling in unknown and incomprehensible modula- 
 tions, seemed to belong to the forest as completely 
 as their cry. The shrill and liquid song brought 
 back the indefinite melancholy that one has felt 
 with the distant sound of children's voices, singing 
 of Sunday in drowsy rhythms. But these sounds 
 belonged to the place, to its own peculiar genius 
 of a lonely beauty, associated with an indefinite past, 
 little understood ; with death, and primeval nature, 
 and final rest" 
 
 "Why," asked a young sculptor the other 
 day, " do painters write so well ? " Genuine, 
 146
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 serious, unpedantic thinking about impor- 
 tant things removed from the accidents of 
 daily civil life seems to be more common 
 among workers in the plastic arts than among 
 any other class, and it shows when they 
 take up the pen. Their lives are devoted 
 to ideas, which, unlike the literary men, 
 they do not have to beat out thin for a 
 living. Then, too, the long apprenticeship 
 teaches them how much sacrifice any good 
 work demands, and often as fun is heard in 
 the studios flippancy is rare. It is experi- 
 ence as well as imagination and culture that 
 makes Mr. La Farge write so well. Never 
 stirring, never emotional, his reflective 
 calmness seems to be laden with knowledge 
 of life. It is in the style itself: 
 
 "Far away the sounds of pilgrims' clogs echoed 
 from the steps of distant temples ; we heard the 
 running of many waters. Above us a few crows, 
 frequenters of temples, spotted the light for a 
 moment, and their cries faded with them through 
 the branches. A great, heavy, ugly caterpillar crept 
 along the mossy edge of the balustrade, like the fresh 
 incarnation of a soul which had to begin it all anew." 
 
 Even when no moral truth is touched, the 
 
 same impression comes sometimes from the 
 
 unobtrusive music of the words, as in "a 
 
 '47
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 pleasantly managed balance of the full and 
 empty spaces," or "whose worn surfaces 
 contained marvels of passionate delicacy and 
 care framed in noble lives." 
 
 Although Mr. La Farge is always grave 
 there are touches of light, which have their 
 charm partly in the sobriety of their setting. 
 There is also frequently a French freshness 
 and pointedness of epithet that would be wit 
 or epigram if it were not so restrained, as in 
 the last of the modern painting tricks spoken 
 of in this praise of the Japanese : 
 
 " Not knowing the science and art of perspective 
 drawing, nor the power of representing shadows 
 according to rule, nor having the habit of ruling 
 lines with a ruler to give interest, nor of throwing 
 little witty accents of dark to fill up blanks, they 
 were perhaps the more obliged to concentrate their 
 powers upon the end of the work ; and their real 
 motive was the work itself." 
 
 At the end of all this praise a reservation 
 must be made; not the obvious one that 
 Mr. La Farge is not constructive in criti- 
 cism, that his wholes are not as good as 
 some of his bits, but the more fundamental 
 one that the style leaves the reader troubled, 
 questioning its sincerity. The personality 
 in it seems dual, its virtues appear to be 
 148
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 part of the artist rather than of the man. 
 The conscious mixture of frankness and 
 reserve, the appreciation of every high work 
 or impulse, the imaginative morality, the 
 gravity, the harmony, the humility, seem to 
 be there because they are the best things. 
 They seem to be chosen. I cannot select 
 passages to prove that, for it is an impres- 
 sion instilled insidiously by the whole; but 
 perhaps it is most definite when the author 
 talks about himself. A warm admirer of La 
 Farge, the artist once spoke of him as sur- 
 passingly clever. That word seemed to give 
 the key to my impression. The person has 
 not gone into the style. It is not born; it 
 is made. The man seems to be separated 
 from the artist who selects the thoughts and 
 phrases, choosing excellently. Pose it is 
 not, yet it is a lack of innocence. It is sin- 
 cere aesthetically and intellectually, rather 
 than sincere with the force of an included 
 character, and it is for this reason perhaps 
 as much as because of the difference in per- 
 ception and language that La Farge's fine 
 passages, exceptionally just and beautiful as 
 they are, have little of that rush of all-round 
 living truth which in the words of a Fro- 
 mentin may touch the heart of the most 
 critical reader. 
 
 149
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 III 
 
 KENYON Cox is in most ways the opposite of 
 Mr. La Farge. His writing, mostly anony- 
 mous and little known to the public, is felt 
 by artists on account of the technical knowl- 
 edge, clear and severe style, and fearless 
 speech ; but it is not only the victims of his 
 rigor who do not wholly approve of his man- 
 ner. An artist who received only high 
 praise from him, spoke with coolness of his 
 lawyer-like virtues. Some competent ob- 
 servers would have criticism more sympa- 
 thetic. It may well be answered that what 
 Americans suffer most from is the leniency 
 of their few authoritative critics. Not only 
 do the newspaper reviewers praise under 
 the guidance of the counting-room, but com- 
 mentators of more eminence deal in the 
 amenities to which they are tempted by per- 
 sonal acquaintance with the producers of 
 literature; and even of the few who do not 
 lack courage, the greater part think that 
 arts in their infant state should be treated 
 with gentleness. Mr. Cox spoke of his 
 companions in art with the unsoftened hon- 
 esty which most intelligent critics confine in 
 public to the dead, and apply only in private 
 to the living. 
 
 150
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 The past tense comes naturally, to express 
 Mr. Cox's position, although he is still 
 painting and writing in New York. It 
 seems apt, because he has ceased to write 
 much about the current picture exhibitions, 
 the significant reason for this being, it is 
 generally believed, that he found his radical 
 experiment in frankness too uncomfortable 
 and preferred silence to compliance. To 
 the student, at least, there is a loss, and if 
 competent and fearless criticism is favor- 
 able alike for advance in art and in public 
 taste, no critic was more needed. It must 
 be said, however, that not all intelligent 
 people took the same view of Mr. Cox's 
 withdrawal. "Of course," said an admirer 
 of him, 
 
 " Strictly just criticism is what is wanted where art 
 is established, as in Europe. But in this country, 
 to say practically, ' A dozen of you are trying for 
 the right thing, but only two of you have the 
 natural gifts to reach it,' is the kind of frankness 
 that blights. All who are trying for what is right 
 should be encouraged and only false ideas treated 
 severe." 
 
 This question is obviously too large for 
 dogmatism. 
 
 To show the suggestiveness, concreteness, 
 and bluntness of Mr. Cox's remarks on tech-
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 nical execution would take too many quota- 
 tions. In praising or blaming conception, 
 color, drawing, or any other element, he 
 never has vague conclusions, but always 
 definite ideas, well summed up in words and 
 full of detail. The free tone in which he 
 speaks of even his most prominent contem- 
 poraries is shown in this remark: "Mr. Sar- 
 gent is of all living painters perhaps the 
 most consummate virtuoso. It is vain to 
 look to him for thought, profundity, harmo- 
 nies of tone or line; but Paginini was 
 none the less great because he was not 
 Beethoven, and Sargent is the Paginini of 
 painting." Of Abbott Thayer he speaks in 
 a characteristic way, combining appreciation 
 of his good qualities with a frank statement 
 of his defects : 
 
 " Here the manner is rough, heavy, and labored, 
 and the color brown and lifeless, but the root of the 
 matter is in it. One learns to look through the 
 mannered and somewhat unpleasant technique, and 
 one is rewarded by finding a depth and purity of 
 sentiment which is delightful. One feels the charm 
 of the wistful, childish faces, and one forgives every- 
 thing else." 
 
 To suggest his power of stating clearly a 
 technical principle, one quotation must be
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 relied upon. Mr. Van Dyck had spoken of 
 blue as a luminous color, as shown in 
 Monet's landscapes. Mr. Cox says: 
 
 " It is precisely the least luminous of all colors, 
 and that is why it is, as Mr. Van Dyck says, the 
 ' most unmanageable,' and why Reynolds formulated 
 his rule, which Gainsborough defied, that it should 
 be reserved for the shadows and never appear in the 
 principal light of a picture. Blue is essentially a 
 shadow, and that very fact, rightly understood, is 
 the key' to impressionists' use of it ; for as never so 
 little blue will at once produce the effect of shadow, 
 one is enabled to paint on a much higher key with 
 blue shadows than without. Instead of a difference 
 in the degrees of remove from white, the impres- 
 sionist merely gives a difference of tint, and so gets 
 his whole canvas into the upper register and makes 
 it the dazzling thing we know, while his pale blues, 
 in spite of their paleness, still look like, and are, 
 shadows. It is in the shadow alone that Ver Meer or 
 the modern impressionists use their blue ; light they 
 invariably render as warm in tone, yellow, or even 
 pink, either of these colors being really ' more 
 luminous than white,' which partakes of the cold 
 nature of blue. It is the non-luminous nature of 
 blue that makes a blue sky so hard to paint, and 
 every decorator knows how blue kills the light of a 
 room. It is only by breaking blue with all sorts of 
 warmer tones, as Gainsborough did, that it can be 
 made to express light at all."
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Even one who thinks this the kind of 
 work which America needs should of course 
 mark its limits. Honesty is not the only 
 quality which keeps Mr. Cox from pleasing 
 the public. To take hold of the people, 
 the critic must generalize highly. His 
 concrete judgments must be so set in ele- 
 mentary principles, familiar to all, that they 
 will seem but the text for the expounding 
 of these fundamental ideas. This does not 
 of necessity point to Ruskinism, although 
 a large element of moralizing and obvious 
 poetizing might be recommended in a recipe 
 for criticism of which the appeal should be 
 universal. Criticism may be humanized 
 without being moralized. If Fromentin's 
 perceptions were not given unity by strong 
 feeling, by a distinct point of view, by the 
 individuality, the personal element in his 
 style, he would not with all his knowledge 
 of painting and writing be the first of art 
 critics. If Diderot had not connected pic- 
 tures and statues with the other interests 
 of life, he could not have led the intelli- 
 gence of France to art as he did in the 
 Eighteenth Century. Emotional sympathy, 
 controlled but expressed, is needed to give 
 the critic the ear of the world moral 
 imagination, ardor. The human tone is
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 what Mr. Cox lacks. His style, strong, 
 clear, free of moralizing and of guesswork, 
 is not alive, but formal, merely intellectual. 
 He certainly sees fundamental moral, men- 
 tal, emotional elements in the artists with 
 whom he deals, and handles them as fairly 
 as he does technical methods, but that 
 does not give similar qualities to his own 
 presentation. Accuracy, simplicity, value 
 to the student, are in this estimate of Turner 
 no more clearly than is the lack of the more 
 universal elements which make literature. 
 
 "Turner's city is like one seen in a troubled 
 dream, luridly magnificent, but rankly impossible 
 in every line. Repose is carefully eliminated, and 
 mass is everywhere subdivided into an endless mass 
 of confusing and benumbing details ; church spires 
 are lifted to a Babel-like elevation ; the bridge across 
 the river becomes Cyclopean in its stride; every- 
 thing is colossal, yet wavering and uncertain, like a 
 city in the clouds at sunset and, like such a city, 
 one expects to see it dissolve and transform itself 
 before one's eyes. 
 
 "That this is a work of strong imagination no 
 one can deny ; but whether or not it is that of a 
 great or healthy imagination is a different question. 
 To us the imagination of Turner seems an emi- 
 nently morbid and let us risk the word theatri- 
 cal one. His conception of art was scenic and 
 *$$
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 spectacular ; his mind was operatic. Many of his 
 little vignettes seem like sketches for the scenery of 
 3. f eerie, and he would have been the greatest scene- 
 painter that ever lived. His natural endowment 
 was great, his knowledge of nature profound ; but 
 his carelessness of truth was supreme, and his influ- 
 ence, wherever exercised, has been almost unmixedly 
 for evil." 
 
 This summary, strong as it is, approaches 
 a danger often connected with the power 
 of vigorous writing, the heightening of 
 contrasts, the omission of reservations, in 
 order to be striking. The student does not 
 care. He is looking less for a judgment 
 that is absolutely judicial than for inside 
 light on art, and he gets more from the 
 expert whose conclusion is wrong than 
 from the ignorant person who is right ; how- 
 ever irrelevant the standards of the expert 
 may be to the picture he is judging. Mr. 
 Cox says of the Assumption : " It is clumsy, 
 and posed in its arrangement, the figures are 
 common in type and (several of them) badly 
 drawn, the color is bright with the bright- 
 ness of stained glass, thin and lacking in 
 quality. . . . The ' Presentation ' is flat and 
 hard and commonplace, and the others are 
 grimy and brown and woolly, and common- 
 place too. " That may be true, but it may 
 156
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 well be said that Titian is not adequately 
 accounted for. Mr. Cox is frankly a student 
 neither of the public nor of the past. " The 
 earlier men, the Vivarini and the rest, and 
 even Gentile Bellini and the much lauded 
 Carpaccio, may, by all but the historical 
 student of art, be entirely neglected." 
 His judgment does not change with the time 
 or the artist. He is always Kenyon Cox, a 
 New York painter of to-day, clear-headed, 
 sturdy, educated, applying the standards of 
 contemporary execution to all time and 
 every place. In praise it is the same. Of 
 Pallas and Mars he says : 
 
 " The fulness and glow of color is Titian at his 
 best, but Titian with a difference Titian inclining 
 to the blue and green of the scale and away from 
 the red and yellow. The richness of light and 
 shade, the glow of the lovely knees and rounded 
 arms, and the transparent depths of shadow, are like 
 Correggio, but a Correggio of more daring invention, 
 and shorn of the affectations and prettinesses adored 
 of school girls. The lithe suppleness of full muscled 
 form, the adorable distinction of the delicately poised 
 heads, with their shining braids of golden-brown hair, 
 the firm hands, with their square-ended fingers 
 these are Tintoretto and none other ; one of the 
 first painters of all time when he took the time to 
 be so." 
 
 J S7
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Inspiriting as this is, it does not touch 
 what makes Tintoretto part of the world's 
 history. To appreciate Mr. Cox is to see 
 what a narrow ground he stands upon, at the 
 same time that one sees how few occupy it ; 
 and after all the limitations are drawn, he 
 remains a bracing and regulating critic. 
 He respects success in the solution of a 
 given problem, and knows it when he sees 
 it ; and therefore he is as much needed now 
 as others who have what he lacks, the love 
 of beauty and of poetry. 
 
 IV 
 
 IN any criticism an interesting element is 
 the personality of the critic, and in no con- 
 temporary American criticism is there a 
 fuller character than there is in the style 
 and substance of Mrs. Van Rensselaer's 
 writing. The quality, therefore, which 
 her style has in a pre-eminent degree, 
 is the sense of life and some of the best 
 personal elements. Her constant improve- 
 ment in technical skill shows devotion to the 
 demands of words and phrases ; but, after all, 
 her work remains of the kind which leaves 
 the reader with a respect for literature, but 
 a realization of its littleness in comparison 
 '58
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 to its subject. To give the elements of her 
 own power, it may be enough to quote her 
 praise of another : 
 
 "I knew of no more delightful place than his 
 studio, where one forgot the art, almost, in one's 
 interest in the man or felt it to be merely a part, 
 a fragment, an incomplete revelation, of a most 
 attractive personality, a most intelligent mind, a 
 most warm and honest heart. He loved his art as 
 few men love it even among artists ; and he seemed 
 to love humanity as do few of us, I fear, in any 
 walk of life. A talk with him was one of the best 
 spurs to effort, to energy, to enthusiasm of a clear- 
 sighted and not a maudlin kind, that an artist or a 
 critic could receive. No one could be careless or 
 apathetic, unreasoning or hypercritical, in George 
 Fuller's Company no one could forget the pleas- 
 ure and responsibility of his work whether that work 
 were painting or mere commentary." 
 
 How many critics can be so serious with- 
 out loss? In how many is earnest feeling 
 at once strength and fineness? Although 
 much that can be learned shows in this 
 style, its worth is the way of seeing the 
 world, the something that gives importance 
 to elementary things said simply. The 
 words tell us that the writer has felt keenly, 
 and seen with an intelligence which is 
 kind. We know that frivolous things are 
 '59
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 not part of her, that even her humor is 
 dignified. One kind of earnestness is the 
 most depressing fault, one rare kind the 
 highest faculty. Mrs. Van Rensselaer, who 
 writes for the general public, sometimes 
 mars her pages by the direct teaching style, 
 but this roughness of form almost disappears 
 in the general tone of gravity and experi- 
 ence, of enthusiasm controlled by a sense of 
 what cannot be said. 
 
 Simplicity is the natural expression of 
 such a nature. Her words are common ones, 
 not infrequently repeated. There is little 
 ornament, no over subtle idea. Many of 
 her pages are admirably written technically, 
 as well as essentially, but the finish is 
 seldom obtrusive: 
 
 " I have, indeed, seen one or two Japanese 
 pictures where a weeping willow looked very well. 
 There it overhung a cascade; and it looked well 
 because the falling lines of water harmonized with 
 its own lines because, so to say, the cascade ex- 
 cused its abnormal shape. If you have a little cas- 
 cade, then, plant a little weeping willow ; or if you 
 have a big waterfall, encourage a weeping willow to 
 grow big beside it ; but do not allow one to shed 
 its tears in the centre of your lawn, or to mingle its 
 weak pendulousness with the sturdier, more normal 
 forms of the trees in your foreground group or your 
 160
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 forest-like plantation. It can never form an assent, 
 like a Lombardy poplar ; it can only form a contrast 
 and, almost invariably, an inharmonious one. It is 
 out of all relation with soft round-headed trees, 
 and still more with angularly spreading or aspiring 
 trees." 
 
 As unaffected as this and yet as far from 
 artless, the style seems born no less of expe- 
 rience than of character. Frankness, expan- 
 sion, amiability are in it, but above them 
 are discretion, practical wisdom, and taste, 
 the weight of experience of many sides of 
 life. It seems to me of minor importance 
 that Mrs. Van Rensselaer writes mainly 
 about art. Whatever might have been her 
 subject, the attraction would have been the 
 same. One who reads her essay on " People 
 in New York," or her story called "One 
 Man Who was Happy," will see this attrac- 
 tion at its best. Her knowledge of life, 
 from fashion to the slums, her interest in 
 all its forms, is not so much the cause as 
 the result of the quality which makes her 
 charm. Active political work and histori- 
 cal research simply fit into the same virtue, 
 sane but earnest intelligence applied to 
 those subjects which are most important 
 to the race. Literature that does not 
 seem like an overflow of life may be charm- 
 ii 161
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 ing, but it is not impressive. An instinc- 
 tive sense of the reality of the world, a 
 point of view near the centre, is needed to 
 allow the individual to borrow some of the 
 world's momentum. "Henry James," said 
 a clever man to me, "has hopelessly handi- 
 capped himself by taking for the centre of 
 his world the country house, which is not 
 the centre of the universe." Mrs. Van 
 Rensselaer's feeling for life, for the mass of 
 men as the world on which classes, intellec- 
 tual as well as social, are but hills and 
 valleys, has given her some of her faults as 
 an artist, notably some needless explanation, 
 but that, with the other defects of form with 
 which she started, has rapidly decreased with 
 work ; so that in the writing of the last two 
 years the form is a comparatively adequate 
 channel for the nobility of thought and feel- 
 ing. The words every year carry more and 
 more uninterruptedly the breadth, the 
 warmth, the understanding of fundamentals, 
 the kindness that make her essays and her 
 stories live. With all this seriousness there 
 goes the loyalty to art which makes her, as 
 she says in her article on Stevenson, rewrite 
 not less than thirty times to make a passage 
 satisfactory to her in sound as well as in 
 sense. Some faults there will always be, 
 162
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 but they have little to do with the rare 
 combination of sincerity and delicacy of 
 feeling, earnestness and constancy of effort, 
 clearness and lack of digression in thought, 
 which combine into a vital style. To quote 
 again her words of another : 
 
 " A philosopher very wise in that most precious 
 kind of lore which gives the soul modesty and poise, 
 cheerfulness, humor, and courage ; a student of 
 human nature, not with classification and categories 
 to fill out, but with a special welcoming niche pre- 
 pared for the reception of each new human soul ; 
 a 'detached intelligence,' but a heart intimately 
 attached to every palpitant fibre in the web of 
 existence, which loved to love, and chose for its 
 hatred only fundamentally hateful and harmful 
 things like hypocrisy, vanity, intolerance, and cow- 
 ardice in the face of life." 
 
 After the death of the same man, Steven- 
 son, she wrote: "In our little world of art, 
 in our strenuous little world of oft-defrauded 
 but perennial aspiration, I feel that there 
 will never again be quite as much joy in the 
 technical struggle." But greater always 
 than her interest in the technical struggle is 
 her care for people, "the motley pageant of 
 the streets," as she says, the life outside as 
 well as in. "... to see the rich of New 
 163
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 York in all their gorgeousness one must 
 visit Central Park of a pleasant afternoon. 
 I like to do this myself, in the finest car- 
 riage owned by any of my friends, and to 
 pretend that nothing else could suit me quite 
 so well." Then, more seriously, comes the 
 interest in "those who are helping to turn 
 the wheels of the big, busy, experimenting 
 world." To find the gravest note, read 
 "One Man Who was Happy," on the one 
 hand, and on the other, the end of "People 
 in New York," both full of personal feel- 
 ing ; one for the individual, the other for a 
 class. 
 
 " Do you know that the tiny gifts in money and 
 food which pass from almost empty to quite empty 
 hands in this town of ours must exceed in their 
 noble aggregate the lordly sums that our rich folks 
 give in charity ? . . . You might see dreadful things 
 in the streets of this region, more dreadful things in 
 its flaming bar-rooms and dance-halls, things most 
 dreadful and pitiful beyond words in its damp and 
 filthy cellars, in its naked attics, which are cold past 
 sufferance in winter, and in summer pestilential with 
 a tropic heat. And now you might hear the des- 
 perate cry, ' Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for 
 to-morrow we die,' and again the still more desper- 
 ate moan, ' Help as to eat, drink, and be warm, 
 just for once for we are dying to-day.' " 
 164
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 To come back to the contrast again; all 
 this is in the woman who speaks of "that 
 natural love for pretty things which assails 
 even the least extravagant of my sex," whose 
 articles in a New York newspaper led the 
 opposition to woman suffrage at the time of 
 the agitation there, whose pen has carried 
 weight in many political changes, who in 
 many branches of art, although not an ex- 
 pert, is a scholar. The feminine quality is 
 in every page, making more striking the pic- 
 ture of what one woman can do. The kind- 
 ness i feminine, the seriousness, the humor, 
 the taste, all are necessarily feminine since 
 all are personal. It is a striking case of a 
 character steadily conquering a mode of 
 expression, not by the method of putting 
 into the words only what would easily go 
 into them, but by working at them until 
 they received the whole personality with its 
 exceptional richness. All this is essentially 
 praise tf her work as literature; but that 
 work has its place as interesting criticism, 
 because the appreciation and the power which 
 have counted for so much in New York life, 
 have been put in such large part into making 
 art ideas alive to a class of readers who 
 could only be effectively reached by a per- 
 son whose point of view was widely human. 
 '65
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 V 
 
 AMONG contemporary Americans Mr. Brown- 
 ell is the best representative of the powers 
 and the shortcomings of one very distinct 
 kind of literature, which gains its strength 
 from culture and has the weaknesses of such 
 an origin. There are more critics funda- 
 mentally of his sort in England, and there 
 are some with superficial resemblances to 
 him in France, because it is from the litera- 
 ture of France that he has drawn largely for 
 his education. This special study of French 
 literature, conspicuous now in American and 
 English critical minds, gives usually lucidity 
 and prudence; but it instigates the attempt 
 to assimilate qualities which seldom enter 
 organically into superior English style, such 
 as the studied emphasis of the epithet and 
 the manner of intellectual sprightliness. 
 Although, however, French models are not 
 aids to permanent English literature, the 
 general level of current writing is doubtless 
 being raised by the study of them. Senti- 
 mental rhetoric and heavy truism are killed 
 by it. Respect for attainment, for skill, for 
 expert opinion is instilled by it. In " French 
 Traits," Mr. Brownell's thought seems more 
 the result of immediate observation, al- 
 166
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 though there too it owes much to good books 
 or to good company; and in "French Art," 
 we get, not copied but chosen and reflected, 
 some of those clear, permanent ideas which 
 are the heritage of culture, to which, now 
 and then, some original critic adds some- 
 thing; so that those who never get to the 
 sources, to "Maitres d'Autrefois," for in- 
 stance, to Millet's letters, to a dozen other 
 springs, to the talk of living painters, miss, 
 if they read "French Art," much less than 
 if they do not; for in it are given with dig- 
 nity and purity the lasting conceptions, 
 slowly accumulated, of the best general 
 criticism; points of view merely burlesqued 
 by many more popular English writers. 
 
 Mr. Brownell's style is studied; it verges 
 on epigram. " To be adequate to the require- 
 ments rarely very exacting in any case 
 made of one; never to show stupidity; to 
 have a great deal of taste and an instinctive 
 feeling for what is elegant and refined; to 
 abhor pedantry and take gayety at once 
 lightly and seriously; and beyond this to 
 take no thought, is to be clever. . . ." 
 That, I think, is a pleasing definition, with 
 just enough lightness to fit its subject. The 
 power of pressing a whole point of view into 
 a few phrases without being pyrotechnic is 
 167
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 shown in an extract, much of which might 
 apply to the kind of literature which he 
 himself makes. 
 
 " The neo-Greek painters are thoroughly educated. 
 They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of 
 their poetic brethren they lack the moving and 
 interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of 
 these ; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction 
 that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is 
 inspired and transfigured as it appears in such works 
 as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their dis- 
 tinction is not less real for being the distinction of 
 cultivation rather than altogether native and abso- 
 lute. It is, perhaps, even more marked, more per- 
 suasive, more directly associated with the painter's 
 aim and effect. One feels that they are familiar 
 with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, 
 that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being 
 less personal and powerful their horizon is less 
 limited, their purely intellectual range, at all events, 
 and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider. 
 They have more the cultivated man's bent for ex- 
 perimentation, for variety. They care more scru- 
 pulously for perfection, for form. With a far 
 inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in 
 dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with 
 the abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind 
 to their successful handling of line and mass and 
 movement, is to neglect a sense of refined pleasure. 
 To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their ad- 
 168
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 mirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feel- 
 ing for decorativeness is to miss their delightful 
 decorum." 
 
 This long quotation gives a glimpse, not 
 only of Mr. Brownell's powers, of his pene- 
 tration, firm style, faultless syntax, of his 
 clear ideas held with ease and measure, but 
 also of his minor failures in the use of his 
 own manner. "Sapient skill," the contrast 
 of " decorativeness " with "delightful deco- 
 rum," are each unobjectionable; but before 
 one of his books is finished, the reader sees 
 enough obvious alliteration to make him 
 restless, and " sapient " is one of the words, 
 like "suave" and "puissant, " which appear 
 with an insistence that is depressing, espe- 
 cially when variety might be given by bet- 
 ter words, more ruggedly English. Other 
 words, good in themselves, less suggestive 
 of French reading, words which are fashion- 
 able in the vocabulary of contemporary cul- 
 ture, are worked too hard ; among them, in 
 their special applications to art, "compos- 
 ure," "reserve," "reticence," "stark," and 
 "elegance." In judging one whose powers 
 are shown largely in the selection of words, 
 it is certainly not beside the mark to lay some 
 emphasis on these little flaws of execution. 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps the prince 
 169
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 of those who subdue language word by word, 
 never learned to conceal his art. 
 
 Trifling failures in this kind of skill raise 
 the larger question of the value of this writ- 
 ing, the perfection of which is gained by 
 studying the details of language. What is 
 the style worth of Stevenson himself? It is 
 a broad question, insoluble and interesting, 
 the comparative worth of the style of culture, 
 compared to the style that is a man, the 
 style of inspiration. Does Stevenson have 
 anywhere the blood that flows through the 
 easy, unstudied sentences of writers whose 
 minds were on their results, not on their 
 tools, by whom words were used almost as 
 unconsciously as letters? Can any self- 
 made writer stand permanently with the 
 spontaneous ones, with Fielding, with Swift, 
 De Foe, or Scott ? In criticism the answer 
 is less certain; but even there the great 
 styles, those for instance of Bacon, Dryden, 
 Thackeray, Emerson, Lamb, seem to grow 
 out of the idea, with an occasional pause 
 for a word, not out of a preoccupation 
 with phrases. The consciousness of one's 
 language leads naturally to an attempt to 
 overload the epithet, making what one of 
 my friends called "adjective literature." 
 However, this emphasis of the details of 
 170
 
 AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 
 
 style is intelligent, instructive, fit to leaven 
 our present crudity. It has not the unity 
 given by a mastering thought, only a little 
 piece of the writer goes into his phrases, 
 a studied fragment of his conscious thought, 
 poor by necessity in comparison to the style 
 used unconsciously and inevitably as a man's 
 native tongue. 
 
 Of course the attempt to judge a writer 
 by standards so high is in itself praise, and 
 Mr. Brownell will hardly be praised too 
 much. "Poise," says he, "is perhaps the 
 one essential element of criticism." It is 
 at least an essential, and one which he has 
 to the full. Romantic and classic art, initi- 
 ation and tradition, are given equal justice 
 by him, and even such persons as Bougereau 
 and Cabanel have their meed of apprecia- 
 tion. Perhaps the thing most difficult for 
 him to weigh objectively is crudity, but 
 " French Traits " almost contents one who 
 accepts with satisfaction America as it is. 
 On the other hand, in the wide range of 
 his three books, there is, I believe, but one 
 infatuation, his admiration for the sculptor 
 Rodin. In this artist all of Mr. Brownell's 
 comparisons must be with the giants of 
 thought, mainly with Michelangelo; and 
 although the superiority of the Frenchman 
 171
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 is not stated, as Mr. Brownell never decides 
 the relative values of contrasted styles, the 
 exposition of the Frenchman's art, contrasted 
 with that of Michelangelo, is so ardent that 
 it is a solitary break in the sustained judicial 
 tone; in that careful, comprehensive appre- 
 ciation of diverse qualities which gives value 
 to his opinions and dignity to his language. 
 To describe his point of view more narrowly, 
 it is that of the literary man of intelli- 
 gence; not the painter's, by any means, 
 although touched sometimes with studio lan- 
 guage; still less that of the man who is blind 
 to the differences between the standpoint of 
 the painter and those of the moralist and 
 poet ; but that of the literary man in a fairer 
 sense, broad enough to see what the painter 
 thinks, what the many kinds of spectators 
 think, and personal enough to know what 
 he thinks himself. 
 1896. 
 
 172
 
 AMERICAN COSMOPOLI- 
 TANISM
 
 VI 
 
 AMERICAN COSMOPOLI- 
 TANISM 
 
 AT a time when so many new ideas about 
 the humanities are flooding America, it is not 
 surprising that among our ambitious young 
 men of the first generation of culture are 
 many whose intellectual methods show more 
 eagerness than measure. With no traditions 
 behind them they do not realize how nec- 
 essary are humility, repose, and care to sound 
 ripening of the perceptions and the judgment. 
 As their fathers struggled for academic edu- 
 cation or for material ease, the sons make a 
 struggle of ideas on art. They over-empha- 
 size what they get hold of, from a deficient 
 sense of permanent values. Though this 
 spectacle has been seen at other times, per- 
 haps never before was so large a mass of new 
 ideas thrown to so hungry a public. 
 
 The men of whom I speak are more occu- 
 pied with the idea of enlightenment than with 
 the things which give light. Americans give
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 too much importance to intellectual things, it 
 is frequently said. Riper intelligence puts 
 less emphasis on itself. When we first see 
 beyond others about us we are dazzled by the 
 idea of our own advancement. This often 
 makes us set ourselves up as enemies of the 
 Philistines and of all their ways. What is 
 known to all or felt by all is unimportant. 
 Distinction consists in seeing and believing 
 novel things. 
 
 " I the heir of all the ages 
 In the foremost files of time." 
 
 Of the young prophets of culture whom I 
 know, all Americans, some living in Europe, 
 some by necessity in America, every one 
 thinks that the only art of to-day is French or 
 Japanese ; that there has never been any art 
 in England ; that the most advanced literature 
 of the world is the realism of the younger 
 men in Paris ; that there is much less beauty 
 in nature than in art ; that work in any un- 
 artistic employment is a waste of life ; and 
 that it is impossible for an intelligent man to 
 be contented in America. The saying that 
 the French would be the best cooks in Europe 
 if they had any butcher's meat, modified by 
 Mr. Bagehot into the aphorism that they 
 would be the best writers of the day if they 
 176
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 had anything to say, applies also to these 
 critics who make such striking theories out 
 of so little. 
 
 Of course the case can be stated more sym- 
 pathetically ; for instance, let us suppose a 
 youth known in college as a man of taste 
 comes back from some years in Italy to go 
 into the practice of a profession. His work 
 now is intellectual, but as far as possible 
 from artistic; and he had cared only for 
 artistic things. His present work requires en- 
 ergy, attention to practical details, and logic. 
 Among his companions he finds none who 
 have his instincts and his training. Beautiful 
 surroundings, friends with leisure and taste, 
 art, music, literature, had seemed necessities 
 to him. To adjust himself to his conditions 
 here and be happy does not seem possible. 
 The cities have less art than European cap- 
 itals, and repel him by their noise and lack 
 of sensuous beauty. Perhaps he chooses 
 to give up the pursuit of happiness, sink 
 himself in work, and make his life a routine. 
 
 His case is not an easy one, but it may be 
 contrasted with that of a young girl I knew 
 who went from a small city to a great uni- 
 versity and won a reputation as a writer, a 
 talker, and a painter. Her friends believed 
 that she needed only opportunity to do much 
 12 I77
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 in art. Paris was a paradise to her. But she 
 never went there. She was compelled to re- 
 turn to her home, where there is no art and no 
 intelligent society. At first it seemed to her 
 a moral death. Her imagination was so vital, 
 however, that it soon began to enjoy its own 
 power, even in its narrow home. The girl 
 who had dreamed of the studios of Paris, the 
 conversation, the gayety, the freedom, the 
 art, is happy now with nothing but what she 
 can get from a routine home life and child- 
 like companions. She drives about the streets 
 and looks at the spectacle of life as it is in the 
 little city. She takes part in the occupations 
 of society, she delights in seeing people move 
 and think, as she delights in watching fowls 
 or insects. Perhaps the power to express is 
 dying in her; she cannot tell, though she 
 tries to keep it alive for the possible oppor- 
 tunity. But though the disappointment is 
 heavy-still, life itself seems the great thing to 
 her now, so rich in its barest spots that it is 
 worth all one's powers. Excitement, joy, 
 fame, are gone for her, perhaps, but a deep 
 seriousness has kept her happy. Of course, 
 if she can, she will take the other goods, 
 for though less, they are additions ; and she 
 knows that now she would be in no danger 
 of losing the essential outlines in the details. 
 178
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 Such a reconciled way of accepting lim- 
 ited opportunities seems to some who have 
 settled permanently abroad perfunctory and 
 provincial. It would not do to draw too 
 radical conclusions from a score of examples; 
 but it may be that perfect freedom of oppor- 
 tunity weakens as many as it develops. 
 One man of wealth, with some taste and with 
 no talent, bought a villa in Italy, and has 
 never returned to America. His whole 
 horizon seems to go no further than Italian 
 art. If he takes a walk in the mountains, he 
 judges the beautiful only from the point of 
 view of its suitability to the painter. The 
 Alps are not beautiful, because they cannot 
 be painted. A scene is not beautiful, be- 
 cause the blue of the lake is in a different 
 key from the blue of the sky. His world lies 
 in a picture frame. Whenever he meets an 
 interesting American, he tries to induce 
 him to stay in Italy, where alone, he thinks, 
 true culture can be acquired. America, he 
 says, is in the dark ages, a nation of 
 Chinamen. Intellect at our universities is 
 scholastic, dry, without life. Life for him 
 is Italian history, talk about painting, the 
 slang of an art-world in which he is an out- 
 sider, a hanger-on, a new-comer. The real 
 citizens of that world, it need hardly be said, 
 179
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 have no such narrowness. The talk, the 
 standards, of the true artist are not obtru- 
 sively artistic. These young American 
 prophets of expatriation (there are many of 
 them) are in striking contrast to the thing 
 they imitate, though they impress many who 
 cannot understand the original. The real 
 seer of the beautiful, who, perhaps, has 
 painted and starved in many lands, settles 
 almost anywhere and becomes happy. New 
 York is full of such men. They find beau- 
 ties on our ugliest streets, which the pseudo- 
 culture of their imitators could not see in 
 Naples or in Paris. 
 
 Among the most exaggerated of the 
 prophets of culture by one path only are 
 the women. Their philosophy is likely to 
 be even further from life, for it comes often 
 from their men friends, who parody it from 
 the originals. I have heard a number of 
 women, living about the cheaper places of 
 Europe on small incomes or the lower order 
 of hack work, solemnly preaching the doc- 
 trine that " life " is in one place and not 
 in another. Of course it is the rule that 
 those who have come from the narrowest en- 
 vironment are the fiercest converts. They 
 furnish many rather sad pictures of the 
 check of the deep instincts of their sex 
 180
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 for the painful forcing of some intellectual 
 absurdities. 
 
 We see the expression of these things in 
 journals recently founded all over the coun- 
 try, which, in an average life of a few months, 
 express the opinions and reveal the art of a 
 few young men who think they are ahead of 
 their times. Just now the main character- 
 istic of this literature is that it suggests as 
 often as it can the art of painting. It calls 
 itself by the name of a color, yellow, green, 
 purple, gray. Constant use is made of the 
 slang of art. Indeed, their only way of 
 appearing artistic seems to be to make their 
 writing as far as possible remind the reader 
 of the plastic arts. Art is ostentatiously 
 opposed to everything else, especially to 
 scholarship, morality, and industry. The 
 idea seems to be that art is made by talking 
 about art, or by talking about life in terms 
 of art. Equally noticeable is the instinct 
 that in making one special quality conspic- 
 uous by neglecting others, they are showing 
 originality. They do not see that in an 
 artist great enough to give a large man the 
 feeling of life there are too many elements 
 for any detail to be conspicuous. The work 
 of this artist will be life-like, commonplace, 
 unless seen by an eye to which common life 
 181
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 reveals its interests. Edmond de Goncourt 
 can see nothing in "The Scandinavian 
 Hamlet." He prefers "Pere Goriot," who 
 is newer, he thinks, and more real. Edmond 
 de Goncourt is an admirable example of the 
 attitude of a few men in Paris who have 
 largely influenced some of our tawdry litera- 
 ture. In one of his journals he remarks 
 sadly that in a certain conversation about 
 abstract things, general human points of view, 
 he failed to shine; and he asks plaintively 
 why it is that men who " on all other sub- 
 jects " find original things to say are in these 
 generalities on a footing with the rest of the 
 world : which means to him, flat. Readers 
 of the eight volumes of the journal may 
 smile at the "all other subjects," but it is at 
 least true that on certain narrow topics of 
 which few persons know anything, he could 
 feel more profound than he could on subjects 
 of universal human interest. His test of 
 Shakspere, by the way, is an apt one. It 
 does not condemn a man that he does not 
 find Hamlet interesting. Many intelligent 
 men do not. Any man, however, who infers, 
 from his lack of appreciation, that Shakspere 
 is not a great artist, is deficient in critical 
 intelligence and in understanding of the 
 value of evidence. And when a man remarks 
 182
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 that Raphael, Beethoven, or Shakspere, was 
 a great man in his time, but that the world 
 has progressed, and that, as we stand on the 
 shoulders of our predecessors, the Balzac of 
 this century sees more than the Shakspere of 
 two centuries earlier, we have a subject for 
 comedy. That any critic who seriously 
 treats with contempt any man or any institu- 
 tion that has a high place in the general 
 world of ideas is shallow, an avoider and 
 not a solver of questions which confront a 
 man of mature culture and broad mind, is 
 almost axiomatic. When we hear so many 
 critics to-day expressing scorn of whole 
 nations, saying of England, perhaps, that 
 she has no art, of Germany that she has only 
 dull learning, of America that she is Philis- 
 tine ; when we see these critics surrounded 
 by groups of followers, do we not wish, with 
 some reason, that we had a Moliere to-day? 
 What a play he could make of " Les Critiques 
 Ridicules;" or of "L'Ecole des ^Esthetes," 
 or of " L'Americain Malgre Lui. ' 
 
 It would be unfair, however, to leave the 
 impression that all Americans who dislike 
 their country are small. It is probably true 
 that any man who is capable of sinking 
 deeply into life has often a strong feeling for 
 the instincts and prejudices of his race ; but 
 183
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 it is not less true that some men of genuine 
 intellectual passion find other things out- 
 weigh these sympathies, and live with most 
 happiness and fullest growth in foreign lands. 
 But men of whom this is true are usually not 
 the ones whose feelings about America are 
 acid. The bitter berating of any country as 
 Philistine is usually the mark of shallowness. 
 A New York artist not long ago was speaking 
 of an acquaintance who had been telling how 
 he hated America and wanted to get back to 
 Europe. " Think of it," exclaimed the artist, 
 who was born in Europe and loves it, " he has 
 lived in New York thirty years, and he hates 
 America ! " That is a whole philosophy. The 
 person who can live in a great city so long 
 and not find beauty and meaning is a small 
 person. A strong man may say that he 
 would prefer something else, but that will 
 not keep him from feeling the fulness of life 
 where he is. 
 
 Even to-day a good deal of blame for the 
 failure of many of their graduates to adapt 
 themselves readily to their occupations is put 
 upon the universities, not by unthinking Phil- 
 istines, but by men of comparative liberality. 
 Of course the days when active men in general 
 looked with entire distrust on college gradu- 
 ates are gone ; but many men who think that 
 184
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 a college education is almost essential to-day, 
 believe its advantages are partly offset by the 
 impetus it gives to this kind of discontent 
 with our conditions. It is undoubtedly true 
 that the prominence of the intelligent dilet- 
 tante spirit often makes it harder to take up a 
 burden in the world. But to look upon this 
 as a serious misfortune is hardly more intelli- 
 gent than the old-time suspicion of all college 
 training. The youth who for several years 
 had roamed unfettered, talking art and litera- 
 ture, studying what he liked, dreaming of 
 distant scenes, is often for a few years after 
 graduation an unhappy creature and a forlorn 
 spectacle; but when he does turn from his 
 dreams of other things to an effort to find 
 beauty and interest in what is forced upon 
 him, he finds more than he would have done 
 without the experience. 
 
 Exactly the same thing is true, probably, 
 of foreign training that is true of the influence 
 of the colleges. The men who have seen 
 doubt have in the end the clearest faith. 
 Many of our young teachers, for instance, 
 who are furnishing the hard work as well as 
 the guidance in the educational changes being 
 made in all of our American colleges are Har- 
 vard men who for a time after graduation 
 wandered about the Louvre, or drank beer in 
 '85
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 Berlin, or idled sweetly in Italy, dreading the 
 need of returning. It is true also of some of 
 our ablest young lawyers and journalists, and 
 of men in other occupations, though un- 
 doubtedly the men who get this spirit strong 
 upon them and cannot earn a living in any 
 of the arts are more likely to go into law, 
 journalism, or teaching than into any other 
 work. 
 
 Americans are accused of being superficial 
 in education and in the conduct of life. Prob- 
 ably the men who will remove this reproach 
 are not those who take instinctively to the 
 methods and the point of view that grew out 
 of the rapid settling of a raw country, but 
 those who feel deeply the attraction of the 
 slower, riper thoughts and feelings of the 
 older countries ; and among those, of course, 
 the ones who after a time are able to use this 
 insight on the actual material about them, 
 not to bring foreign culture here, like a grown 
 plant, for it is not transplantable, but to get 
 its seed, to use their knowledge of foreign 
 things as one element of a new perception 
 of their environment. Goethe's well-known 
 statement that he never deemed any truth his 
 until he had himself conquered it is applicable 
 everywhere. It is well for us to take what 
 information we can from any source; but 
 186
 
 before it will do us good we must learn to 
 find it over again in the things which we 
 see and work with. Our deepest knowledge 
 of life must be our first-hand perceptions, 
 must come from daily sights and experiences. 
 The man who lives in New York and thinks 
 in London or in Rome guesses at life. 
 
 The question, of course, remains, whether 
 one can say that every artist, or every student 
 of life, will grow best where he was planted. 
 The young artist who wishes a mass of im- 
 pressions and instructions from Europe only 
 to come back and spend a life in trying to 
 understand from the inside the New England 
 people, has a truth that is vital; but is it 
 universal ? It is one thing to say, " If you 
 must return, you get most by putting your 
 heart and mind into your surroundings." It 
 is another thing to say, " Though you have 
 the opportunity to live in any place you 
 choose, wisdom orders you to live in your 
 native land." 
 
 Though the extreme position is taken ,in- 
 stinctively by many intelligent Americans, it 
 can hardly stand the bald statement. One 
 may argue : " The cosmopolitan is on the 
 outside of things everywhere ; he knows a 
 great many things that are not worth know- 
 ing ; his knowledge and his instincts are not 
 187
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 in harmony ; therefore he has no fundamental 
 insight." Another may call this provincial or 
 mystical. He may say : " It is as absurd to 
 make such divisions by countries as it would 
 be by counties. The more widely one sees 
 the world, the more deeply he understands 
 it." Each generalization must be untrue for 
 some. Perhaps neither in its extreme form 
 is true for many. 
 
 The question as applied to artists often 
 ends, in discussions among young Ameri- 
 cans, in an issue on the case of Mr. Henry 
 James. He is the favorite example of an 
 American cosmopolitan. Some who like his 
 work say that, however delicate and skilful it 
 may be, it is not large or important, because 
 it is remote ; it deals with no instincts shared 
 by large masses of people ; it is the talk of a 
 man who has floated about, touching various 
 societies, sinking into none, and recording, 
 therefore, nothing but a fringe, the minor 
 differences of the outside, gaining none of 
 the rich color that so subtle and so sensitive 
 a mind would have drawn from a life of 
 natural responsibilities and prejudices. The 
 answer is to take issue on the facts. Mr. 
 James, says the cosmopolitan, has a more 
 real insight, a fairer judgment, for his lack of 
 attachment. The other attitude is partisan ; 
 188
 
 COSMOPOLITANISM 
 
 it is made intense by its lack of perspective ; 
 it is passionate because it is narrow. The 
 large mind, unprejudiced and serene, chooses 
 its goods from all the world and its friends 
 from all mankind. 
 
 Obviously it is an individual matter. Mr. 
 James may have done his best work with 
 the life he has led, as Emerson may have 
 done his best by the opposite course. Mr. 
 Whistler may be living under the most favor- 
 able circumstances as surely as is Mr. Winslow 
 Homer. Any sweeping rule is inadequate to 
 the facts. One can perhaps say little more 
 than that a man working his life out fully 
 either way will have no impulse either to 
 scorn or to envy the other method. 
 
 Granting all this, however, granting that 
 some individuals will do better away from 
 home, the fact remains to move our imagina- 
 tions, that when our greatest artists come they 
 will be no exceptions to the rule which has 
 been illustrated by the other nations of the 
 world. Probably these artists will come the 
 sooner for any culture that leads our young 
 men to study deeply real life about them, 
 to rejoice, like the strong artist, in fresh 
 fields. A deep enough understanding will 
 bring literature and art out of the millions 
 of people of all races crowded into our great 
 189
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 cities. To be a great artist, a man must know 
 his world so intimately that he does not ex- 
 press it on purpose. He does not go to work 
 to give the character of his people or his town. 
 He talks about the simple, universal subjects, 
 and his environment is given inevitably, with- 
 out conscious effort, in every line he writes. 
 The style is not the man only; it is the 
 country, the race. To this height, to the 
 largest poetry, cosmopolitanism has never 
 reached. The constant record of compari- 
 sons is a slight thing before the work of the 
 national artist, steeped in the color of a race, 
 profoundly conscious of definite social and 
 political conditions as realities, not as spec- 
 tacles. It is a good education, the cosmo- 
 politan training and instinct, a good influence 
 for us, a refinement, a stimulant ; but most of 
 us who cannot have it should not take the 
 deprivation as an essential one. Moreover, 
 and more important from the general point 
 of view if not from that of the individual, 
 the most interesting men are not made by 
 cosmopolitan training. They grow in the 
 soil. 
 1896. 
 
 190
 
 HENRY JAMES
 
 VII 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 THE ironical attitude, according to Mr. Henry 
 James, is the attitude of the artist; an opinion 
 which may well be startling until one learns 
 that the artist is one thing and the poet its 
 opposite. With irony, in his own sense, Mr. 
 James is impregnated. The unusual shadings 
 given to words, the complicated and facile 
 syntax, the broken sentences in dialogue, that 
 suggest a shrug, the frequent French, the ir- 
 relevant parentheses, the completions that are 
 so close to repetitions, all these have the 
 airiness of irresponsibility about them. Mr. 
 James does not crash into the heart of a 
 thought with a noun. He hovers about it, 
 pricks it here, with delicacy, then there, so 
 near that sometimes here and there seem like 
 one point. The fineness of his distinctions, 
 their abundance, and the apparent ease with 
 which they are dropped, contribute much to 
 our sense of the futility of the world he is 
 describing; partly because the world is so 
 13 193
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 blind to all this, partly because at first these 
 delicate touches seem to create a world all 
 surface, a soap-bubble, as it were, in which 
 familiar things are refracted into shapes at 
 once fantastic and persuasive. Imagine a 
 young American, crude, matter-of-fact, and 
 rather bored by his crudities and literalness, 
 meeting for the first time this spirit. Suppose 
 him just enough irritated at and balked by 
 the rigid world he knows to be ready to 
 attack it, but weaponless. " Roderick Hud- 
 son " falls into his hand. He settles back on 
 his lounge before he has read ten lines, with 
 the excitement of feeling that he has found 
 the needed secret and that it is a long and full 
 one. He has read Emerson before, and has 
 sneered at the plastic arts. Before he has 
 read a week he longs to see the Madonna of 
 the Chair, because Henry James has mixed 
 it in with his universe by some flitting adjec- 
 tive. He longs to see Florence and Rome, 
 because Christina and Rowland yawned and 
 talked and influenced and came to nothing 
 there. His whole thought takes a back- 
 ground that he believed foreign to it. There 
 is a world that laughs at the limitations and 
 rigidity that annoyed him that is gay, intel- 
 lectual, unproselyting ; that is, the attractive 
 people are all this, and the Philistines are 
 194
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 simply funny and unimportant. He knows 
 now more clearly what he wants to see and 
 be. He wants to see people whose divisions 
 of the world are not hampering, and he wants 
 to be an ironical and unprejudiced observer. 
 His Emerson goes on to the shelf, marked 
 abstract and provincial. Instead he buys 
 photographs of Italian paintings, studies at- 
 lases, plans a trip to Europe, and reads Me"ri- 
 mee and Turgenieff. 
 
 For Mr. James is not all the fascinating and 
 cultivated satirist. There are forms built of 
 the mass of apparently surface touches that are 
 adequate expressions of the deepest and most 
 lasting experiences. Though the author was 
 in each sentence of the book, we realize at the 
 end of the thick volume that he was not all 
 there. The detail was deliciously redolent of 
 a certain point of view ; the whole that gradu- 
 ally appears is deeply typical of life, with 
 much of its mystery. To quote one of the 
 author's stories : " He lived once more into 
 his story and was drawn down, as by a siren's 
 hand, to where, in the dim under-world of 
 fiction, the great, glazed tank of art, strange, 
 silent subjects float. He recognized his mo- 
 tive and surrendered to his talent." 
 
 Of course there are intelligent readers for 
 whom Mr. James's work seems almost frivo- 
 '95
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 lous. Those who are literal, inelastic, limited 
 to set classifications and distinctions, find him 
 remote, unreal, indefinite, inconclusive. They 
 say that by nature he is a psychologist or a 
 critic, no novelist; that in a kind of expres- 
 sion where he would be forced to speak his 
 meaning he would be valuable. What they 
 call the meaning they want put directly and 
 explicitly. A world which is not obviously 
 sifted for them, which is all one lump of 
 vague reality, the end of which is to create 
 with any methods, be they more usually seen 
 in the essay, the novel, or any other form, 
 the impression corresponding to that the ac- 
 tual world makes on us, with its solidity, its 
 complexity, its irrationality, such a piece 
 of expression is meaningless to them. And 
 to other minds, more vital and less ingenuous, 
 it is meaningless too. Though in its most 
 general features the world they see is the one 
 Mr. James paints, they do not like his details, 
 they do not enjoy the flavor of his mind, and 
 they therefore cannot go through the many 
 pages to get the general plan. The author 
 himself believes that his novels were felt by 
 Ivan Turgenieff to be hardly food for men. 
 The elaboration, the thousand slight touches 
 that make the general effect, bore such men. 
 The work seems to them embroidery. They 
 196
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 want more directness, simplicity, force. Tur- 
 genieff has an awful fatalism of his own, but it 
 is too simple and too strenuous to come within 
 our definition of irony. In the slang of the 
 day, Mr. James is too " elegant " to come near 
 to the man whom he calls the poet, as he does 
 Turgenieff. But to his friends reason dressed 
 in banter is more amiable, law is lighter when 
 it speaks in the tones of irresponsibility. One 
 who sees his matter as clearly as his manner 
 can hardly fail to feel that he is distinguished 
 by range as surely as by precision, by endur- 
 ance as surely as by acuteness ; that his in- 
 sight is as extensive as it is fine, and his art is 
 equal to its expression. This is not to deny 
 that the variety of persons, scenes, or situa- 
 tions which he handles is rather slight. It is 
 to assert, however, that with the illustrations 
 he does use he sets forth adequately, com- 
 pletely, some essential springs of the mind. 
 Though his people and his scenes have not 
 the profusion of contrast that life has, that 
 some artists have, the relations are there in 
 their proper proportions, only in a shorter 
 scale. 
 
 A limitation in means similar to this lack 
 
 of exuberance is an inability to paint vividly 
 
 the physical world. One understands feels 
 
 the surroundings, but he hardly sees them. 
 
 197
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 The most striking of his descriptions have 
 something the air of feats. It is difficult to 
 illustrate a negative, but here is a sentence in 
 which the picturesque is tried for : 
 
 "There is a certain evening that I count as virtu- 
 ally a first impression the end of a wet, black 
 Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March. 
 There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned 
 gray, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of 
 was a fresh beginning," 
 
 Perhaps the following description of the first 
 appearance of Christina Light will show how 
 he just misses the visual : 
 
 " A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass 
 of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval 
 of perfect purity, a flexible lip just touched with 
 disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess, 
 these were the general features of his vision." 
 
 The clothing of the personages and their 
 physique seem described with effort, and so 
 do the landscape, the room, or whatever the 
 setting may be. The author is not to a large 
 degree a man for whom the visible world 
 exists, in the sense of Gautier's famous 
 phrase. Its interest is adjective mostly : the 
 interest of its effect on persons first, and, 
 second, an interest of suggestion. It is rich 
 198
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 in analogy. Mr. James feels its importance, 
 and he usually gives its effect adequately, but 
 sometimes one feels that his work is weakened 
 by rather more than is necessary of direct 
 description of the environment; one is disap- 
 pointed at the unconvincing touch. For, to 
 the reader who is best fitted to appreciate 
 Mr. James, this literal setting is not neces- 
 sary. The atmosphere is created without it; 
 it comes from what the personages do and say, 
 and from the author's manner of talking about 
 them. The environment is a great bully with 
 some of the best literary workmen of recent 
 times. It is a very important element of art, 
 but it does n't need to be labelled. In the 
 main Mr. James is free from this exaggera- 
 tion. He has a rare, distinguished genius, 
 and it is the genius of an artist, but the artist 
 is a psychologist. The idea is what gives life 
 to his work ; the personal, the abstract idea ; 
 though this idea does not exist apart from its 
 embodiment, and is described, necessarily, 
 when it is most adequately described, in 
 terms of its external expression, it is the 
 side of final interest. " A psychological rea- 
 son is, to my imagination, an object adorably 
 pictorial," says Mr. James ; and the reverse 
 is as true : when a pictorial object interests 
 him, his interest is delightfully psychological. 
 199
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 One who feels this inseparability of form and 
 idea in Mr. James is rather supported by the 
 discovery that his father was a logician at once 
 acute and picturesque, and that his brother is 
 a studied psychologist who connects the ordi- 
 nary matter of his science with the mixed 
 stream of life with uncommon subtlety and 
 with uncommon definiteness, seeming at once 
 psychologist and logician, scientist and poet. 
 One is pleased also to read that at the age of 
 seven Mr. Henry James lay on the hearth rug 
 and studied " Punch," and that he longed 
 to know the life suggested by the pictures. 
 There is nothing told us of the child's love 
 for the lines and colors of nature. It is 
 beauty that is a human expression that 
 interests him; that is information about 
 human character. There is no truancy in 
 the mind. It sticks to the fact from the 
 beginning. There are no fables and fairy 
 stories for it, no fancy, no forms that are 
 not fact; and, on the other hand, the young 
 psychologist is an artist, and all his facts have 
 form. Later he has said that he can imag- 
 ine no object in weaving together imaginary 
 events except the representation of life. The 
 child's mind was as loyal to the same object. 
 To explain what is meant by saying that, 
 while everything is expression, everything is 
 200
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 also form to Mr. James, may, after one has 
 denied him any remarkable eye for line and 
 color, be rather difficult. Of the truth of 
 the proposition, however, there can be little 
 doubt. He says somewhere that the most 
 definite thing about an emotion is its surface. 
 The metaphor is at once baffling and convinc- 
 ing, as his metaphors are likely to be. The 
 thing I wish to emphasize is that it is his 
 perception of the shapes of the moral world 
 that gives him his distinguished value. In 
 this bit, for instance, there is a fair visual 
 image, slight, however, compared to the 
 picturesqueness one feels. 
 
 " I always left him in a state of ' intimate ' excite- 
 ment, with a feeling that all sorts of valuable things 
 had been suggested to me ; the condition in which 
 a man swings his cane as he walks, leaps lightly 
 over gutters, and then stops, for no reason at all, 
 to look, with an air of being struck, into a shop- 
 window where he sees nothing." 
 
 These powers and these limitations some- 
 times lead one to wonder why Mr. James is 
 not more a critic and less a novelist. As a 
 matter of fact, most of his power is in his 
 fiction, and the greater part in his long 
 novels. He needs time for a multitude of 
 his light touches to give to his picture 
 
 201
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 a convincing simplicity. The best short 
 stories, plays, and essays have been made in 
 bolder, shorter strokes. In the drama, he 
 not only misses the living touch, but loses 
 his own charm. His dialogue in becoming 
 shorter becomes stiff, instead of becoming 
 intense. Directness and simplicity of feel- 
 ing are outside of Mr. James's power of 
 representation. There is a scene in " The 
 Tragic Muse " in which Julia takes Nick's 
 head in her hands and kisses it. It makes 
 the reader close his teeth, as at a false note. 
 He feels that the airy world, so parallel to 
 the real world, so representative of it, is 
 shattered when such material is forced into 
 it. The comedy of his universe is "the 
 smile of the soul," as Beyle said of French 
 wit, and his tragedy is the sigh of the soul. 
 The laugh and the throb are not in his scale; 
 and the smile of the body and the sigh of 
 the body are not there, either. His art, a 
 firm and rounded representation of life, is 
 no direct presentation of it, no copy. His 
 dialogue may improve in plausibility and 
 flexibility, but not so much that one cannot 
 feel that he is describing a world that his 
 imagination never saw; that he has seen 
 the astral bodies of people and seen them 
 static, in certain relations, to be described 
 202
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 by him in long paragraphs of his own deli- 
 cate observations, saying comparatively little 
 themselves speaking only for confirmation, 
 as it were; that this fairy world of his, con- 
 taining in it the essence of the interest of 
 life for many, will not for any be visible to 
 the outer eye, with fleshly bodies and tangi- 
 ble clothes, furniture, relations of actual 
 space. 
 
 In criticism he is less successful than in 
 fiction, for reasons other than this inability 
 to give the direct blow. He repeats, some- 
 times grossly. A number of times he says 
 without variation that, however flat his joke, 
 du Maurier's picture has its unfailing charm ; 
 even the language scarcely changes. It may 
 be that part of this iteration is due to sym- 
 pathy, to the desire to make the length of 
 his comment equal his interest, a desire 
 which, when his attitude toward his subject 
 is very simple, is disastrous. Much could 
 be learned by comparing this essay with 
 MerimeVs criticism of his friends, where 
 the critic is as brief as he is when he carves 
 his stories. Mr. James has no power of 
 sacrifice. Effort, effort, always effort, he 
 says, is the secret of success for all ambi- 
 tious workers in the field of art. It is a 
 secret that sometimes leads him astray, for 
 203
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 he neglects other conflicting secrets ; he fails 
 to rest and he fails to throw away duplicates. 
 "You cannot," he says to the young writer, 
 "take too many notes." Without quibbling 
 over the metaphor, one may believe it possi- 
 ble to take notes too constantly and with too 
 much strain, and certainly possible to use 
 too many of one's notes. 
 
 Another quality, which is one of the 
 merits of the stories, delicacy, becomes 
 aggressive and turns into a defect, squeam- 
 ishness, in some of the essays. " Be gener- 
 ous and delicate," Mr. James says to the 
 young writer, "and then, in the vulgar 
 phrase, go in ! " That parenthetical apology 
 for colloquialism occurs rather too often. It 
 begins to savor of literalness. We should 
 like to have rather more taken for granted. 
 We feel too insistent an air of distance, of fine 
 breeding, even of condescension. We like 
 to see one artist strictly bounded by the 
 delicacy of his tastes; but we wish the critic 
 to know that it may be another artist's 
 strength to be crude or naked. The instinct 
 of privacy, for instance, is something upon 
 which Mr. James's taste absolutely insists. 
 He cannot talk long enough or severely 
 enough about the publication by M. Edmond 
 de Goncourt of an account of his brother's 
 204
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 mental wreck, and of the nervous disease of 
 both of them, or of the publication of Flau- 
 bert's letters, and he interjects his respect 
 for privacy on all occasions. It is safe to 
 say he does not feel imaginatively Balzac's 
 racy and unquotable illustration of his ideal 
 of openness. This queasiness might be 
 parodied by the story of a man who could 
 not believe that athletes are sincerely with- 
 out any feeling of shame when they run, bare 
 to the knee, through the city streets. The 
 critic must not insist too solemnly on his 
 view of etiquette, if the world is to listen to 
 him. 
 
 The one fault of the essays still to be men- 
 tioned is comparatively trifling, and, like the 
 others, akin to a virtue, to the originality of 
 Mr. James's choice of words, a virtue par- 
 ticularly apt in a writer whose end is exact 
 and fine discrimination ; for in words, as in ob- 
 jects, familiarity dulls our vision, and of two 
 words expressing a shade with equal accuracy 
 the rarer is the one that Mr. James always 
 chooses. It is one of his methods of sharpen- 
 ing his reader's mind and keeping fresh his 
 attention. His fault is that he narrows his 
 vocabulary by overworking his fresh and apt 
 words. He not only sacrifices variety of 
 phrase ; he sometimes lets a word try for an 
 205
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 idea that a more familiar term would hit more 
 precisely. What essay can you read through 
 without finding " mitigated," " casual," " in- 
 veterate," and other adjectives that have driven 
 all rivals from the field and gained themselves 
 a factotum air? They are delicious at first, 
 and finally flat. 
 
 Perhaps, after all, however, this last word 
 is unfair. It may be that the weaknesses of 
 this inclusive, subtle, contemporary spirit are 
 rooted in its strength. If so, it would be 
 silly to object. It may be that what looks 
 like queasiness of taste to an outsider is a part 
 of the elegance, and that what looks like flip- 
 pancy is only the more radical manifestation of 
 the subtlety. It is, of course, only apprecia- 
 tion that we seek, and if in the world of a 
 writer whom we are studying certain details 
 which do not please us are an organic part of 
 that world there is no more to be said. In 
 this case, fortunately, it is of small importance 
 whether these particular characteristics be 
 spots on a bright art or features of it, for 
 they are so slight that they are scarcely 
 visible in a general view of the work that 
 Mr. James has done, a work of equal value 
 to the detached student of life and to the 
 sympathizer with special human progress. 
 Standing alike in the world of art and in the 
 206
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 world of sympathy, he has been the interpreter 
 of each to the other with equal fairness if not 
 with equal love. The breadth of the impres- 
 sion of life that can be got from his books is 
 due to this broad stand, covering two points 
 of view as far apart as any: the standpoint of 
 the man to whom life is a thing to be lived, 
 with emotion and prejudice, and the stand- 
 point of the man to whom it is a lot of lines 
 and shades that can be combined into attrac- 
 tive and representative surfaces. The literal 
 attitude is to Mr. James apparently the more 
 pathetic, and the artistic or symbolic one the 
 more distinguished. He himself is intimate 
 with both, and in his novels the two natures, 
 each in many grades, are kept face to face, 
 and each is shown as it seems to itself and as 
 it seems to the other. Therefore to us Anglo- 
 Saxons he has been an education that we 
 needed, for the artistic attitude (in the present 
 sense of the unmoral, form-loving attitude) is 
 particularly hard for us to see. Closely allied 
 to this conflict is the contrast between culture 
 and primitiveness which he has painted so 
 carefully and so often in his groups of Ameri- 
 cans and Europeans. To these two great 
 pictorial ideas Mr. James has given his best 
 work, and in doing the best he could for art 
 has done what was most fit and timely for 
 207
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN 
 
 the needs of some of his countrymen. Giving 
 to them their own eloquence and coherence, 
 he helps them see with some comprehension 
 the people to whom they are fantastic. They 
 know whom he likes to be with, but they 
 trust his impartiality none the less, for they 
 feel that he does not like too strongly to be 
 with any one. His artistic friends, his culti- 
 vated friends, he sees in their limits too, al- 
 though not so clearly as he sees his Daisy 
 Millers and his Millicent Hennings. If he 
 patronizes Emerson and lauds Mrs. Hum- 
 phry Ward we can forgive him, as we can if 
 his essay on London has more infatuation 
 than power. We forgive him because he has 
 written "The Tragic Muse," "The Princess 
 Cassimassima," and " The American ; " be- 
 cause, although in his essays he has told what 
 his limitations of sympathy are, he has in his 
 novels spoken more impersonally. Whether 
 his novels can live, whether the world will take 
 him thinned and spread out into so many 
 volumes, may well be doubted, for he does 
 not justify himself page by page and word by 
 word ; and one seldom rereads him. But he 
 has been a marked man of his time and has 
 done a good work in it. 
 1894. 
 
 208
 
 PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A. 
 FOR HERBERTS. STONE & CO., PUB- 
 LISHERS, CHICAGO, AND NEW YORK
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 HERBERT S. STONE 
 & CO. THE CHAP-BOOK 
 The HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
 
 CAXTON BUILDING, CHICAGO 
 I I I FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK 
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 HERBERT S. STONE 
 & CO. THE CHAP-BOOK 
 The HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 
 
 Ade, George. 
 
 ARTIE : A Story of the Streets and of the 
 Town. With many pictures by JOHN T. 
 McCurcHEON. i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Ninth thousand. 
 
 " Mr. Ade shows all the qualities of a successful 
 novelist." Chicago Tribune. 
 
 " Artie is a character, and George Ade has 
 limned him deftly as well as amusingly. Under 
 his rollicking abandon and recklessness we are 
 made to feel the real sense and sensitiveness, and 
 the worldly wisdom of a youth whose only lan- 
 guage is that of a street-gamin. As a study of the 
 peculiar type chosen, it is both typical and inimi- 
 table." Detroit Free Press. 
 
 "It is brim full of fun and picturesque slang. 
 Nobody will be any the worse for reading about 
 Artie, if he does talk slang. He's a good fellow 
 at heart, and Mamie Carroll is the ' making of 
 him.' He talks good sense and good morality, and 
 these things have n't yet gone out of style, even in 
 Chicago." New York Recorder.
 
 "Well-meaning admirers have compared Artie 
 to Chimmie Fadden, but Mr. Townsend's creation, 
 excellent as it is, cannot be said to be entirely free 
 from exaggeration. The hand of Chimmie Fad- 
 den's maker is to be discerned at times. And just 
 here Artie is particularly strong he is always 
 Artie, and Mr. Ade is always concealed, and never 
 obtrudes his personality." Chicago Post. 
 
 " George Ade is a writer, the direct antithesis of 
 Stephen Crane. In 'Artie ' he has given the world 
 a story of the streets at once wholesome, free, and 
 stimulating. The world is filled with people like 
 'Artie ' Blanchard and his ' girl,' ' Mamie ' Carroll, 
 and the story of their lives, their hopes, and 
 dreams, and loves, is immeasurably more whole- 
 some than all the stories like 'George's Mother' 
 that could be written by an army of the writers 
 who call themselves realists." Editorial, Albany 
 Evening- Journal. 
 
 Ade, George. 
 
 PINK iMARSH : A Story of the Streets and 
 of the Town. With forty full-page pic- 
 tures by JOHN T. McCuTCHEON. i6mo. 
 Uniform with Artie. $1.25. 
 
 Fourth thousand. 
 
 "There is, underlying these character sketches, 
 a refinement of feeling that wins and retains one's 
 admiration." St. Louis Globe- Democrat. 
 
 "Here is a perfect triumph of characterization. 
 * * * Pink must become a household word." 
 Kansas City Star. 
 
 "These sprightly sketches do for the Northern 
 town negro what Mr. Joel Chandler Harris's
 
 < Uncle Remus Papers' have done for the South- 
 ern old plantation slave." The Independent. 
 
 " It is some time since we have met with a more 
 amusing character than is 'Pink Marsh,' or to 
 give him his full title, William Pinckney Marsh, of 
 Chicago. * * * ' Pink' is not the conventional 
 'coon 'of the comic paper and the variety hall, 
 but a genuine flesh and blood type, presented 
 with a good deal of literary and artistic skill." 
 New 1'ork Sun. 
 
 " The man who can bring a new type into the 
 literature of the day is very near a genius, if he 
 does nothing else. For that reason Mr. George 
 Ade, the chronicler of 'Artie,' the street boy of 
 Chicago, did a rather remarkable thing when he 
 put that young man into a book. Now Mr. Ade 
 has given us a new character, and to me a much 
 more interesting one, because I do not remember 
 having met him face to face in literature be- 
 fore. Cincinnati Commercial Tribune. 
 
 Benham, Charles. 
 
 THE FOURTH NAPOLEON: A Romance. 
 I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 An accurate account of the history of the Fourth 
 Napoleon, the coup d'etat which places him on 
 the throne of France, the war with Germany, and 
 his love intrigues as emperor. A vivid picture of 
 contemporary politics in Paris. 
 
 Bickford, L. H. 
 
 (and Richard Stillman Powell.) 
 PHYLLIS IN BOHEMIA. With pictures 
 and decorations by ORSON LOWELL, and
 
 a cover designed by FRANK HAZENPLUG. 
 i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Sentimental comedy of the lightest kind. It is 
 the story of Phyllis leaving Arcadia to find Bohe- 
 mia, and of her adventures there. Gentle satire 
 of the modern literary and artistic youth and a 
 charming love story running through all. 
 
 Blossom, Henry M., Jr. 
 
 CHECKERS: A Hard - Luck Story . By 
 the author of " The Documents in Evi- 
 dence." i6mo. $1.25. Tenth thousand. 
 
 "Abounds in the most racy and picturesque 
 slang." Nevj York Recorder. 
 
 '" Checkers' is an interesting and entertaining 
 chap, a distinct type, with a separate tongue and a 
 way of saying things that is oddly humorous." 
 Chicago Record. 
 
 11 If I had to ride from New York to Chicago on 
 a slow train, I should like a half dozen books as 
 gladsome as 'Checkers,' and I could laugh at the 
 trip." New Tork Commercial Advertiser. 
 
 " ' Checkers ' himself is as distinct a creation as 
 Chimmie Fadden, and his racy slang expresses a 
 livelier wit. The racing part is clever reporting, 
 and as horsey and 'up to date' as any one could 
 ask. The slang of the racecourse is caught with 
 skill and is vivid and picturesque, and students of 
 the byways of language may find some new gems 
 of colloquial speech to add to their lexicons." 
 Springfield Republican.
 
 Bloundelle-Burton, John. 
 
 ACROSS THE SALT SEAS : A Romance of 
 the War of Succession. By the author of 
 " In the Day of Adversity ," "The Hispan- 
 iola Plate" " A Gentleman Adventurer" 
 etc. I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 In " The Hispaniola Plate" Mr. Burton showed 
 his familiarity with the stories of the buccaneers 
 of the Spanish Main. In this new story there is 
 still this picturesque element, although the scene 
 is the battle of Vigo and the looting of the Spanish 
 galleons. The hero escapes through Spain in an 
 attempt to reach Marlborough in Flanders, and 
 has many exciting though not improbable adven- 
 tures. Any one who cares for good fighting, and 
 in whose ears the "sack of Maracaibo" and the 
 "fall of Panama" have an alluring sound, will 
 like the book. There is also an attractive love 
 *tory in a rather unusual form. 
 
 Chap-Book Essays. 
 
 A VOLUME OF REPRINTS FROM THE 
 CHAP - BOOK. Contributions by T. W. 
 HIGGINSON, H. W. MABIE, LOUISE 
 CHANDLER MOULTON, H. H. BOYE- 
 SEN, EDMUND GOSSE, JOHN BURROUGHS, 
 NORMAN HAPGOOD, MRS. REGINALD 
 DE KOVEN, LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY, 
 LEWIS E. GATES, ALICE MORSE EARLE, 
 LAURENCE JERROLD, RICHARD HENRY 
 STODDARD, EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON,
 
 and MAURICE THOMPSON, with a cover 
 designedly A. E. BORIE. i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Chap-Book Stories. 
 
 A VOLUME OF REPRINTS FROM THE 
 CHAP-BOOK. Contributions by OCTAVE 
 THANET, GRACE ELLERY CHANNING, 
 MARIA LOUISE POOL, and Others, i6mo. 
 $1.25. Second edition . 
 
 The authors of this volume are all American 
 Besides the well-known names, there are some 
 which were seen in the Chap-Book for the first 
 time. The volume is bound in an entirely new 
 and startling fashion. 
 
 Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. 
 
 THE LAND OF THE CASTANET: Span- 
 ish Sketches^ with twenty -Jive full-page 
 illustrations. I2mo. $1.25. 
 
 "Gives the reader an insight into the life of 
 Spain at the present time which he cannot get 
 elsewhere." Cincinnati Commercial Tribune. 
 
 " Mr. Chatfield-Taylor's word-painting of special 
 events the bull-fight for instance is vivid and 
 well colored. He gets at the national character 
 very well indeed, and we feel that we know our 
 Spain better by reason of his handsome little 
 book." Boston Traveler. 
 
 "He writes pleasantly and impartially, and very 
 fairly sums up the Spanish character. * * * Mr. 
 Taylor's book is well illustrated, and is more read- 
 able than the reminiscences of the average globe- 
 trotter." Nevj York Sun.
 
 Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. 
 
 THE VICE OF FOOLS: A Novel of Society 
 Life in Washington. By the author or 
 " The Land of the Castanet," " Two 
 Women and a Fool" " An American 
 Peeress" etc. With ten full page pictures 
 by Raymond M. Crosby. l6mo. $1.50. 
 
 The great success of Mr. Chatfield-Taylor's so- 
 ciety novels gives assurance of a large sale to this 
 new story. It can hardly be denied that few per- 
 sons in this country are better qualified to treat 
 the " smart set " in various American cities, and 
 the life in diplomatic circles offers an unusually 
 picturesque opportunity. 
 
 D'Annunzio, Gabriele. 
 
 EPISCOPO AND COMPANY. Translated 
 by Myrta Leonora Jones. i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Third edition. 
 
 Gabriele d'Annunzio is the best known and 
 most gifted of modern Italian novelists. His work 
 is making a great sensation at present in all lite- 
 rary circles. The translation now offered gave 
 the first opportunity English-speaking readers 
 had to know him in their own language. 
 
 De Fontenoy, The Marquise. 
 
 EVE'S GLOSSARY. By the author of">ueer 
 Sprigs of Gentility,' 1 with decorations in 
 two colors by FRANK. HAZENPLUG. ^to. 
 $3.50. 
 
 8
 
 An amusing volume of gossip and advice for 
 gentlewomen. It treats of health, costume, and 
 entertainments; exemplifies by reference to noted 
 beauties of England and the Continent; and is 
 embellished with decorative borders of great 
 charm. 
 
 Earle, Alice Morse. 
 
 CURIOUS PUNISHMENTS OF BYGONE 
 DAYS, with twelve quaint pictures and a 
 cover design by FRANK HAZENPLUG. 
 I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 "In this dainty little volume Alice Morse Earle 
 has done a real service, not only to present read- 
 ers, but to future students of bygone customs. To 
 come upon all the information that is here put 
 into readable shape, one would be obliged tosearch 
 through many ancient and cumbrous records." 
 Boston Transcript. 
 
 "Mrs. Alice Morse Earle has made a diverting 
 and edifying book in her ' Curious Punishments 
 of Bygone Days,' which is published in a style of 
 quaintness befitting the theme." New Tork 
 Tribune. 
 
 "This light and entertaining volume is the most 
 recent of Mrs.Earle's popular antiquarian sketches, 
 and will not fail to amuse and mildly instruct 
 readers who love to recall the grim furnishings and 
 habits of previous centuries, without too much 
 serious consideration of the root from which they 
 sprang, the circumstances in which they flour- 
 ished, or the uses they served." The Independent.
 
 Embree, Charles Fleming. 
 
 FOR THE LOVE OF TONITA, AND OTHER 
 
 TALES OF THE MESAS. With a cover 
 designed by FERNAND LUNGREN. i6mo. 
 $1.25. 
 
 Characteristic and breezy stories of the South- 
 west, by a new author. Full of romantic interest 
 and with an unusually humorous turn. The book 
 coming from a new writer, is likely to be a real 
 surprise. The cover is an entirely new experi- 
 ment in bookbinding. 
 
 Fletcher, Horace. 
 
 HAPPINESS AS FOUND IN FORETHOUGHT 
 MINUS FEARTHOUGHT, AND OTHER 
 SUGGESTIONS IN MENTICULTURE. i2mo. 
 $1.00. 
 
 The enormous popularity of Mr. Fletcher's 
 simple philosophy, as shown in the sale of his 
 first volume, " Menticulture " is a sufficient evi- 
 dence of the prospects of the new book. In it he 
 develops further the ideas of menticulture, and 
 urges with energy and directness his plea for the 
 avoidance of worry. 
 
 Fletcher, Horace. 
 
 MENTICULTURE: or the A-B-C of True 
 Living. I2mo. $I.OO. 
 
 Nineteenth thousand. 
 
 Transferred by tie author to the present publishers. 
 10
 
 Gordon, Julien 
 
 EAT NOT THY HEART: A Novel, By 
 the author of" A Diplomat's Diary," etc. 
 l6mo, $1.25. 
 
 Life on Long Island at a luxurious country 
 place, is the setting for this story, and Mrs. 
 Cruger's dialogue is as crisp, as witty, as satirical 
 of the foibles of fashionable life as ever. She has 
 tried a new experiment, however, in making a 
 study of a humbler type, the farmer's wife, and 
 her ineffectual jealousy of the rich city people. 
 
 Hapgood, Norman. 
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN AND OTHERS. 
 A book of essays on men seen from a distance. 
 I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 Essays from one of our younger writers, who is 
 already well known as a man of promise, and who 
 has been given the unusual distinction of starting 
 his career by unqualified acceptance from the En- 
 glish reviews. Scholarly, incisive, and thought- 
 ful essays which will be a valuable contribution to 
 contemporary criticism. 
 
 Hichens, Robert. 
 
 FLAMES: A Novel. By the author of" A 
 Green Carnation" " An Imaginative 
 Man" " The Folly of Eustace," etc., with 
 a cover design by F. R. KIMBROUGH. 
 I2mo. $1.50. Second edition.
 
 "The book is sure to be widely read." Buffalo 
 Commercial. 
 
 * It carries on the attention of the reader from 
 the first chapter to the last. Full of exciting in- 
 cidents, very modern, excessively up to date." 
 London Daily Telegraph. 
 
 "In his last book Mr. Hichens has entirely 
 proved himself. His talent does not so much lie 
 in the conventional novel, but more in his strange 
 and fantastic medium. ' Flames' suits him, has 
 him at his best." Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 "' Flames,' " says the London Chronicle, in a long 
 editorial on the story, " is a cunning blend of the 
 romantic and the real, the work of a man who can 
 observe, who can think, who can imagine, and who 
 can write." 
 
 "'Flames' is a powerful story, not only for the 
 novelty of its plot, but for the skill with which it 
 is worked out, the brilliancy of its descriptions of 
 the London streets, of the seamy side of the city's 
 life which night turns to the beholder; but the 
 descriptions are neither erotic nor morbid. * * * 
 We may repudiate the central idea of soul-trans- 
 ference, but the theory is made the vehicle of 
 this striking tale in a manner that is entirely sane 
 and wholesome. It leaves no bad taste in the 
 mouth. * * * 'Flames' it is the author's 
 fancy that the soul is like a little flame, and hence 
 the title must be read with care. There is much 
 brilliant epigrammatic writing in it that will 
 delight the literary palate. It is far and away 
 ahead of anything that Mr. Hichens has ever writ- 
 ten before." Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 James, Henry. 
 
 WHAT MAISIE KNEW : A novel. I2mo. 
 
 $1.50- 
 
 12
 
 The publication of a new novel one quite un- 
 like his previous work by Mr. Henry James, 
 cannot fail to be an event of considerable literary 
 importance. During its appearance in the Chap- 
 Book, the story has been a delight to many read- 
 ers. As the first study of child-life which Mr. 
 James has ever attempted, it is worth the attention 
 of all persons interested in English and American 
 letters. 
 
 Kinross, Albert. 
 
 THE FEARSOME ISLAND ; Being a mod- 
 ern rendering of the narrative of one 
 Silas Fordred, Master Mariner of Hythe, 
 whose shipwreck and subsequent adventures 
 are herein set forth. Also an appendix, 
 accounting, in a rational manner, for the 
 seeming marvels that Silas Fordred en- 
 countered during his sojourn on the fearsome 
 island of Don Diego Rodriguez. With a 
 cover designed by FRANK HAZENPLUG. 
 i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Le Gallienne, Richard. 
 
 PROSE FANCIES : Second series. By the 
 author of " The Book-Bills of Narcissus" 
 "The ghtest of the Golden Girl," etc. 
 With a cover designed by FRANK. HAZEN- 
 PLUG. i6mo. $1.25. Second edition. 
 
 " In these days of Beardsley pictures and deca- 
 dent novels, it is good to find a book as sweet, as 
 
 '3
 
 pure, as delicate as Mr. Le Gallienne's." New 
 Orleans Picayune. 
 
 "'Prose Fancies' ought to be in every one's 
 summer library, for it is just the kind of a book 
 one loves to take to some secluded spot to read 
 and dream over." Kansas City Times. 
 
 " There are witty bits of sayings by the score, 
 and sometimes whole paragraphs of nothing but 
 wit. Somewhere there is a little skit about 'Scot- 
 land, the country that takes its name from the 
 whisky made there'; and the transposed proverbs, 
 like ' It is an ill wind for the shorn lamb,' and 
 ' Many rise on the stepping-stones of their dead 
 relations,' are brilliant. 'Most of us would never 
 be heard of were it not for our enemies,' is a cap- 
 ital epigram." Chicago Times-Herald. 
 
 " Mr. Le Gallienneis first of all a poet, and these 
 little essays, which savor somewhat of Lamb, of 
 Montaigne, of Lang, and of Birrell, are larded 
 with verse of exquisite grace. He rarely ventures 
 into the grotesque, but his fancy foflows fair 
 paths; a certain quaintness of expression and the 
 idyllic atmosphere of the book charm one at the 
 beginning and carry one through the nineteen 
 'fancies' that comprise the volume." Chicago 
 Record. 
 
 Magruder, Julia. 
 
 Miss AYR OF VIRGINIA, AND OTHER 
 STORIES. By the author of "The Princess 
 Sonia," " The Violet^ etc. With a 
 cover-design by F. R. KiMBROUGH. i6mo. 
 $1.25. 
 
 "By means of original incident and keen por- 
 traiture, ' Miss Ayr of Virginia, and Other Stories,'
 
 is made a decidedly readable collection. In the 
 initial tale the character of the young Southern 
 girl is especially well drawn; Miss Magruder's 
 most artistic work, however, is found at the end 
 of the volume, under the title ' Once More.'" The 
 Outlook, 
 
 "The contents of 'Miss Ayr of Virginia' are not 
 less fascinating than the cover. * * * These 
 tales * * * are a delightful diversion for a 
 spare hour. They are dreamy without being can- 
 didly realistic, and are absolutely refreshing in 
 the simplicity of the author's style." Boston 
 Herald. 
 
 "Julia Magruder's stories are so good that one 
 feels like reading passages here and there again 
 and again. In the collection, ' Miss Ayr of Vir- 
 ginia, and other stories,' she is at her best, and 
 'Miss Ayr of Virginia,' has all the daintiness, the 
 point and pith and charm which the author so 
 well commands. The portraiture of a sweet, un- 
 sophisticated, pretty, smart Southern girl is be- 
 witching." Minneapolis Times. 
 
 Malet, Lucas. 
 
 THE CARISSIMA : A modern grotesque. 
 By the author of " The Wages of Sin," 
 etc. I2mo. $1.50. Second edition. 
 
 * # *This is the first novel which Lucas Malet 
 has written since "The Wages of Sin." 
 
 "The strongest piece of fiction written during 
 the year, barring only the masters, Meredith and 
 Thomas Hardy." Kansas City Star. 
 
 "There are "no dull pages in 'The Carissima,' no 
 perfunctory people. Every character that goes in 
 and out on the mimic stage is fully rounded, and 
 the central one provokes curiosity, like those of 
 
 15
 
 that Sphinx among novelists, Mr. Henry James. 
 Lucas Malet has caught the very trick of James's 
 manner, and the likeness presses more than 
 once." Milwaukee Sentinel. 
 
 "The interest throughout the story is intense 
 and perfectly sustained. The character-drawing 
 is as good as it can be. The Carissima, her father, 
 and a journalistic admirer are, in particular, abso- 
 lute triumphs. The book is wonderfully witty, 
 and has touches of genuine pathos, more than two 
 and more than three. It is much better than any- 
 thing else we have seen from the same hand." 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 "Lucas Malet has insight, strength, the gift of 
 satire, and a captivating brilliance of touch; in 
 short, a literary equipment such as not too many 
 present-day novelists are possessed of." London 
 Daily Mail. 
 
 " We cannot think of readers as skipping a line 
 or failing to admire the workmanship, or to be 
 deeply interested, both in the characters and the 
 plot. ' Carissima' is likely to add to the reputa- 
 tion of the author of 'The Wages of Sin.'" G/as- 
 gow Herald. 
 
 Merrick, Leonard. 
 
 ONE MAN'S VIEW. By the author of 
 "A Daughter of the Philistines" etc. 
 l6mo. $I.OO. 
 
 The story of an ambitious American girl and 
 her attempts to get on the English stage, her mar- 
 riage and subsequent troubles, and the final hap- 
 piness of every one. The author's point of view 
 and the story itself are unusual and interesting. 
 
 " Very well told." The Outlook. 
 16
 
 "Clever and original." Charleston Ne-ws and 
 Courier. 
 
 " Eminently readable." Netv Orleans Times- 
 Democrat, 
 
 " A highly emotional, sensational story of much 
 literary merit." Chicago Inter Ocean. 
 
 "A novel over which we could fancy ourselves 
 sitting up till the small hours." London Daily 
 Chronicle. 
 
 " A really remarkable piece of fiction * * * 
 a saving defense against dullness that may come 
 in vacation times." Kansas City Star. 
 
 Moore, F. Frankfort. 
 
 THE IMPUDENT COMEDIAN AND 
 OTHERS. Illustrated. I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 " Several of the stories have appeared in the 
 Chap-Book; others are now published for the first 
 time. They all relate to seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth century characters Nell Gwynn, Kitty 
 Clive, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, and David 
 Garrick. They are bright, witty, and dramatic. 
 
 "Capital short stories." Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 " A thing of joy." Buffalo Express. 
 
 "The person who has a proper eye to the artis- 
 tic in fiction will possess them ere another day shall 
 dawn." Scranton Tribune. 
 
 "Full of the mannerisms of the stage and thor- 
 oughly Bohemian in atmosphere." Boston Herald. 
 
 "The celebrated actresses whom he takes for 
 his heroines sparkle with feminine liveliness of 
 mind." JVeiv York Tribune. 
 
 " A collection of short stones which has a flash 
 of the picturesqueness, the repartee, the dazzle of 
 
 17
 
 the age of Garrick and Goldsmith, of Peg Wof- 
 fington and Kitty Clive." Hartford Couraiit. 
 
 "The stories are well conceived and amusing, 
 bearing upon every page the impress of an inti- 
 mate study of the fascinating period wherein they 
 are laid." The Dial. 
 
 "Mr. F. Frankfort Moore had a capital idea 
 when he undertook to throw into story form some 
 of the traditional incidents of the history of the 
 stage in its earlier English days. Nell Gwynn, 
 Kitty Clive, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Abington, and 
 others are cleverly depicted, with much of the 
 swagger and flavor of their times." The Outlook. 
 
 Moore, F. Frankfort. 
 
 THE JESSAMY BRIDE : A Novel. By 
 the author of" The Impudent Comedian. 1 " 
 I2mo. $1.50. 
 
 A novel of great interest, introducing as its 
 chief characters Goldsmith, Johnson, Garrick, 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others. It is really a 
 companion volume to "The Impudent Comedian." 
 The first large English edition of "The Jessamy 
 Bride " was exhausted before publication. The 
 great popularity of his other books is sufficient 
 guaranty of the entertainingqualities of this latest 
 volume. 
 
 "Admirably done." Detroit Free Press. 
 
 "It is doubtful if anything he has written will 
 be as well and at widely appreciated as 'The 
 Jessamy Bride.' " Kansas City Times. 
 
 "This story seems to me the strongest and sin- 
 cerest bit of fiction I have read since 'Quo 
 Vadis.' " George Merriam Hyde in The Book 
 Buyer. 
 
 18
 
 " A novel in praise of the most lovable of men 
 of letters, not even excepting Charles Lamb, must 
 be welcome, though in it the romance of Gold- 
 smith's life may be made a little too much of for 
 strict truth * * * Mr. Moore has the history 
 of the time and of the special circle at his finger- 
 ends. He has lived in its atmosphere, and his 
 transcripts are full of vivacity. * * * 'The 
 Jessamy Bride ' is a very good story, and Mr. 
 Moore has never written anything else so chival- 
 rous to man or woman." The Bookman. 
 
 Morrison, Arthur. 
 
 A CHILD OF THE JAGO. By the author 
 of " Tales of Mean Streets." I2mo. 
 $1.50. Second edit to n . 
 
 " The book is a masterpiece." Pall Mall Gazette. 
 "The unerring touch of a great artist." London 
 Daily Graphic. 
 
 "Told with great vigour and powerful simplic- 
 i ty ." Athencenm . 
 
 " Remarkable power, and even more remarka- 
 ble restraint." London Daily Mail. 
 
 " A novel that will rank alone as a picture of 
 low-class London life." New Saturday. 
 
 "The power and art of the book are beyond 
 question." Hartford Courant. 
 
 "It is one of the most notable books of the 
 year." Chicago Daily Ne-ws. 
 
 "'A Child of the Jago'will prove one of the 
 immediate and great successes of the season." 
 Boston Times. 
 
 "The description of the great fight between 
 Josh Perrott and Billy Leary is a masterpiece." 
 PuncA. 
 
 19
 
 "Never, certainly, a book with such a scene on 
 which so much artistic care has been lavished. 
 * * The reader has no choice but to be con- 
 vinced." Review of Reviews. 
 
 " Mr. ArthurMorrison has already distinguished 
 himself (in his Tales of Mean Streets) as a deline- 
 ator of the lives of the East -end poor, but his 
 present book takes a deeper hold on us." London 
 Times. 
 
 "Is indeed indisputably one of the most inter- 
 esting novels this year has produced. * * One 
 of those rare and satisfactory novels in which 
 almost every sentence has its share in the entire 
 design." Saturday Review. 
 
 " Since Daniel Defoe, no such consummate 
 master of realistic fiction has arisen among us as 
 Mr. Arthur Morrison. Hardly any praise could 
 be too much for the imaginative power and artis- 
 tic perfection and beauty of this picture of the de- 
 praved and loathsome phases of human life. 
 There is all of Defoe's fidelity of realistic detail, 
 suffused with the light and warmth of a genius 
 higher and purer than Defoe's." Scotsman. 
 
 " It more than fulfills the promise of ' Tales of 
 Mean Streets ' it makes you confident that Mr. 
 Morrison has yet better work to do. The power 
 displayed is magnificent, and the episode of the 
 murder of Weech, ' fence ' and ' nark,' and of the 
 capture and trial of his murderer, is one that 
 stamps itself upon the memory as a thing done 
 once and for all. Perrott in the dock, or as he 
 awaits the executioner, is a fit companion of Fagin 
 condemned. The book cannot but confirm the 
 admirers of Mr. Morrison's remarkable talent in 
 the opinions they formed on reading ' Tales of 
 Mean Streets.' "Black and White. 
 
 20
 
 Powell, Richard Stillman. 
 (See Bickford, L. H.) 
 
 Pritchard, Martin J. 
 
 WITHOUT SIN: A novel. i2mo. $1.50. 
 
 Third edition. 
 
 *^*The New York Journal gave a half-page 
 review of the book and proclaimed it " the most 
 startling novel jet." 
 
 "Abounds in situations of thrilling interest. A 
 unique and daring book." Revic-w of Reviews 
 (London). 
 
 "One is hardly likely to go far wrong in pre- 
 dicting that ' Without Sin' will attract abundant 
 notice. Too much can scarcely be said in praise 
 of Mr. Pritchard's treatment of his subject." 
 Academy. 
 
 "The very ingenious wav in which improbable 
 incidents are made to appear natural, the ingenious 
 manner in which the story is sustained to the end, 
 the undoubted fascination of the writing and the 
 convincing charm of the principal characters, are 
 just what make this novel so deeply dangerous 
 while so intensely interesting." The World 
 (London). 
 
 Pool, Maria Louise. 
 
 IN BUNCOMBE COUNTY. i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 Second edition. 
 
 " ' In Buncombe County ' is bubbling over with 
 merriment one could not be blue with such a 
 companion for an hour." Boston Times. 
 
 21
 
 " Maria Louise Pool is a joy forever, principally 
 because she so nobly disproves the lurking theorv 
 that women are born destitute of humor. Hers is 
 not acquired; it is the real thing. 'In Buncombe 
 County ' is perfect with its quiet appreciation of 
 the humorous side of the everyday affairs of life." 
 Chicago Daily JVetvs. 
 
 "It is brimming over with humor, and the 
 reader who can follow the fortunes of the redbird 
 alone, who nutters through the first few chapters, 
 and not be moved to long laughter, must be sadly 
 insensitive. But laugh as he may, he will always 
 revert to the graver vein which unobtrusively 
 runs from the first to the last page in the book. 
 He will lay down the narrative of almost gro- 
 tesque adventure with a keen remembrance of its 
 tenderness and pathos." Ne-w Tortt Tribune. 
 
 Raimond, C. E. 
 
 THE FATAL GIFT OF BEAUTY, AND 
 OTHER STORIES. By the Author of 
 u George Mandeville s Husband" etc. 
 i6mo. $1.25. 
 
 A book of stories which will not quickly be sur- 
 passed for real humor, skillful characterization 
 and splendid entertainment. "The Confessions 
 of a Cruel Mistress " is a masterpiece, and the 
 " Portman Memoirs" exceptionally clever. 
 
 Rossetti, Christina. 
 
 MAUDE : Prose and Verse. With a pref- 
 ace by William Michael Rossetti. l6mo.
 
 THE CHAP-BOOK 
 
 A Semi-Monthly Miscellany and Review of Belles -Lettres. Price, 10 
 cents a copy; $2.00 a year. 
 
 "The Chap-Book is indispensable. In its new form, as a literary re- 
 view, it fills an important place in our magazine literature." Rochester 
 Post-Express. 
 
 " The new Chap-Book is an imposing and inspiriting production to take 
 in the hands, and it is opened with an anticipatory zest that is rewarded 
 simply by a reading of the contents." Providence Neivs. 
 
 "The notes are vivacious and vigorous. The literary quality is what 
 one has a right to expect from a literary journal, and we heartily welcome 
 the new Chap-Book toour table." The Watchman. 
 
 " In its enlarged form the magazine has taken on a somewhat more 
 serious aspect than it carried in its first estate, but it has lost none of its 
 crispness and interest." Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 " As we glance through the Chap-Book we are newly charmed with 
 the excellence of its book reviews. Of course it has other features of interest 
 notably the introductory "notes" that give in a genteel way the freshest 
 gossip of the aristocracy of letters but for our part we turn at once to the 
 book reviews, for we know that there we can be sure of being at once in- 
 structed and entertained. Whoever they are that produce this copy and 
 being anonymous, one has no clue they deserve rich recompense of cakes 
 and wine, and, betimes, a lift in salary, for they do know how to review." 
 Scranton Tribune. 
 
 A Monthly Magazine devoted to Houses and Homes. Articles on Rugs, 
 Furniture, Pottery, Silverware, and Bookbindings; Prints, Engravings, and 
 Etchings; Interior and Exterior Decoration, etc. Abundantly illustrated. 
 It is a magazine of general interest, and appreciative rather than technical 
 in character. 10 cents a copy; $1.00 a year. Sample copies sent for five 
 two-cent stamps. 
 
 " The House Beautiful, for its sincerity of purpose and dignified ful- 
 filment of its aim, so far, should be highly commended, The third number 
 contains some exquisite illustrations. * * Some good reviews and 
 notes follow the articles, and a really useful magazine, in a fair way to be- 
 come well established, is thus kept on itscourse." Chicago Times-Herald. 
 " Throughout, this magazine is governed by good taste to a degree which 
 is almost unique." Indianapolis Neivs. 
 
 " There is room for a magazine like The House Beautiful, and the 
 third number of that excellent monthly indicates that the void is in a fair 
 way to be filled. In addition to a good assortment of articles on practical 
 
 ?uestions of household art and artisanship, there is a valuable paper by W. 
 rving Way on ' Women and Bookbinding'." Chicago Tribune. 
 
 " The House Beautiful is the title of the new monthly which deals 
 principally with art as applied to industry and the household. * * It 
 seems to be a magazine which will have a permanent use and interest." 
 Worcester Spy. 
 
 For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postpaid, 
 by the publishers, on receipt of price. 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY 
 
 Oaxton Bldg, Chicago Constable Bldg., New York
 
 A 000047281 1
 
 T TTnTT"! A TVL7" OHP A TIT"! 0% jTT^"M 
 
 LITERARY STATESMEN! 
 
 & OTHERS 
 BY NORMAN HAPGOOD I