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 - -■'■ 1 i.^ver- 1855-Sept. 19. 191^' ^^^ 
 ^V?l IX (1916-17^-
 
 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 AND 
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 
 By NEAL brown 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER PRESS 
 
 WAUSAU WISCONSIN
 
 COPYRIGHTED 1899 By NEAL BROWN 
 COPYRIGHTED 1902 By NEAL BROWN 
 
 FIKST EDITION DECEMBER 1899 
 SECOND EDITION DECEMBER 1902
 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ANDREW LANG . . . , 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 
 DEGENERATION . . . . 
 
 JOHN SMITH 
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM . 
 AMERICAN NOTES . . . , 
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES . 
 
 9 
 
 22 
 
 29 
 
 60 
 
 95 
 
 136 
 
 158 
 
 174 
 
 193 
 
 550391
 
 ANDREW LANG 
 
 IN pessimistic mood, one feels that the world 
 of letters has squandered most of its genius, 
 
 and is traveling toward an intellectual 
 poorhouse. The great poets have certainly 
 departed. Stevenson has gone, and there are 
 but two or three story-tellers left. Fiction has 
 become short and choppy; a matter of 
 fragments, without sustained flights. The few 
 mountain peaks that are left are nodding. The 
 fruits of letters seem over-ripe and ready to fall 
 rotting to the ground. It is a transition time, 
 and perhaps the soil is being fertilized by the 
 rank growths that spring up, for something 
 better to come. 
 
 We are seduced from healthy standards by 
 fin de Steele tendencies ; the colour of nature is 
 gone, and we have green carnations and 
 unsubstantial, unreal things. Men are made 
 to seem like shadows walking. We are 
 non-creative. We either imitate, or else we 
 rebel against imitation, and the pendulum
 
 10 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 swings as far the other way. The result is 
 strange, uncouth, fancies in art and literature, 
 and our romancists make monkeys of men, to 
 borrow a phrase from the vernacular. The 
 commercial autocrats of magazinedom, and 
 certain of the hack writers of newspaperdom 
 set the fashion. With the small arts of puffery 
 they build up small reputations that die in a 
 day. How often the announcement ; "agenius 
 is coming, watch for him, he is here, — he has 
 written a great novel, a great poem, or what 
 not." We are put on the qui vive, and by 
 and bye when the poor little puffed-out product 
 struts upon the stage we find that he belongs 
 to the ephemera. These strains are common. 
 We watch anxiously for the pool to move that 
 we may be healed of these grotesque vagaries 
 of mental disease. We gaze longingly up the 
 road for a rescuer and see but wind-piled 
 columns of choking dust. 
 
 We comfort ourselves a little with Kipling; 
 and Besant and Black are still with us, but we 
 sigh to be healed of Hardy's decadence, and of 
 the tastelessness of THE Martian — poor 
 withered fruit of DuMaurier's dotage. 
 
 We cry out for something in place of this 
 dry rot, this attenuated intellectuality; this
 
 ANDREW LANG 11 
 
 vain struggling after startling effects. Our 
 sensibilities are mangled and scarified day by 
 day by the rude contact of a crowd of weird, 
 grotesque figures, who flit their fantastic way 
 across the stage. 
 
 We are surrounded by writers of queer 
 distorted verse, drunken with their own turgid, 
 muddy, rhetoric; dancing fauns and satyrs 
 holdingf revels over social uncleanness like crows 
 over carrion ; dreamers of meaningless visions, 
 makers of verse full of incomprehensible 
 gibberish. Are they of healthy human kind 
 who beat time in this rout? Is that young 
 woman who writes tigerish verses of a tigerish 
 passion, all the Sappho we shall have? Must 
 we call a plain case of erotic mania, poetic 
 fervour? Is that jingler of little verselets, that 
 journeyman carver of odd forms of speech, to 
 be our Tennyson? Shall we force ourselves to 
 see deathless harmony in a mere mush of words, 
 simply because it is labeled poetry? Must we 
 give JuDE The Obscure and The Martian 
 a place with Vanity Fair and David 
 COPPERFIELD? We "have been nolled by 
 holy bell to church, have sat at good men's 
 feasts, " and we cannot forget those feasts. If 
 there is nothing else, give us some good stories
 
 12 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of bears and tigers, of jungles, of far-off lands 
 where men are breathing free, and where there 
 is good wholesome blood-letting and killing. 
 
 Thus the Pessimist. 
 
 But we may be comforted in a measure; 
 we have ' our blessings and must not be 
 unmindful of them. Into this world where 
 everything is worn out, and steeped in the 
 ditch-water of dullness, comes an interrogation 
 point of a man — Andrew Lang. If needs be, 
 he will smash every idol and question every 
 fad. Let the fashions change as they will, here 
 is a man who clings to the verities of truth and 
 mental good health. 
 
 He is cool-blooded and temperate when 
 others are furious. He retains his composure 
 amidst the clamours of little coteries of in- 
 tellectual starvelings frantically admiring each 
 other, and bound to coerce all others into a like 
 service. Into this market-place of small wares, 
 Lang comes as the Sealer of Weights and 
 Measures. He hears unmoved the dingdonging 
 of the auction bell, the selling of names. He 
 cannot be hypnotized by the posturings and 
 caperings of literary mountebanks. Over the 
 Kingdom of Fools, he is the upright and just 
 judge, with plenary jurisdiction.
 
 ANDREW LANG 13 
 
 Many idols, some false and some true, have 
 been rang-ed before this judgment seat. Along 
 with other stucco-work, is poor old Poet Bailey, 
 the solace and comfort of our grandmothers. 
 Look in your Poets' Argosy or Gems op 
 Poetry, and you will unearth among other an- 
 cient treasures, "O no. We Never Mention Her," 
 and like lollipops and sweet things from Bailey. 
 I knew Bailey first through the melancholia 
 of my friend Mr. Richard Swiveller, who turned 
 from the perfidious Sophy to Bailey's soothing 
 charm. I learned Bailey better through Lang, 
 who treated his reputation charitably, bestowing 
 only a spanking — lightly laid on. In fact 
 Lang thinks that Bailey might have been 
 something of a poet, he pleased so many simple 
 folk. In this genial fashion does he judge all 
 small sinners. 
 
 But when Lang reads the beadroll of 
 genius, names that" were before heard and 
 forgotten stick like burrs. They stand for 
 something. The dead heroes walk again in 
 new-kindled light. Bunyan, and Montaigne, 
 and Scott, and all great and noble souls gain 
 new nobility and pass unscathed through that 
 wise and kindly judgment. Lang has the 
 grand hailing sign and password of the kinship
 
 14 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of genius. He recognizes his fellows for what 
 they are across the centuries and the wide 
 seas. 
 
 Thus it is that he flashed recognition over 
 to Holmes and Lowell, of all Americans the 
 most like himself. He discovered Kipling in 
 the wilderness of India, and gave him a passport 
 into the world of letters. And now Kipling 
 has become the man of three continents, with 
 fame enough to fill them all. 
 
 Lang is best as a critic and hero worshipper. 
 He and Nordau are almost the only ones left to 
 police our world of literary nondescripts. Carlyle, 
 that harsh block of Scottish granite is gone, 
 and humbug and cant may thrive apace. 
 Thackeray, Keeper of a House for the Correction 
 of Snobs, stalks his grim beat no more. 
 Macaulay, who so deftly put Mr. Robert Mont- 
 gomery in the pillory, is with the dust of the 
 earth. Dr. Holmes, vested with large jurisdic- 
 tion over vulgar pretenders in these American 
 Colonies, has no further judgments to execute. 
 They are no more. Gallant spirits, loyal to 
 the truth, when shall we look upon your like 
 again ! You yet have some security that your 
 work wmII be carried on, for Lang is your living 
 disciple. You may be sure that some frothy
 
 ANDREW LANG IS 
 
 cant will be sponged out; some humbugs will 
 be dosed heroically; some literary reputations 
 will be put in the stocks where we may all have 
 our fling at them. Who shall say that these 
 labours have been in vain? The snobs did not 
 run about at ease while Thackeray was at 
 them. Some of them were killed and some 
 cured. 
 
 Where, for instance is the Fashionable 
 Authoress — where is Lady Fanny Flummery? 
 She was done to death by Thackeray, and has 
 left no heirs. I believe that Lang claims he 
 had a commission once to discover the habitat 
 of her successor, but was compelled to make 
 return of the same unsatisfied. It is true 
 Thackeray was not always so successful. He 
 tried to suppress the poet who writes Odes to 
 Dying Things, such as Frogs, Brook Trout, or 
 whatever it may be, but he could not do it. 
 She — I use the feminine advisedly — is immortal ; 
 suppress her in one generation and she will 
 break out in the next. She still lives to infest 
 the watches of the moon, to write odes and 
 other nameless things. She w^as a Miss Bunion 
 in Thackeray's time and averred that her youth 
 resembled :
 
 16 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 A violet shrinking- meanly 
 When blows the March wind keenly; 
 A timid fawn on upland lawn, 
 Where oak-boug-hs rustle greenly. 
 
 These thrice-crazed ones scatter sweet 
 flowers about us still. Their dainty ribbon-tied 
 volumes strew our libraries like autumn leaves 
 in Vallombrosa. Yet after all, Thackeray's 
 punishment of Miss Bunion was not in vain. 
 His magisterial process is still out against her 
 successors. Nor was it a vain labour for Mr. 
 Yellowplush and the Sallybrated Mr. Smith, 
 over a cold hoyster in the Yellowplush pantry, 
 to hale Mr. Bulwer Lytton to the torture. 
 That day was Fine Writing punctured so that 
 the sawdust padding ran out of it. 
 
 Unlike Nordau, Lang is not a Tartar of 
 savage severity toward his convicts. That 
 Vidocq of continental letters hangs his victims 
 in chains in barbaric style, for the sun and wind 
 to bleach. In this he is like Carlyle, who had 
 a troglodyte nature and brained his with a 
 stone axe. Lang has an Englishman's love of 
 fair play. He gives quarter and treats his 
 victim with courtly grace during the nec- 
 essary torture. Captain John Smith did 
 not behead the three Turks before the walls
 
 ANDREW LANG 17 
 
 of Regall with more blandness or gentle 
 affability. 
 
 Lang makes the desert places of scholarship 
 fair and pleasant with beauty and verdure. 
 Greek is dry and arid when taught by dusty- 
 brained pedantic parrots. Lang transmutes 
 it until it lives again, bringing forth boughs 
 like a plant. In his interpretation its dreary 
 tasks become pleasant pastimes. He would 
 have the college dry-as-dusts give way for one 
 greater than they — the deathless singer, the 
 sightless poet who saw all things; who found 
 the soul of song in far off mystic Illium, in 
 surging seas and on battle fields, on dreary 
 ocean coasts and lonely lost lands, in the tombs 
 of the dead and in the darkness beyond, in the 
 loves and hopes of statesmen and warriors, of 
 rustics and ploughmen round their hearth-fires, 
 in the legends of a thousand years, in the 
 wanderings of the Grecian Chieftain and his 
 return to the great hall where the suitors met ; 
 who could pluck his dearest thought from the 
 welcome home which the dumb and faithful 
 Argus gave the wanderer. Lang would have 
 the ardent student follow Ulysses in his wander- 
 ings, unbelittled by translators, until by and 
 bye the splendour and power of that wonderful
 
 18 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 melody would not let him sleep. Soon a 
 knowledge of Greek would come, but better 
 than this would come a knowledge of Homer. 
 The finest thing in Lang is his worship of 
 Homer. He seems to continually hunger and 
 thirst for him. He holds him close to his heart 
 in half-boyish adoration and fervour. He is a 
 jealous lover, and cannot bear that Pope and 
 Morris and others of the translator's mob, 
 should put Homer into their rhyming strait- 
 jackets. He is savage upon their trespasses 
 and punishes them with many stinging scoffs 
 and gibes. He has lived so much with Homer, 
 that at will the centuries roll back and he sees 
 the world that Homer saw. He loves Homer's 
 lightest word better than all Pope's stilted 
 rhymes. He makes one mourn for his ignorance 
 of Greek, for it means that he can never know 
 Homer for all that he is. 
 
 Lang has the advantage of being a Scotch- 
 man with English advantages. He is a later 
 Socrates in a dress coat. Some one has said 
 that he is too finished a product to become 
 popular with the mass. I will admit that he is 
 neither dull and heavy nor light and vulgar. 
 After his title-page there is not a dull line, and 
 even a title-page with the name of Andrew
 
 ANDREW LANG 19 
 
 Lang- on It will illuminate a whole library. 
 When I find a library tenanted by Andrew 
 Lang-, I confess to feeling vastly increased 
 respect for the proprietor. Even the presence 
 of She, or Mr. Barnes of New York in that 
 library, cannot entirely destroy this good 
 opinion. The scholar and man of letters may 
 by inadvertence become the victim of the brazen 
 train-boy. 
 
 Lang disdains fine writing, and yet 
 always writes finely, with the virile, powerful 
 touch of a master. He does not hold himself 
 above the common speech of people if by ranging 
 there he can find the apt word or the rightly 
 turned phrase, A scholar w'ith the art to 
 conceal the mere repelling externals of scholar- 
 ship, Yale or Oxford could not take the fine 
 temper out of such a soul as his. He did not 
 come forth from the pedagogic inquisition 
 afflicted with intellectual rickets. Whether the 
 University Procrustes found him too long or 
 too short, cannot be discovered from any tokens 
 he bears. He comes into a world of much 
 fustian scholarship, a true scholar, a loyal, 
 perfect knight of the pen. 
 
 But Lang is not all the critic, not all the 
 man of war — the knight whose keen and biting
 
 20 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 rapier plays like lightning among the false and 
 the foolish. 
 
 There is another Lang— a poet and hero- 
 worshipper, a lover of homely things, of homely 
 human-kind ; one who takes content in watching 
 his peaches ripen on the wall and his grapes on 
 their trellis; one who loves walks of peace and 
 quietness, and who can see the "splendour in 
 the grass, the glory in the flower;" one who 
 can look upon lovers strolling together in the 
 sweet English May-time with kindly eyes and 
 softened heart. He is no longer young, but he 
 can remember the loves and hopes of youth. 
 With him : 
 
 Manhood's noonday shadows hold 
 The dews of boyhood's morning. 
 If this were not so he could not have 
 written such verses of baffling sweetness as 
 these: 
 
 Who wins his love shall lose her; 
 
 Who loses her shall gain; 
 For still the spirit wooes her, 
 
 A soul without a stain; 
 And mem'ry still pursues her, 
 With longings not in vain. 
 
 * * *
 
 ANDREW LANG 21 
 
 In dreams she grows not older, 
 
 The land of dreams among-, 
 Though all the world wax colder, 
 
 Though all the songs be sung; 
 In dreams shall he behold her, 
 
 Still fair, and kind, and young-.
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 
 
 AS Balzac is favored with a minor place in 
 Max Nordau's Gallery of Degenerates, I 
 am disposed to make a deprecatory bow 
 to that eminent vivisectionist. Some characters 
 should be described by describing their op- 
 posites — Mr. Gulliver said that he could better 
 realize the huge dimensions of the Brobingnag- 
 gians, because of his recent experiences in 
 Lilliput. 
 
 If I shall take liberties of comparison with 
 any of the idols in our home temple of fame, it 
 is not to make them seem more diminutive, but 
 to give a better perspective for Balzac. Few of 
 our countrymen have broken into his prodigious 
 storehouse. The charming insularity of the 
 truly patriotic American, prejudices him against 
 the products of the effete despotisms. He says, 
 we have our own shrines, why go abroad to 
 worship? 
 
 Hence the elevation of Howells, who never 
 says damn, and who never levels even a small 
 
 22
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 23 
 
 corner of his faithful kodacon any of the tabooed 
 vulgarities. I confess I prefer a somewhat coarse 
 bluntness to this chaste veiling. I defy any one, 
 for instance, to tell just what sins Ho wells intends 
 to impute to Bartley Hubbard. If Balzac had 
 dealt with him, he would have stripped his soul 
 naked, even if it did take coarse and vulgar 
 words to do it. 
 
 As w^e progress in social development, our 
 society grows more clubbish. Gentle woman 
 organizes herself, and pursues and gluts herself 
 on Culture, without ceasing. We have Arnold 
 Clubs and Browning Clubs, and what not, and 
 the stones of Rome and the number of bricks 
 in St. Paul's must be counted in didactic essay. 
 Culture does not have much chance to escape 
 these indefatigable pursuers. Yet those who 
 grow weary of this child's game of Culture, 
 this fishing in a water-pail and drawing nothing 
 up, can find easy relief in the wisdom and 
 strength of Balzac. 
 
 Why watch continually the never-moving 
 waters of smug literary mediocrity, when you 
 have only to climb the steeps a little way and 
 look upon the mighty sea? This immortal 
 genius can bide its time however. It may yet 
 become the fad of the Culture Clubs ; a reigning
 
 24 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 mode in literature. The LiLY OF The Valley, 
 orlJRSULA, of crystal purit3s may yet fill the place 
 of the highly immoral Trilby. Pere Goriot 
 may supersede Howell's Broomfield Corey, or 
 that delightful old philistine, who gained 
 ephemeral riches in mineral paint. 
 
 We assure those who have become ac- 
 customed to the pure and elevated morality of 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and THE Quick and the 
 Dead, that they will find nothing to shock or 
 disturb them in Balzac. The austere virgin. 
 Propriety, should also be warned that she will 
 see nothing very offensive in Balzac and that 
 she had better not take the trouble to look for 
 it. If she should by any chance have breathed 
 too long the mephitic sewer gas of the Erotic 
 School, of American Fiction and Poetry, she 
 may not at first have free respiration in the 
 higher altitudes of Balzac. 
 
 It is true that he does not aim to have a 
 moral, ticketed and labeled as such, for every 
 tale. He paints human life as he finds it, in 
 its baseness and glory, in its weakness and its 
 strength. He does not announce the moral, 
 yet it is always present; in the punishment 
 and repentance of the wicked, in the fives of 
 the pure in heart, and in the hells which
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 25 
 
 evil souls build for themselves. Our gentle 
 E. P. Roe, who should be called Pencils- 
 and-Pickles, he is so much affected by young 
 w^omen towards the end of their bread- 
 and-butter age, always builds his moral 
 first, and then fits his story to it afterwards. 
 He carries his pulpit around on his back as a 
 snail does its residence, or an organ-grinder his 
 instrument of torture and if he gets half a 
 chance he will set it up and preach. 
 
 Balzac tells his story and lets the moral 
 take care of itself. He has no patent theological- 
 seminary plan for coverting sinners. Where is 
 there a finer sermon than the conversion of 
 Doctor Minoret, led to repentance by the child 
 he loved. 
 
 "Can it be that you believe in God?" 
 she cried with artless joy, letting fall the 
 
 tears that gathered in her eyes. 
 * * * 
 
 "My God," he said in a trembling voice, 
 raising his head, "if any one can obtain my 
 pardon and lead me to Thee, surely it is this 
 spotless creature. Have mercy on the 
 repentant old age that this poor child 
 presents to Thee. " 
 Balzac has the carelessness and abandon
 
 26 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of conscious power. He plays the prodigal with 
 his talents. The sweepings of his attic would 
 stock a dozen common skulls with genius, and 
 make a dozen latter-day reputations. He is 
 not concerned with the petty fears and alarms 
 of small minds. One of their gods is Brevity. 
 Your writer of magazine novelettes; your mere 
 parlour entertainer, affects to abhor the Super- 
 fluous Word. 
 
 Balzac never bothers his head about it. 
 His words come in great torrents, and the 
 excess cannot hide his kingly port. Always 
 present is the dramatic quality. You watch 
 with terrour for his next effect. Our colder 
 Teutonic blood has too little of this fire, and 
 so genius becomes atrophied and lifeless. Afraid 
 to give Nature speech, our strugglers after 
 fame belittle the passions and make them tame 
 and commonplace, or paint them in strange 
 bizarre colors and in mangled grotesqueness. 
 How different the mighty genius of Balzac! 
 When Doctor Minoret weeps, Balzac says : — 
 The tears of old men are as terrible as 
 those of children are natural. 
 
 The sorrows of Pere Goriot have a 
 thousand eloquent tongues. What a profound 
 and immeasurable baseness is that which
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 27 
 
 robbed him of his peace! Throned in the 
 majesty of death his whispers are heartrending. 
 Sometimes he babbles childish nonsense, and 
 sometimes shrieks his last terrible resentments. 
 He calls for his daughters alternately in curses 
 and words of endearment. You can feel him 
 groping through the thick shadows for them, 
 but they do not come. It is King Lear, with 
 a difference. Finally, in the moment of dissolu- 
 tion, God is merciful to this shattered soul. 
 He sees again his daughters as little children, 
 and calls them by the childish names he once 
 gave them ; and so he passes from this inhuman 
 world. 
 
 One must walk with Balzac in fear and 
 dread. His are not always the pleasant tasks 
 of an idle hour. He will lead you through the 
 hell of the living where you will meet dreadful 
 shades and weeping, crucified, souls. He will 
 also show you Complacent Respectabifity sitting 
 in placid ease, "storing yearly little dues of 
 wheat and wine and oil." He preaches a 
 thousand sermons of the erring majesty of 
 human life, but he does not, like Zola, batten 
 on dunghills, and show you how much muck 
 he can dig up.
 
 28 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 And now, what is the main difference 
 between him and the Lilliputians? 
 
 They are mere photographers, taking 
 machine pictures with painful care. It is the 
 difference between a kodac and the brush of a 
 great master. 
 
 He may be ever so careless and slovenly, 
 but he has the hand of power, and when he 
 sweeps his brush across the canvas, that canvas 
 becomes one of the dear and priceless treasures 
 of the world through all the centuries.
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 
 
 CAPTIOUS persons may insist that they be 
 made acquainted with the authority 
 which prompts this further presentation 
 of Thackeray lore. 
 
 This seems to be agreeable to the demand 
 that the distant suburbs of culture shall 
 remain in eternal calm, except for the harryings 
 of the Chatauqua Course and the literary tea 
 and toast of the culture clubs. Yet this mes- 
 sage will be unpretending, as becomes one from 
 a place so far distant from the habitat of 
 learned and approved reviewers. The point of 
 view at least should not unduly prejudice the 
 relation, for the ferment of London, Boston 
 and New York is busy upon newer themes, and 
 the soil once worked to exhaustion now lies 
 fallow. 
 
 Not consenting to the paramount jurisdic- 
 tion of any reviewer whosoever, there is here 
 presented some cumulative testimony on 
 Thackeray, for it is the duty of each generation 
 
 29
 
 30 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 to testify to all that has aforetime been done in 
 letters. Thus divers testimonies can be pre- 
 served for the use of posterity when it shall 
 make up its final verdict. This review is 
 offered by one who loves his task, a witness on 
 minor points, merely as a deposition in rei 
 pei'Petna tne^noriam, for what even such an 
 one has thought of Thackeray may become a 
 matter of curious and valuable interest some 
 hundreds of years hence. The toiler and 
 dreamer must look to that final judgment, and 
 not the applause of the easily satisfied, who 
 may crown a favourite to-day and uncrown him 
 to-morrow\ 
 
 Not in profane analogy to the final judg- 
 ment in the moral and spiritual world, but in 
 the conceit of an idle hour, one can imagine a 
 court of last resort for authors, in which there 
 shall be a final decree on all fames and reputa- 
 tions; where worth and not names shall 
 control; where even some rejected manuscripts 
 will give their testimony not disqualified by any 
 past editorial verdict; where some obscure poets 
 shall have due commendation, and the swollen 
 reputations of some great men will suffer proper 
 diminution. The poor scholar who has es- 
 caped prosperity shall there be crowed with the
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 31 
 
 tardy bays, and many darkened garrets of our 
 Grub Streets will become visibly glorious in that 
 effulgent justice. The magazine magnate who 
 hears not the voice of genius until it be properly 
 advertised, and who has spent his life-time 
 putting its inspirations into strait-jackets; the 
 Professional Organizer of Clacques for Small 
 Performers; the Critics Banditti who hold up 
 all travelers on the road to fame, will, let us 
 trust, on that last judgment day find their 
 deserved place among the goats. But surely 
 there are some fames that will grow brighter 
 and brighter in that last winnowing. Unless 
 the known standards of excelence shall fail, in 
 all the world of nineteenth century authorship, 
 Thackeray will be given first place. 
 
 Sometimes, owing to the failing memories 
 of men, priceless things are lost sight of for a 
 time, yet assurance seems now so full, that it 
 cannot be so with Thackeray. With him, 
 however, more than with any other author, the 
 effect he produced on his readers forms a 
 curious study. Som.e minds instinctively dis- 
 like him and yet delight in Dickens and Bulwer 
 Lytton. Such soils, however well sown with 
 Thackerayism, blossom only into the meagerest 
 appreciation. This trait is like unto the fabled
 
 32 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 inability of the North Briton to comprehend a 
 joke. Is it because the satire of Thackeray is 
 so sweeping and all-embracing that even the 
 most obtuse reader imagines he is being mocked 
 at and that all of his own vanities and follies 
 are being rudely caricatured before his eyes? 
 Happy is the man who can laugh at his own 
 follies and jest at himself for the fool that he 
 was on yesterday. To him Thackeray is a 
 well-spring of delight. 
 
 Both the comedy and tragedy of life have 
 a sameness from generation to generation. It 
 is a commonplace to say that names and social 
 customs and forms of government change, but 
 the nature of man remains as it was, and that 
 the creations of Moliere and Shakespeare will 
 always have living duplicates. Who has not 
 known a TartufFe? Even a Falstaff is not 
 difficult to find, and as for Nym, Pistol and 
 Bardolph, they are as common as sawdust 
 saloons. 
 
 I have met the Old Campaigner — busy 
 breeder of divorces that she is — and Becky 
 Sharp still lives and continues to shoot young 
 curates and other impressionable males dead 
 with her soft glances. 
 
 On the very threshold of Thackeray's
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 33 
 
 world one cannot help but linger a little over 
 his endearing personal qualities. Soon he will 
 show us life's baseness and meanness, and it 
 seems good to pause over some happier things 
 before launching into the blacker and deeper 
 currents. He was one of the lovable men of 
 literature. Count them up and you will 
 see how few of these there are. Some of 
 the greatest names stand for icebergs of 
 personality, and you can feel the lowering 
 temperature as you near them. Do you always 
 love the man behind the book? It is rank 
 treason to suggest it, but can you feel affection 
 for the man Dickens, for the man Tennyson, 
 or for Bulwer Lytton? I confess that I cannot ; 
 they are only graven images and mere makers 
 of books, as remotely frigid as the north pole. 
 There is some coldness in the blood accounting 
 for this that cannot be explained or analyzed. 
 But, what warmth and cheer and glow of good 
 fellowship and kindliness radiates from Thack- 
 eray and Lamb and Holmes. When you read 
 their words they become alive again, and when 
 you think of them as dead, it brings a sharp 
 pang of grief ; a sense of personal loss. Time 
 cannot still their heart-throbs, and life and love 
 are pulsing yet, despite the tokens of mortality.
 
 34 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 It may be that this repellant coolness in 
 Tennyson and Dickens is due to the drop of 
 Semetic blood ascribed to them by anthropolog- 
 ical investigators. I think it is Besant who 
 says that this tincture of the elder race is 
 necessary to mental perfection, and that where 
 it comes it leavens with an added genius the 
 tough stubborn fibre of the Teutonic intellect. 
 He adds that we all need a little of it in order 
 to properly ripen our talents. 
 
 In the lesser memoirs of the great poet we 
 read that after he had w^ritten The Revenge 
 and committed it to his publisher's hands and 
 before it had become public property, he invited 
 a choice company to hear it read. Probably no 
 one but he could bring together such a group 
 of listeners within the four seas. His grave 
 biographer describes his reading generally as a 
 "mysterious incantation exceedingly impress- 
 ive, " and as he read on towards the end every 
 heart was awed by the wonderful power of the 
 immortal poem. 
 
 He finally came to the close with such a 
 strange mixture of genius and thrift that his 
 hearers were frozen lifeless : — 
 
 And they mann'd the Revenge with a 
 swarthier alien crew,
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 35 
 
 And away she sail'd with her loss and 
 
 long^'d for her own ; 
 When a wind from the lands they had 
 
 ruin'd awoke from sleep, 
 And the water beg"an to heave and the 
 
 weather to moan, 
 
 And or ever that evening- ended a great 
 
 g-ale blew, 
 And a wave like the wave that is raised 
 
 by an earthquake grew, 
 Till it smote on their hulls and their sails 
 
 and their masts and their flags, 
 And the whole sea plunged and fell on 
 
 the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, 
 And the little Revenge herself went down 
 
 by the island crags 
 To be lost evermore in the main, 
 
 and the beggars only gave me three 
 hundred pounds for it — " 
 quoth my Lord Tennyson, not making 
 pause at all between the last words of the poem 
 and his execrations on the hard-hearted 
 publishers who had driven a close bargain with 
 him. It is hard to have the deathless minstrel 
 sweep one hand across his harp, while with the 
 other he clinks and counts his guineas. 
 Doubtless not one of that noble assemblage
 
 36 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ever forgot the scene, or could ever look on 
 Locksley Hall as anything but a commercial 
 pot-boiler, or on In Memoriam as other than 
 a task to be paid for at so much a line. Behind 
 the scenes one sees dimly the publishers and 
 the poet, driving the bargains of an old 
 clothes shop. 
 
 How different this from Dante who "could 
 hold heart-break at bay for twenty years and 
 not let himself die until his task was done, " or 
 Lamb "winning his way, with sad and patient 
 soul, through evil and pain, and strange 
 calamity." These two marshaled life's forces 
 through black shadows, the one with a warrior's 
 stern, set face, that never lightened and the 
 other with pleasant jest, heedless of whether he 
 won or lost, so he but hid the heartache. Who 
 could turn from this real tragedy to Byron's 
 counterfeit, or feel affection for him in his 
 theatrical sorrow as he displayed in many 
 postures his many-times-broken heart to the 
 public gaze? 
 
 It is for him who is a man first and a 
 genius afterwards, that we reserve our best 
 affection. We accord this to Thackeray for he 
 had the heart of a child that worldly wisdom 
 could not spoil.
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 37 
 
 It is a far leap from these thou^jhts to 
 Thackeray's land of snobs. He is markedly 
 eminent as the only great specialist on this 
 subject. He has taken them apart and put 
 them together, and reduced them to their 
 original elements. He has admired, dissected 
 and played with them, and artfully drawn them 
 out and felinely leaped upon them from 
 cunning concealments. He has dug and 
 searched for snobs in all social formations, and 
 never without reward. He has made scientific 
 research into all kinds, qualities, conditions 
 and degrees of snobs, and classified, arranged, 
 named, numbered, indexed and cross-referenced 
 them. He has grilled them sometimes savagely, 
 and sometimes lovingly, for he had a grotesque 
 form of affection for them such as Dickens said 
 that he had for the pigs which he saw disporting 
 themselves in the streets of New York. Given 
 one scale of any species of snob, and Thackeray 
 could construct the complete animal. He takes 
 a just pride in his cabinet of snobs where there 
 are multitudes of them artistically arranged 
 with pens stuck through their snobbish thoraces. 
 Among these remains are Clerical, Royal, 
 Military, Respectable, Great, City, Banking, 
 Scholastic, Irish, Sporting, University, Theat-
 
 38 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 rical, Professional and Official Snobs. Being 
 pressed to define Literary Snobs, the satirical 
 rogue says: 
 
 The fact is that in the literary profession 
 
 there are no snobs. Look around over the 
 
 whole body of British men of letters, and I 
 
 defy you to point out a sing-le instance of 
 
 vulg-arity, or envy, or assumption. 
 
 This genial snob-hunter sometimes beats 
 
 up his own thickets. He admits that he would 
 
 rather walk down Pall Mall arm in arm with a 
 
 Lord than with a commoner, and would feel a 
 
 snobbish elation if he could only be seen between 
 
 two dukes in Picadilly. In the divine ardour of 
 
 the chase he is willing to jeeringly trice himself 
 
 up. If at any time one feels a tendency to 
 
 snobbishness, he can de-snobize himself by 
 
 consulting Thackeray's probe and scalpel. We 
 
 arise from this feast of snobs to ask if there is 
 
 any place free from the Snob? Is there no wild 
 
 of England, Scotland or Ireland, or Thibet or 
 
 Crim-Tartary, or among the Anthropophagi, 
 
 where a snob is not? 
 
 Thackeray gave but the most casual 
 investigation to the fauna of this continent. He 
 had doubtless read our history and knew that 
 there were no snobs here, and that in this
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 39 
 
 repu bile all men were created equal and recognized 
 neither rank nor social condition as conferring 
 any distinction. He must have found that 
 snobs, like weeds, do not grow on new soils. 
 No, we do not love a lord better than a 
 commoner; we do not envy our neighbours; we 
 do not think meanly of and inflict slights on 
 those less fortunate than ourselves; we do not 
 think better of any man because of his wealth. 
 No one here "meanly admires mean things," 
 which is his definition of a snob. Our interna- 
 tional marriages with foreign titles have been 
 possible only because of the singular worth of the 
 groom involved, and also, by reason of the — 
 worth of the bride. With us, kind hearts are 
 more than coronets, and, thank heaven, we have a 
 proper contempt for the social sycophancy of the 
 degenerate Briton. Those fecund Irish kings 
 and noble families of the three islands have no 
 noble descendants here v^ho brag of their long 
 descent, and we who know that our ancestry is 
 noble, never mention it and do not esteem 
 ourselves for it. 
 
 There is one line of fiction in which 
 Thackeray is not great. He portrayed no 
 murderers, no Napoleonic criminals who slept 
 in the contriving of crime and awoke to do it.
 
 40 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 He had no love for slumming, and did not, like 
 a respectable sort of scavenger, rake over the 
 refuse of the London streets for lessons and 
 sermons and fine morals with which to adorn 
 his romance. 
 
 He made the novel a public conveyance 
 where all sorts of people might find carriage; 
 where Parson Honey man is rudely jostled by 
 Mr. Moss, and the gentle Amelia and Captain 
 Raff touch elbows; where callow Pendennis 
 hotly courts the ancient Fotheringay, chap- 
 eroned by the redoubtable Costigan; where 
 Becky Sharp and her vis-a-vis, the stately 
 Semiramis Pinkerton, picked up as the coach 
 rolls by Chiswick Mall, make faces at each 
 other; where the Castlevvoods cease not their 
 genteel family quarrels, and Lady Maria begins 
 that little Affair with the French dancing 
 master; where the Virginians arrange for the 
 early morning meeting with their lately esteemed 
 friend, G. W. ; where Philip glowers hatred at 
 his father and Clive and Barnes Newcome fall 
 to cousinly insults and blows; while ever 
 watchful in his corner sits a humorous "Literary 
 Gent, " as the genial Harry Foker calls him, 
 taking notes and chuckling now and then as
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 41 
 
 the coach speeds away, and the ruts bring out 
 the temper of the passengers. 
 
 There are inns to be made, and new 
 passengers to be taken up, and old ones to be 
 put down, and country roads stretching before, 
 and narrow towns to pass, and by and bye, 
 the din and roar of the great Babylon. But 
 the journey is never long and never weary, for 
 always you are keeping close company with 
 human life, and are looking breathlessly into 
 its meanness and its majesty. 
 
 Take joy of this ferment and turmoil of 
 living and loving and hating, and so that you 
 may love it the more heartily, turn and look 
 upon the single-seated equipages of romance 
 that are trundled before us in this part of the 
 world. The single nondescript passenger that 
 you see is the author's fad in morals, religion 
 or politics, or some flotsam gleaned from the 
 nine days' talk of the tea parties, or furbished 
 out of the last labour strike, the newest phase 
 of the New Woman, the Chicago Fire, the 
 Charleston Earthquake, or the last visitation of 
 Cholera or Yellow Fever. Any commonplace 
 of this kind furnishes plot and pabulum and all 
 manner of excellencies to our story- writers 
 of pauperized wits. Among them are the
 
 42 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS. 
 
 Obituary Novelists, who, like the Obituary 
 Poets in the country newspapers, go hand in 
 hand with Death. Let Death come to a city 
 with generous stroke, in Flood, Fire, Earth- 
 quake, or Plague and the public can draw at 
 ninety days on the Obituary Novelists for this 
 mortuary aftermath of fiction. Thus comes 
 our Dreary School of Romance. 
 
 Its upbullders select a supposed dramatic 
 situation or center and round it range the 
 puppet characters, who chatter from page to 
 page some text of commonplace and are as 
 sentient and alive as a lot of wooden Indians. 
 Thus we have had; "Bulwarks Burned Down," 
 "The Earth Shook," "Saved by the Flood," 
 "Plague Stricken, " etc., etc. " The Washer- 
 wo^nan of Finchley Common^ ' ' would be of 
 riotous interest as compared with some of these. 
 Their admirers are one with the Exeter Hall 
 enthusiast who declared that he would rather 
 be the author of the tract named than of 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 But come away to where we have better 
 mettle. Thackeray deals with respectable 
 wickedness in the main ; a wickedness of 
 cushioned pews and pretty pulpits, and em- 
 inently virtuous drawing rooms; of assemblies
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 43 
 
 where highly respectable people such as you 
 and I know, eat, drink and make merry; a 
 wickedness of pleasant family circles where all 
 hands quarrel in a perfectly genteel way ; a 
 wickedness which goes hand in hand with 
 Christian church-going, with Christian alms- 
 giving, with loyal support of the State and all 
 established institutions; a wickedness which 
 dresses in the paint and tinsel of conventional 
 moralities, which sits in the boxes in Vanity 
 Fair, and looks down with stern scorn on the 
 ungenteel low-down wickedness of the pit ; — in 
 short a philistine, pharisaical, canting, time- 
 serving, toadying, sham-loving, holier-than-thou 
 wickedness that cankers and rots character like 
 a leprosy. You will sometimes turn your head 
 away from this rout of respectable sinners for 
 shame of our common humanity. 
 
 You do not need to pray to be saved from 
 the crimes of the statute books, but you may 
 need to be saved from the sins of the Old 
 Campaigner, of Mrs. Bute Crawley, of Barnes 
 Newcome, of Old Osborne, of Lady Kew, and 
 the Reverend Honeyman, of the Pontos, the 
 Botibels, the Clutterbucks, and Lady Susan 
 Scraper, and many others. These were all of 
 approved respectability and some of them made
 
 44 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 a great figure in Vanity Fair. They did not 
 pick pockets or commit murder, but acted in 
 all things as a great many respectable people 
 about you do, yet how you despise and loathe 
 them. These are Thackeray's Helots, drunken 
 with greed and selfishness and all uncharitable- 
 ness, shown as examples of what respectable 
 men and women may do and still keep their 
 rags of respectability. 
 
 We do not have to be warned against the 
 wickedness of Sykes, and Fagin, and Jonas 
 Chuzzlewit, of Quilp and Brass. Their de- 
 pravity has no enticement; it is vulgar and 
 repelant. The warning in Thackeray's sermons 
 is for the Respectable Wicked, and the most 
 complacent sinner will wince under this lash. 
 Thackeray loved a man, and would have nothing 
 less. With him : 
 
 One ruddy drop of manly blood 
 The surging- sea outweighs. 
 He never spares himself. Here is one of 
 his self-indictments: 
 
 I never could count how many causes 
 went to produce any given effect in a person's 
 life, and have been, for my own part many a 
 time quite misled in my own case, fancying 
 some grand, some magnanimous, some vir-
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 45 
 
 tuous reason for an act of which I was proud, 
 when lo! some pert little satirical monitor 
 spring-s up inwardly, upsetting- the fond 
 humbug- which I was cherishing- — the pea- 
 cock's tail wherein my absurd vanity had clad 
 itself — and says; "Away with boasting-; I 
 am the cause of your virtue my lad. You are 
 pleased thatyesterday at dinneryou refrained 
 from the dry champagne. My name is 
 Worldly Prudence, not Self Denial, and I 
 caused you to refrain. You are pleased 
 because you g-ave a guinea to Diddler. I am 
 Laziness, not Generosity which inspired 
 you. You hug yourself because you resisted 
 other temptation? Coward, it was because 
 you dared not run the risk of the wrong- 1 
 Out with your peacock's plumage 1 Walk off 
 in the feathers which Nature g-ave you, and 
 thank Heaven they are not altog-ether 
 black. " 
 
 Yet the same hand wrote this of a woman 
 looking back forty years to the love of her youth : 
 Oh, what tears have they shed, g-entle 
 eyesl Oh, what faith has it kept, tender 
 heart 1 If love lives through all life, and 
 survives through all sorrow; and remains 
 steadfast with us throug-h all chang-es; and
 
 46 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 in all darkness of spirit burns brig-htly ; and, 
 if we die, deplores us forever, and loves still 
 equally; and exists w^ith the very last g"asp 
 and throb of the faithful bosom — whence it 
 passes with the pure soul beyond death ; sure 
 it shall be immortal. 
 
 And like it is what he said of the gulf of 
 time, and parting, and grief: 
 
 And the past and its dear histories, and 
 youth and its hopes and passions, and tones 
 and looks forever echoing- in the heart, and 
 present in the memory — these no doubt, poor 
 Clive saw and heard as he looked across the 
 great gulf of time, and parting" and grief, and 
 beheld the woman he had loved for many 
 years. There she sits; the same, but 
 changed; as gone from him as if she were 
 dead; departed indeed into another sphere, 
 and into a kind of death. 
 
 If Thackeray dearly loved a man, he also 
 loved a boy. He is the historian, the epic poet 
 of boyhood. The boy is an unknown quantity 
 to the average novelist ; he is elusive and protean 
 and evades description. Some great novelists, 
 although undoubtedly once boys themselves, 
 make mere caricatures of boys. Little Lord 
 Fauntleroy was a charming creature but he
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 47 
 
 was not a boy. D 'Israeli's boys are all old 
 men ; they attain three-score before they are 
 twenty. Witness the grand entrance of some 
 of these unfeathered ones in the world of politics 
 and letters. They discourse of affairs of state 
 before they have achieved the big manly voice. 
 If you should chance to meet one of these very 
 old young gentlemen at Rod well Regis' or Dr. 
 Birch's school you would no more think of 
 giving him a tip to buy sweets with, than you 
 would of tipping Mr. Gladstone. Thomas 
 Bailey Aldrich and Mark Twain have told us 
 of some real boys, and William Allen White is 
 now engaged, as I understand, in the restoration 
 of the Boy to fiction. 
 
 In behalf of these gentlemen and all men 
 who have been boys I protest against expurgated 
 editions of boyhood. Like Cromwell with the 
 portrait painter, I want to have the picture 
 show all the blemishes. You will have to make 
 long search in Dickens before you will find a 
 real boy. He has some impossible creations 
 that are called boys, but as a rule they are 
 grotesque freaks, mere caricatures, made up by 
 selecting and emphazing some one boyish trait. 
 This gives a mere fragment of a boy. The Fat 
 Boy for instance, simply eats and sleeps —
 
 48 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 admittedly too meager an endowment of boyish 
 talent. 
 
 The Dickens Boy is given to the most 
 impossible grown-up language. Here is a 
 sample from Mrs. Lirriper's lodgings. The 
 boy says, in a burst of childish confidence to 
 the old lady who has adopted him : 
 
 And now dear Gran, let me kneel down 
 here, where I have been used to say my 
 prayers, and let me fold my face for just a 
 minute in your g-own, and let me cry, for you 
 have been more than mother, more than 
 father, more than sisters, friends to rae. 
 This is exactly the way the forty-year-old 
 boy talks in a popular play. But no real ten- 
 year-old ever talked like that. Oliver Twist 
 was not much of a boy. The nearest he came 
 to it, was when he asked for more, and when 
 he blacked Noah Claypole's eye. But these 
 events seemed in the nature of accidents and 
 not indicative of any settled boyish habit. 
 
 Thackeray has no counterfeit boys. He 
 never got over being a boy himself and so he 
 knew boys. He does not have them continually 
 at stage business. They fight and fag each 
 other and are flogged religiously and unavail- 
 ingly; they fill up on hardbake and raspberry
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 49 
 
 tart, they run in debt for goodies, and dote on 
 hampers from home, and hate books and love 
 fun. Clive goes to Aunt Honey man's and she 
 stuffs him with sweets as is the manner of aunts 
 the world over. Sad is the childhood that does 
 not have such an aunt. I vow I would rather 
 have vSeen the fight between Champion Major 
 the First Cock of Doctor Birch's School, and 
 the Tutbury Pet, or the one between Cuff and 
 Dobbin, than the combat between the late 
 Messrs. Fitzsimmons and Corbett. 
 
 But Thackeray is most happy with his 
 boys in the salad time, between hay and grass, 
 when the childish treble changes to a more 
 virile note. Few elders understand a boy at 
 this time, nor does he understand himself. If 
 you choose to laugh at the many nebulous 
 aspirations, hopes and ambitions that come to 
 him, then you are laughing over the grave of 
 your own youth where lies all that was best in 
 you. Make your mirth kindly, for so you toiled, 
 and sorrowed and played up the slope of man- 
 hood. The silly hours, the follies in love, the 
 wanton freaks and callow vices, the fitful starts 
 that mark the changing mind, are all pictures 
 of your own youth. You have turned them to 
 the wall and forgotten them, or wish you could
 
 50 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 forget them. Thackeray has dealt kindly with 
 this world of hobbledehoyhood. He has peopled 
 it with Arthur Pendennis, Phillip, Clive, the 
 Virginians and many more of unripe wits. He 
 is youth's kindliest, most generous mentor. 
 'Tis sometimes one whether this boy-man is 
 laughing or crying over this dreamland of youth. 
 
 It was as if he had the same opinion as 
 Dr. Busby, who was asked how he contrived 
 to keep all his preferments, and the head- 
 mastership of Westminster School, through 
 the turbulent times of Charles I, Cromwell, 
 and Charles H; He replied: "The fathers 
 govern the nation; the mothers govern the 
 fathers; the boys govern the mothers; and I 
 govern the boys. " 
 
 He could live over again that many-sided 
 boyhood with its selfishness and generosity, its 
 cruelty and humanity, its justice and injustice, 
 its queer, strange, code of established laws and 
 customs. Always a boy at heart, he could 
 easily turn back to the old days of smiles and 
 tears, of feasting and fighting, of loosely 
 mingled work and play, and feel again the 
 thrill of those early griefs and joys, and that 
 first fond love for many companions whom the 
 dust has long covered.
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 51 
 
 It was in child-hearted mood that he wrote 
 the poem where are these lines : 
 I'd say we suffer and we strive 
 
 Not less or more as men than boys; 
 With grizzled beards at forty-five, 
 
 As erst at twelve in corduroys. 
 And if in time of sacred youth, 
 
 We learned at home to love and pray, 
 Pray heaven that early love and truth 
 
 May never wholly pass away. 
 The Thackeray Woman is a delicate 
 subject — a complex creature, and not to be 
 roughly classified. Our author has been widely 
 accused of making his women either fools or 
 knaves, and of disparaging the sex to the point 
 of slander. This criticism is really based on 
 supersensitive gallantry. In fact, Thackeray 
 treated the sexes impartially, and dealt out 
 stripes and favour with an equal hand. He did 
 not create any lofty and flawless women, 
 but neither did he create any men of this 
 character. 
 
 Becky Sharp, The Old Campaigner, and 
 the fair, false Beatrix and many other selfish, 
 nagging, toadying, respectable and semi- 
 respectable women that he has painted are in 
 his Rogues Gallery, side by side with George
 
 52 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Osborne, the brainless cad, the Marquis of 
 Steyne, and Barnes Newcome. 
 
 We are not unmindful that Zenobia 
 Packer, who belongs to no one knows how 
 many clubs, and is president of the Woman's 
 Emancipation League, and who aims a rapid 
 fire of treatises and addresses at the Tyrant, 
 Man, and is high chum with Lady Summersault, 
 the English head of the Movement for Purity 
 and Reform, thinks that Amelia Sedley was a 
 little fool, and that all of the Thackeray women 
 of gentle mould who prayed among their 
 children, and clung fiercely to their household 
 deities, and never cared whether they had any 
 rights or not, were poor puling weak-spirited 
 creatures, who would be entirely out of date 
 now. Go thy way, Zenobia, to thy clubs and 
 thy culture, and thy meat for the strong- 
 minded ; pace the platform with mannish strides; 
 harangue obdurate Man until he cries for 
 quarter, and hunt the bubble Notoriety from 
 convention to convention. 
 
 TyrantMan would return yourcompliments 
 with interest if he dared. And you, Hysterical 
 One who spleen on marriage service lest it have 
 occult power to subjugate you, and who analyze 
 and re-analyze all your emotions and feelings
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 53 
 
 before you use them, and hold high prate and 
 debate over deum and teti^n, follow your 
 labyrinth and let petty Discontent gnaw you, 
 but leave healthy humanity to its worship of 
 old-fashioned idols. 
 
 If to be gentle, and loving, and kindly, and 
 unselfish; to be ignorant of most of the 
 wickedness of the world, to believe in and trust 
 and idealize a faulty, human, son or brother or 
 husband, and to forgive him seventy times 
 seven, and to pour unmeasured love upon him 
 without pausing to see v^hether it is all 
 measured back or not ; to be generous and 
 charitable to all erring souls, and to hate all 
 wickedness, stamps a woman as a poor weak- 
 spirited creature, then may heaven send us 
 more of such women to bless and cheer the 
 world and make it better. Amelia, it is true 
 loved a cad, but evil tongues were hushed in 
 her presence. The Little Sister artlessly 
 dropped her h's, and said "feller, " and was 
 not at all strong-minded, but in silence she let 
 her own good name suffer a deadly wound in 
 order that she might save the boy, not her own, 
 from an inheritance of shame. 
 
 Some apology is due for approaching the 
 everlasting parallel between Dickens and
 
 54 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Thackeray ; but this habit of comparison has 
 become a fixed and ineradicable trait in all of 
 their admirers. The question of superiority 
 between them is probably as unworthy of serious 
 contention as are some of those favourites of 
 the Ethiopian debating societies. 
 
 Dickens will undoubtedly always be more 
 popular with the masses. His humour, his 
 mannerisms, his bent for fine writing, his long 
 drawn pathos, his unwearying play of sorrow 
 and emotion and his conventional sermonizing 
 on the moralities, are more taking than the 
 quick, sweeping strokes of Thackeray. 
 
 Thackeray disdained pretentious writing 
 and all overdrawn, overworn scenes. He has 
 no Solitary Horsemen, no prefatory tales of 
 wind and storm, no stale theatrical tricks or 
 devices, or tawdry stage properties. He leaves 
 all the gorgeous imagery of sky and storm and 
 landscape to other limners. Life's great joys 
 and sorrows are not made wearying with long 
 speech or ornate funeral rhetoric. Before a 
 death bed, he is not like Dame Quickly or some 
 garrulous caretaker of the chamber, chattering 
 and gossipping of the last hour; he but 
 reverently draws the curtain back for a 
 momentary view and then closes it again. He
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 55 
 
 does not prologue his art and bid you prepare 
 to laugh or weep before the occasion. 
 
 Yet he excels Dickens, and, indeed, most 
 others, as a master of style. The pedant, the 
 mere grammarian, or linguistic martinet, prunes 
 and pares our mother-tongue into bashful 
 regularity — into ordered line and phrase. It is 
 then as the trees in the ground of some 
 parvenue gardener, trimmed into grotesque 
 architecture and deformity, shorn of their grace 
 and beauty, and mere caricatures of the great 
 forests. 
 
 Thackeray will have none of this; he 
 touches the barren rock of dictionary lore, and 
 the living words gush forth. 
 
 Some of the best examples of his style are 
 found in the introduction of Major Pendennis 
 reading his morning mail, in the perusal of 
 which 3^ou get several life- histories; in the scene 
 where Colonel Esmond discards the young 
 pretender, and in Colonel Newcome's last hour. 
 In these are shown the marvel and power of a 
 few simple words. 
 
 Like music answering music is a younger 
 author's affectionate tribute to the great 
 master. 
 
 In his Letters to Dead Authors, Lang
 
 56 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 says of Thackeray's style, using for his text 
 Thackeray's own words, "Forever echoing in 
 the heart and present in the memory : ' ' 
 
 Who has heard these tones, who does not 
 hear them as he turns over your books that, 
 for so many years have been companions and 
 comforters? We have been young and old, 
 we have been sad and merry with you, we 
 have listened to the midnight chimes with 
 Pen and Warrington, have stood with you 
 beside the death-bed, have mourned at that 
 yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with 
 you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred 
 to our old and immortal affections, a leal 
 souvenirl And whenever you speak for your- 
 self, and speak in earnest, how magical, how 
 rare, how lonely in our literature is the 
 beauty of your sentences ! "I cannot express 
 the charm of them," so you wrote of Georg-e 
 Sand; so we may write of you. They seem 
 to me like the sound of country bells, pro- 
 voking- I don't know what vein of music and 
 meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on 
 the ear. Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so 
 full of surprises — that style which stamps as 
 classical your fragments of slang, and per- 
 petually astonishes and delights — would alone
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 57 
 
 give immortality to an author, even had he 
 little to say. 
 
 But you with your whole wide world of 
 
 fops and fools, of good women and brave men, 
 
 of honestabsurditiesand cheery adventurers; 
 
 you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, 
 
 the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costigan 
 
 and F. B. and the Chevalier Strong— all that 
 
 host of friends imperishable — you must 
 
 survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in 
 
 the memory and affections of men. 
 
 When Thackeray arrows weary of snobs 
 
 and their ways, and of the meannCvSs and 
 
 baseness of life, he has places of refuge, where 
 
 no evil comes, but only charity and worth and 
 
 manliness. These are his temples, and some 
 
 deity of truth is worshipped in each. You can 
 
 weep and pray with him here, and walk forth 
 
 with new-opened heart. I liken him to the 
 
 Ancient Mariner, homeward bound after that 
 
 voyage of evil sights, who crosses the harbour 
 
 bar, and sees the light-house top, and the kirk 
 
 and feels the familiar homely flush of life in his 
 
 own country once more. Straightway his spirit 
 
 falls prone and he learns the message he is to 
 
 take to all, that he prayeth best, who loveth 
 
 best, all things both great and small. So, when
 
 58 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Thackeray comes to the lives of good men and 
 women, he casts off his hardihood and cynicism, 
 and sees only the things that he loves best. If 
 he created Becky Sharp, and George Osborne 
 and Barnes Newcome, he also gave us The 
 Little Sister, and Amelia Sedley, and dear old 
 Dobbin. 
 
 The wickedness and baseness is over- 
 matched by Colonel Newcome, and where in all 
 literature is there so simple, kindly, manly and 
 chivalrous a vSoul. Almost the first we see of 
 him is in the coffee-room when he arises from 
 his seat, trembling with indignation and stalks 
 out with little Clive, because one of the baccha- 
 nalians commences to sing a ribald song. His 
 life is all one prayer for his boy. When the evil 
 days came and the lash of The Old Campaigner 
 fell upon him, he bowed his shoulders in charity 
 and patience. In the real world it might be 
 hard to find men like him, but unquestionably 
 there are women like her. We last see him in 
 Gray Friars, one of the Poor Brethren, accepting 
 with blended pride and humility the dole of 
 charity for a little time until death comes. 
 With Clive, and Ethel, and Madame de Florae, 
 w^hom he had loved and lost forty years before, 
 clinging to his hands, he heard the evening bell
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 59 
 
 strike as his summons came, and raising his 
 head called '^ Adsum^ " the word he answered 
 with when names were called at school. Colonel 
 Newcome alone redeems Thackeray from the 
 charge of thinking too meanly of human-kind. 
 His own careless lines best close the page: 
 The play is done; the curtain drops, 
 Slow falling to the prompter's bell; 
 A moment yet the actor stops. 
 
 And looks around to say farewell. 
 It is an irksome work and task; 
 
 And when he's laughed and said his say 
 He shows, as he removes the mask, 
 
 A face that's anything but gay. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Come wealth or want, come good or ill, 
 
 Let young and old accept their part. 
 And bow before the Awful Will, 
 
 And bear it with an honest heart. 
 Who misses, or who wins the prize? 
 
 Go, lose or conquer as you can; 
 But if you fail, or if you rise. 
 
 Be each, pray God, a gentleman.
 
 D E G E N ER A T I O N 
 
 IN his Degeneration, Dr. Nordau comes 
 crashing into literature like the traditionary 
 bull into a china shop. When that rude 
 invasion occurred, according to some accounts, 
 the proprietor of the shop, after the intruder 
 had been led away to the shambles, took an 
 inventory of the ruins. He found great wreckage 
 of silly gingerbread-ware, of costly stucco, and 
 antique vases, priceless because they were old ; 
 he found broken specimens made famous and 
 notable because some mad fancier had started 
 the fashion of doting on them, and many other 
 sheep-like madmen had chased after their 
 leaders. Some of these fragments were ground 
 into dust and past all patching; but others he 
 noted he could stick together and hide their 
 wounds, or, better still, could parade them 
 maimed and battered in proof of their great 
 antiquity. To maintain my figure properly I 
 choose to believe that this shopkeeper was a 
 collector, a connoisseur^ a lover of rare old 
 
 60
 
 DEGENERATION 61 
 
 pottery who paid fabulous prices for such as 
 pleased his taste; one who valued many of the 
 gems of his collection, not because they were 
 artistic, but because they were hideous, and 
 other pieces because no one else had them, and 
 still others because some Royal Society had set 
 its approval on them. I shall assume that he 
 had some dingy lies purporting to come from 
 the palaces of Pompeii, or the tombs of Etrusca, 
 that really hailed from the shed of some vile 
 nineteenth century potter. The bull must have 
 knocked some of the grimy deceiving glaze from 
 these gauds and shown them for what they were. 
 Our antiquarian could solace himself with the 
 thought that he could afford to lose some of 
 his wares; could patch others and deceive the 
 public with the fragments, and that after all, 
 his best treasures were on the higher shelves 
 and received no harm. In the case at bar, as 
 the lawyers say, we vtho keep the literary shop 
 have walked about since Nordau darkened our 
 doors, picking up the ruins and ruefully 
 surveying the broken idols. 
 
 We find much dull clay gilded as wedge- 
 wood and rare china; we find antiquities that 
 were made yesterday with no more lies to tell; 
 we find that some things can be patched
 
 62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 together; and, thankfully, we find that 
 some priceless treasures were placed so high 
 that this raging iconoclast could not harm 
 them. Let us, then, rejoice over our 
 salvage. As for Nordau, he has been led away 
 to the critic's shambles, there to await the 
 lethal strokes of ten thousand daggers. 
 
 The vendetta between him and his victims, 
 and victims' victims has become international. 
 It is our happiness to sit around in the pleasant 
 amphitheatre and watch the killing, moved 
 only by the love of truth. Under no cir- 
 cumstances let us turn up our thumbs for the 
 king's mercy. This charge of one man upon 
 an army will be one of the famous braveries in 
 literature. He faced only the leaders at first, 
 "the prime in order and in might, " but behind 
 these come the inferior orders, and then the ten 
 thousand thousand disciples of the Degenerates. 
 This rude shock did not even spare the temple 
 of France where the Forty Immortals are safely 
 housed beyond all necessity of struggling for 
 fame. It is vain however to suppose that the 
 common business of establishing cults will be 
 lessened much. We will still continue to give 
 to our newest Genius assurance of fame by 
 naming clubs after him, and disciplining an
 
 DEGENERATION (.3 
 
 army to ring his perpetual eulogy. In club 
 circles it will still be thought blasphemous that 
 critics like Nordau should disturb public 
 worship by their rude and fretful speech. We 
 shall spend many a decade hereafter listening 
 to the donkey chorus, and watching the halo, 
 which Dullness always delights to place around 
 Dullness, grow and fade. 
 
 I have my own fee-grief however. After 
 reading Nordau, I bethought me of those 
 ancient library favourites — those storehouses of 
 polite letters — the Poets' Argosy; Treasures 
 of Verse; and Sheaves Gleaned From the 
 Great Ocean of Literature. I fear that 
 I have been harbouring Degenerates behind 
 these wooden walls. I know that the gentle- 
 souled compilers, always thoughtful of the 
 manners and morals of their patrons, have 
 already expurgated much, yet I may have to 
 follow them with the blue pencil. If I must, I 
 shall even tear out a forbidden leaf here and 
 there. If an intimate friend of mine is arrested 
 at my house charged with a heinous crime, 
 shall I go off to goal and bail him out, and 
 provide for his defense, not caring for my own 
 safety? Or will it be more prudent for me to 
 come out boldly and honestly against him ;
 
 64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 frankly admit that he may be guilty, and that 
 I have observed suspicious things about him 
 for a long time, as I frequently remarked to my 
 other friend, Smith, as Smith very well knows? 
 Is not this the best way to get away from the 
 ridicule and shame of the matter, especially as 
 I remember trying to make many people believe 
 that my friend in custody was a worthy, honest 
 fellow? How can I clear myself of the suspicions 
 arising from my intnnacy with the criminal 
 unless I repudiate him utterly? If I have had 
 a sneaking fondness for Swinburne and Maeter- 
 linck, now that Nordau has made his arrest, is 
 it my best policy to attempt a rescue, or, shall 
 I abandon them to their fate; denounce them 
 in an airy off-handed way, and announce that 
 I never approved of them and am glad of their 
 exposure? 
 
 Indeed, Nordau says that Degenerates love 
 a Degenerate, and thus I may become classified 
 as a Mattoid, an Egomaniac, or a Grapho- 
 maniac, simply because of the company I have 
 kept. These questions as to what faith shall 
 be maintained with old friends are matters of 
 casuistry that the honourable reader will settle 
 for himself. 
 
 For my own part, I think that if an
 
 DEGENERATION 65 
 
 author, after having deceived us these many 
 years, now turns out under a new diagnosis to 
 be a Mattoid or other monster, he Is not entitled 
 to much consideration, and we owe it to our- 
 seh'es to look out for ourselves. The dear 
 ladies who have wept .sentimentally over Ibsen's 
 multifarious sweet follies; the loveless ones who 
 have 'scaped either matrimony or Its happiness, 
 and who find comfort In Tolstoi because he 
 preaches that marriage Is not only a failure but 
 a desecration; the ardent devotees of realism who 
 have followed in Zola's furrow as he subsoiled 
 dunghills; the many youths of kindling minds 
 who have been lured by the gorgeous colouring 
 of Swinburne and RossettI, as the savage Is 
 lured by a red blanket and glass beads; those 
 who love the dictionary conglomerates of 
 Maeterlinck, Baudelaire and Nietzsche — must 
 endure the shock of seeing their deified good 
 masters turned Into swine — into Yahoos, whom 
 none shall reverence. 
 
 Nordau has the scientist's rage for classify- 
 ing the unclassifiable. To the layman the task 
 seems as vain as that of the phrenologists who 
 subdivide the human skull Into compartments, 
 stocking each with its appropriate tenant. It 
 is urged that Nordau pleads his cause against
 
 66 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the Degenerates with too much vehemence; but 
 a juror need not assume that an advocate has 
 a bad case, because he argues it with 
 exaggeration and energy. This new science of 
 Degeneration has begotten names and titles 
 that are appalling to the non-professional 
 reader. How are pupils in the lower forms to 
 know what Masochism, Megalomania, Neo- 
 Catholicism, Graphomania, Anthropomor- 
 phism, Zoomorphism, Echolalia and many 
 other titles of strange disease, are? The 
 scholars must supply literature with a new 
 index for its maladies, or else allow us to lump 
 them off under the head of Nervous Prostration 
 or General Debility. 
 
 To a native of the upper Mississippi Valley, 
 this baiting and harrying of the Degenerates 
 seems like a visitation of righteous wrath only 
 too long delayed. In places where literature 
 has an established service and a common law 
 of tradition and custom, success seems generally 
 to follow persistent clacking and tickling. You 
 talk up my new poem and I will talk up your 
 new novel ; thus pigmy calls to pigmy, and a 
 great deal of noise is made about nothing. If 
 this persistent reciprocal advertising be kept 
 up long enough the Public will soon come to
 
 DEGENERATION 67 
 
 think we are both great men. Would you 
 know how great fame is built up out of nothing, 
 read Nordau's account of the making of 
 Maeterlink: 
 
 This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for 
 years wholly unnoticed in his corner of Ghent 
 without the Belgian Symbolists, who outbid 
 even the French, according- him the slightest 
 attention; as to the public at large, no one had 
 a suspicion of his existence. Then one fine 
 day in 1890 his writings fell accidently into 
 the hands of the French novelist, Octave 
 Mirabeau. He read them, and whether he 
 desired to make fun of his contemporaries in 
 grand style, or whether he obeyed some 
 morbid impulsion is not known ; it is sufficient 
 to say that he published in Lc Figaro an 
 article of unheard of extravagance, in which 
 he represented Maeterlinck as the most 
 brilliant, sublime, moving poet which the last 
 three hundred years had produced, and 
 assigned him a place near— nay, above 
 Shakespeare. And then the world witnessed 
 one of the most extraordinary, and most 
 convincing examples of theforce of suggestion 
 The hundred thousand rich and cultivated 
 readers to whom Figaro addresses itself
 
 68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 immediately took up the views which Mirbeau 
 had imperiously sug-g-ested to them. They 
 at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau 's eyes. 
 They found in him all the beauties which 
 Mirbeau asserted that he perceived in him. 
 Anderson's fairy tale of the invisible clothes 
 of the emperor repeated itself line for line. 
 They were not there, but the whole court 
 saw them. Some imagined they really saw 
 the absent state robes; the others did not 
 see them, but rubbed their eyes so long- that 
 they at least doubted whether they saw them 
 or not; others again could not impose on 
 themselves, but dared not contradict the 
 rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at one 
 stroke, by Mirbeau's favour, a great poet, 
 and a poet of "the future. " Mirbeau had also 
 given quotations which would have completely 
 sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, 
 not given over irresistibly to suggestion, to 
 recog-nize'Maeterlinck for what he is, namely, 
 a mentally debilitated plag-iarist; but these 
 very quotations wrung- cries of admiration 
 from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had 
 pointed them out as beauties of the hig-hest 
 rank, and every one knows that a decided 
 affirmation is sufficient to compel hypnotic
 
 DEGENERATION 69 
 
 patients to eat raw potatoes as orang-es and 
 to believe themselves to be dog-s or other 
 quadrupeds. 
 Nordau gives out this as his text:' 
 
 Degenerates are not always criminals, 
 prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced 
 lunatics; they are often authors and artists. 
 These however manifest the same mental 
 characteristics, and, for the most part, the 
 same somatic features as the members of the 
 above anthropological family. 
 This is his indictment of the great donkey- 
 like public. 
 
 But g-rievous is the fate of him who has 
 the audacity to characterize aesthetic fashions 
 as forms of mental decay. The author or 
 artist attacked never pardons a man for 
 recognizing in him the lunatic or charlatan; 
 the subjectively garrulous critics are furious 
 when it is pointed out how shallow and 
 incompetent they are, or how cowardly when 
 swimming with the stream ; and even the 
 public is angered when forced to see that it 
 has been running after fools, quack dentists 
 and mountebanks as so many prophets. Some 
 among- these degenerates in literature, music 
 and painting have in recent years come into
 
 70 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 extraordinary prominence, and are revered 
 by numerous admirers as creators of a new 
 art, and heralds of the coming centuries. 
 He defines Degeneration as "a morbid 
 deviation from an original type." He says: 
 The society which surrounds the 
 degenerate always remains strange to him. 
 The Englishman is conquered by an absurd- 
 ity accompanied by diagrams. Ruskin is one 
 of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and 
 one of the most powerful masters of style of 
 the present century, * * * The Pre- 
 Raphaslites who got alltheir leading principles 
 from Ruskin, went further. They misunder- 
 stood his misunderstandings. He had simply 
 said that defectiveness in form can be 
 counterbalanced by devotion and noble 
 feeling in the artist. The}', however, raised 
 it to the position of a fundamental principle, 
 that in order to express devotion and noble 
 feeling, the artist must be defective in form. 
 * * * If any human activity is individualistic 
 it is that of the artist. True talent is always 
 personal. In its creations it reproduces itself, 
 its own views and feelings, and not the 
 articles of faith learned from an aesthetic 
 apostle. If Goethe had never written a line
 
 DEGENERATION 71 
 
 of verse, he would all the same have remained 
 
 a man of the world, a man of good principles, 
 
 a fine art connoiseur, a judicious collector, a 
 
 keen observer of nature. Lombroso, a very 
 
 great authority, says of degenerates: "If 
 
 they are painters, then their predominant 
 
 attribute will be the color sense; they will be 
 
 decorative. If they are poets they will be 
 
 rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, but barren of 
 
 thought; sometimes they will be decadents." 
 
 In this connection it may be said that the 
 
 curious style of some artists of this generation, 
 
 notably Monet and his school bears out the 
 
 above statement. Nordau says of Monet: 
 
 Thus originate the violet pictures of 
 
 Monet and his school which spring from no 
 
 actual observable aspect of nature, but from 
 
 the subjective view due to the condition of the 
 
 nerves. When the entire surface of walls in 
 
 salons and art exhibitions of the day appears 
 
 veiled in uniform half-mourning, this 
 
 predilection for violet is simply an expression 
 
 of the nervous debility of the painter. 
 
 Of our ou^n decadents only Walt Whitman 
 
 is taken; perhaps the crop is too small and too 
 
 immature to merit reaping. This belittlement 
 
 of those who are spared may be deserved, and
 
 72 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 yet if Nordau could have read our Tigerish 
 Affection Poetry, our Poetry of Cold Soggy 
 Dreams, or our Small Poetry for Big Maga- 
 zines, he might have found a trace at least of 
 the deadly virus of degeneration. We do not 
 worship overmuch our home-born degenerates. 
 Some of our attempts at literature are puerile, 
 imitative, and vacuous enough, but it is the 
 silly madness and unreason of childhood rather 
 than the rancid ripeness and putrescent 
 maturity of old-world degeneration. You can 
 readily distinguish between the childish prattle 
 of the kindergarten, and the awful adult babble 
 and clamour of the madhouse. 
 
 Our sraall-and-early literature is so desicated 
 and unfattened in its life, that it cannot 
 spoil; there is nothing in it for decay to feed 
 upon, and so it dies without the grosser tokens 
 of mortality. The diseases of degeneration 
 must draw nutriment from something having 
 life and power, even though it be of a degraded 
 sort. We have no madmen with burning 
 brains, like Tolstoi, crying in our wilderness; 
 they belong to an older civilization. Our erotic 
 literature has a brief and transitory life; it is 
 infected with a thin, washed-out, enfeebled and 
 innocuous depravity that is impotent to do
 
 DEGENERATION 73 
 
 harm except among school children. Its makers 
 put it up in imitation of Zola, Rossetti and 
 Swinburne, who are as eagles to these midges. 
 The nympho-maniacal young women who write 
 prose and verse for the patient American public 
 deserve to be put in straight-jackets, only they 
 are not worth a commission de lunatico. They 
 try to fly as eagles but cannot clear the stye 
 where they seem to live. 
 
 Nordau digs up the early remains of the 
 Pre-Raph^elites to point his moral. This 
 Brotherhood is referred to as an instance of how 
 men of real talent can Indulge in grotesque 
 affectation. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman 
 Hunt and Millais formed the Pre-Raphselite 
 Brotherhood in 1848; Collinson and Stephens, 
 two painters and Woolner, the sculptor, joined 
 later. For a time they marked all their work 
 P. R. B. Nordau says of them : 
 
 In course of time the Pre-Raph^elites 
 laid aside many of their early extravagances. 
 Millais and Holman Hunt no longer practice 
 the affectation of willfully bad drawing and 
 of childish babbling in imitation of Giotto's 
 language. * * * They did not paint sober 
 visions but emotions. They therefore intro- 
 duced into their pictures mysterous allusions
 
 74 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and obscure symbols which have nothing- to 
 do with the visible reality. 
 Nordau defines Pre-Raphaelitism thus: 
 
 It is true that the Pre-Rapha3lites with 
 both brush and pen betray a certain, though 
 by no means exclusive predilection for the 
 Middle Ages; but the mediaevalisra of their 
 poems and paintings is not historical but 
 mythical, and simply denotes something 
 outside time and space — a time of dreams 
 and a place of dreams, where all unreal 
 figures and actions may be conveniently 
 bestowed. That they decorate their un- 
 earthly world with some features which may 
 remotely recall mediaevalism ; that it is 
 peopled with queens and knights, noble 
 damozels with coronets on their golden hair, 
 and pages with plumed caps — these may be 
 accounted for by the prototypes which, 
 perhaps unconsciously, hover before the eyes 
 of the Pre-Raph^lites. 
 
 Rossetti finally becomes a man of letters, 
 dominated possibly by his name. William 
 Morris joins the Pre-Raphaelites, and I am 
 reluctantly compelled to say that he has, on one 
 occasion at least, stolen something besides in- 
 spiration from the "mournful Tuscan's haunted
 
 DEGENERATION 75 
 
 rhyme." This practice of conscripting a 
 blessed damozel out of the Middle Ages to do 
 duty in poetry is common with Rossetti and his 
 school. Tennyson — a healthy poet, teaches us 
 that a simple maiden in her flower, is worth a 
 hundred blessed damozels. 
 
 In Rossetti 's poem Troy 777Zf;^, the refrain 
 "O Troy Town," and "O Troy's down," and 
 "Tall Troy's on fire, " is tacked on as the alien 
 and unassisting tail- piece to each one of fourteen 
 strophes. Thus: 
 
 Helen knelt at Venus' shrine, 
 
 [O Troy Town !] 
 Saying, "A little gift is mine, 
 A little gift for a heart's desire. 
 Hear me speak and make me a sign! 
 [O Troy's down. 
 Tall Troy's on fire!]" 
 Nordau says: 
 
 He is ever muttering as he goes, 
 monotonously as in a litany, the mysterious 
 invocations to Troy, while he is relating the 
 visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. 
 Sollier'has the proposition that : 
 
 A special characteristic found in literary 
 mattoids, and also, as we have seen, in the 
 insane, is that of repeating some words or
 
 76 
 
 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 phrases hundreds of times in the same pag-e. 
 His twin brother, Swinburne, is called 
 upon for his contribution to the poetical crazy 
 quilt : 
 
 "We were ten maidens in the g-reen corn, 
 
 Small red leaves in the mill-water; 
 Fairer maidens never were born, 
 
 Apples of gold for the King's daughter. 
 
 We were ten maidens by a well-head. 
 Small white birds in the mill-water; 
 Sweeter maidens never were wed, 
 
 Rings of red for the King's daughter. 
 This mill- water is a monotonous receptacle 
 for almost everything from "small white birds, " 
 to "a little wind," and it bears its variegated 
 burdens through many verses to the end ; when 
 the final grave is dug for the star daughter, it 
 is still on duty. In the last verse "running 
 rain," is cast in aqueous tautology into the 
 mill-water. This practice of putting a tether 
 on Fancy "skyward flying," and bringing her 
 back with a jerk to the same point after every 
 flight seems unnecessarily cruel and inharmon- 
 ious. 
 
 The Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, 
 furnishes rare sport for this hunter of
 
 DEGENERATION 77 
 
 Degenerates. From the Serres chaudes of 
 
 Maeterlinck this sample is given : 
 
 O hot-house in the middle of the woods. 
 And your doors ever closed! And all that is 
 under your dome! And under my soul in 
 your analog-ies! The thoug-hts of a princess 
 who is hungry; the tedium of a sailor in the 
 desert; a brass-band under the windows of 
 incurables. Go into the warm moist corners ! 
 One mig-ht say 'tis a woman fainting- on 
 harvest-day. In the courtyard of the infirmary 
 are postilions; in the distance an elk-hunter 
 passes by, who now tends the sick. Examine 
 in the moonlig-ht! [O, nothing- there is in its 
 place!] One might say, a madwoman before 
 judg-es, a battle ship in full sail on a canal, 
 nig-ht-birds on lillies, a death-knell towards 
 noon [down there under those bells], ahalting- 
 place for the sick in the meadows, a smell of 
 ether on a sunny day. My God ! My God! 
 when shall we have rain and snow and wind 
 in the hot-house? 
 To show how easy this is, Nordau writes 
 
 a parody of it in this fashion : 
 
 O Flowers ! And we groan so heavily 
 under the very old taxes! An hour-g-lass, at 
 which the dog barks in May; and the strange
 
 78 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 envelope of the negro who has not slept. A 
 grandmother who would eat oranges and 
 could not write 1 Sailors in a ballroom, but 
 blue! blue! On the bridge this crocodile and 
 the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons 
 silently! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, 
 and the razor is notched 1 But the chief prize 
 they have not drawn. And on the lamp are 
 ink spots! 
 
 Nordau despairingly asks: "Why parody 
 Maeterlinck? His style bears no parody, for 
 it has already reached the extreme limits of 
 idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally 
 sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an 
 idiot." 
 
 Zola and his school do not escape 
 punishment. 
 
 M. Zola boasts of his method of work ! all 
 his books "emanate from observation." The 
 truth is that he has never "observed; " that 
 he has never, following- Goethe "plunged into 
 the full tide of human life," but has always 
 remained shut up in a world of paper, and 
 has drawn all his subjects out of his own 
 brain, all his "realistic" details from news- 
 papers and books read uncritically. * * * 
 His eyes are never directed towards nature
 
 DEGENERATION 79 
 
 or humanity, but only to his own " Eg-o. " In 
 order that the borrowed detail should remain 
 faithful to reality, it must preserve its rig-ht 
 relation to the whole phenomenon, and this 
 is what never happens with M. Zola. To 
 quote only two examples; in Pot-Bouille^ 
 among- the inhabitants of a single house in 
 the Rue de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the 
 space of a few months all the infamous things 
 he has learnt in the course of thirty years, by 
 reports from acquaintances, by cases in 
 courts of law, and various facts from news- 
 papers about apparently honourable bour- 
 geois families; in La Tcrre, all the vices 
 imputed to the French peasantry or rustic 
 people in general, he crams into the character 
 and conduct of a few inhabitants of a small 
 village in Beauce; he may in these cases have 
 supported every detail by cuttings from 
 newspapers, or jottings, but the whole is not 
 the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue. 
 I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led 
 astray by his swagger, and credulously 
 accepted his novels as sociological contribu- 
 tions to the knowledge of French life. The 
 family whose history Zola presents to us in 
 twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside
 
 80 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 normal daily life, and has no necessary 
 connection whatever with France and the 
 Second Empire. It mig-ht just as well have 
 lived in Patagonia and at the time of the 
 Thirty Years' War. 
 
 Nordau says that the history of one family 
 of criminals in France has supplied M. Zola 
 with material for all of his novels. It is 
 comforting to know that the human beasts 
 described in works like La Terre are selected 
 cases. Thinking that they were samples of the 
 French people, I have felt like giving voice to 
 Byron's adjuration, slightly paraphrased: 
 Arise ye Teutons and g-lut your ire. 
 A land peopled with Zola's characters 
 would be a carcass that even vultures would 
 disdain. 
 
 Nordau says of Friedrich Nietzsche: 
 
 As in Ibsen egfo-mania has found its poet, 
 so in Nietzsche it has found its philosopher. 
 The deification of filth by the Parnassians 
 with ink, paint and clay; the censing- among- 
 the diabolists and decadents of licentious- 
 ness, disease and corruption; the glorification, 
 by Ibsen of the person who "wills, " is "free" 
 and "wholly himself" — of all this Nietzsche 
 supplies the theory, or, something which
 
 DEGENERATION 81 
 
 proclaimsitself as such. * * * From the 
 first to the last page of Nietzsche's writing's 
 the careful reader seems to hear a madman, 
 with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and 
 foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening 
 bombast; and through it all, now breaking 
 out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering 
 expressions of filthy abuse, and invective, 
 now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, 
 and now bursting upon the auditors with 
 threatening mien and clenched fists. 
 Nietzsche evidently had the habit of throwing 
 on paper with feverish haste all that passed 
 through his head, and when he had collected 
 a heap of these snippings, he sent them to the 
 printer and there was a book. * * * j^ 
 remains a disgrace to the German intellectual 
 life of the present age, that in Germany a 
 pronounced maniac should have been 
 regarded as a philosopher and have founded 
 a school. In proof of the correctness of the 
 foregoing criticism I take a passage from 
 Zarathusti'a. 
 
 "The world is deep and deeper than the 
 day thinks it. Forbear! forbear! I am too 
 pure for thee. Disturb me not! Has not 
 my world become exactly perfect? My flesh
 
 82 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 is too pure for thy hands. Forbear, thou 
 dull doltish and obtuse day! Is not the 
 midnig-ht clearer? The purest are to be 
 lords of the earth, the most unknown, the 
 strongest, the souls of midnight who are 
 clearer and deeper than each day. * * * 
 My sorrow, my happiness are deep thou 
 strange day; but yet I am not God, no Hell 
 of God; deep is their woe. God's woe is 
 deeper, thou strange World ! Grasp at God's 
 woe, not at me 1 What am I? A drunken 
 sweet lyre — a lyre of midnight, a sing-ing- 
 frog- understood by none, but who must 
 speak before the deaf, O hig-her men! For 
 ye understand me not! Hence I Hence! 
 O Youth!" etc. 
 
 It would make too lengthy a review to do 
 more than refer to what Nordau says of the 
 other French degenerates. Among them, is 
 Verlaine, who was in prison for two years for a 
 hideous crime; with this preparation he comes 
 forth and establishes a school or cult in litera- 
 ture. Stephane Mallarme was admired as a 
 great poet in certain circles in France, but affected 
 silence, with the pretension that it was indeli- 
 cate and vulgar to expose his naked soul in 
 print. From the top of the pedestal where his
 
 DEGENERATION 83 
 
 worshippers placed him he stimulates their 
 adoration by speechless posturing, leaving- them 
 to read without the aid of the ink-well the great 
 thoughts which they credulously attribute to 
 him. With these comes Moreas, another leader 
 of the Symbolists. Leaving France, we fly at 
 higher game in Tolstoi. Nordau says of him: 
 He has become in the last few years one 
 of the best known, and apparently, also, one 
 of the most widely read authors in the world. 
 Every one of his words awakens an echo 
 among- all the civilized nations on the globe. 
 His strong- influence over his contemporaries 
 is unmistakable. The universal success of 
 Tolstoi's writings is undoubtedly due in part 
 to his 'high literary gifts. * * * Tolstoi 
 would have remained unnoticed like any 
 Knudson of the seventeenth century, if his 
 extravagances as a degenerate mystic had 
 not found his contemporaries prepared 
 for their reception. The wide-spread hys- 
 teria from exhaustion was the requisite soil 
 in which alone Tolstoi could flourish. In 
 England it was Tolstoi's sexual morality 
 that excited the greatest interest, for in that 
 country economic reasons condemn a formid- 
 able number of girls, particularly of the •
 
 84 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 educated classes, to forego marriage; and 
 from a theory which honored chastity as the 
 highest dignity and noblest human destiny, 
 and branded marriage with gloomy wrath 
 as abominal depravity, these poor creatures 
 would naturally derive rich consolation for 
 their lonely, empty lives and their cruel 
 exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling 
 their natural calling. The Kreutzer Sonata 
 has, therefore, become the book of devotion 
 of all the spinsters of England * * * 
 Lombroso instances a certain Knudson, a 
 madman, who lived in Schleswig about 1680 
 and asserted that there was neither a God 
 nor a hell; that priests and judges were 
 useless and pernicious, and marriage an 
 immorality; that men ceased to exist after 
 death; that every one must be guided by his 
 own inward insight, etc. Here we have the 
 principal features of Tolstoi's cosmology 
 and moral philosophy. Knudson has, how- 
 ever, so little pointed out leading the way to 
 those coming after, that he still only exists 
 as an instructive case of mental aberation 
 in books on diseases of the mind. 
 Nordau's work would be incomplete with- 
 out an exposition of Ibsenism. He says of Ibsen:
 
 DEGENERATION 85 
 
 That Hearik Ibsen is a poet of great 
 verve and power is not for a moment to be 
 denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and 
 has the gift of depicting- in an exceptionally 
 life-like and impressive manner that which 
 has excited his feeling-s. * * * Similarly 
 it must be acknowledg-ed that Ibsen has 
 created some characters possessing- a truth 
 to life and a completeness such as are not to 
 be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. 
 Gina, in The Wild Diick^ is one of the most 
 profound creations of world-literature — 
 almost as g-reat as Sancho Panza, who 
 inspired it, Ibsen has had the daring to 
 create a female Sancho, and in his temerity 
 has come very near to Cervantes, whom no 
 one has equalled. If Gina is not quite so 
 overpowering as Sancho, it is because there 
 is a wanting in her his contrast to Don 
 Quixote. 
 
 Through many pages of Nordau Ibsen is 
 dissected and examined. Ibsen's childish ig- 
 norance of the simplest facts taught by modern 
 science; his silly expositions and illustrations of 
 the effect of heredity; his habit of mounting 
 little hobbyhorses that have already been ridden 
 to death by the authors of the Sunday-school
 
 86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 literature of a generation back; the artless 
 discussions carried on by his characters, of 
 delicate and complex social problems, are all 
 given by Nordau as signs of degeneration. 
 
 I should rather say that these things were 
 proofs that Ibsen was a mere dreamer, lacking 
 accuracy; one who was but a shallow student 
 of facts and social problems, and who has had 
 but slight training as a man of the world and 
 of affairs. He has but a dry and tedious closet- 
 wisdom, yet it is sugar-coated at times with his 
 rare poetic and dramatic gifts. It would be a 
 far deduction to say that these faults denoted 
 degeneration. They rather strongly prove 
 the vaguely nebulous condition of thought, 
 incident to one in his non-age. His ideas of 
 sacrifice, of expiation for sin ; his doctrine that 
 men and women must live out their lives, which 
 he explains to mean that they should follow 
 their own sensual or selfish impulses no matter 
 at what cost or shame to others; his open 
 abandonment of all these theories and the 
 advocacy of their opposites from time to time 
 as fits his mood, are certainly marks of mental 
 and moral perversion. If he have a sound 
 lesson on the necessity of right living, to-day, 
 he is sure to contradict it on some other day
 
 DEGENERATION 87 
 
 with guileless and shameless inconsistency. 
 His career is like that of the Libyan who wished 
 to become a god. With this purpose he caged a 
 large number of parrots and taught them to 
 say "Apsethus, the Libyan is a god." Then 
 he set them loose and they spread all over 
 Lybia, and repeated in every wood what he 
 had taught them. The Libyans not knowing 
 of his trick were astounded and finally came to 
 regard him as a god. Nordau uses this story 
 as illustrative of Ibsen, and adds: 
 
 In imitation of the ing-enious Apsethus, 
 Ibsen has taug-ht a few "comprehensives, " 
 Brandes. Eberhards, Jaegers, etc. — the 
 words "Ibsen is a modern," "Ibsen is a poet 
 of the future," and the parrots have 
 spread over all the lands and are chat- 
 tering with deafening dinin books and 
 papers, "Ibsen is great!" "Ibsen is a 
 modern spirit!" and imbeciles among the 
 public murmur the cry after them, because 
 they hear it frequently repeated, and because 
 on such as they, every word uttered with 
 emphasis and assurance makes an impression. 
 No enthronement however high is safe 
 from Nordau ; he invades temples that a 
 humbler critic may not enter even on tiptoe.
 
 88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 He confronts the mighty Wagner in his pride of 
 place and shows the plague-spots in his 
 character. I copy only a fragment from this 
 arraignment: 
 
 The shameless sensuality which prevails 
 in his dramatic poems has impressed all his 
 critics. Hanslick speaks of the "bestial 
 sensuality" in Rheingold, and says of 
 Siegfried: "The feverish accents so much 
 beloved by Wag-ner, of an insatiable 
 sensuality, blazing- to the uttermost limits — 
 this ardent moaning, sighing, crying, sinking 
 to the ground, move us with repugnance. 
 The text of these love-scenes becomes some- 
 times in its exuberance, sheer nonsense." 
 Compare in the first act of the Walkure, in 
 the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, 
 the following stage direction : "Hotly inter- 
 rupting;" "embraces her with fiery passion," 
 "in gentle ecstacy;" "she hangs enraptured 
 upon his neck ; " " close to his eyes ; " "beside 
 himself;" "in the highest intoxication, " etc. 
 At the conclusion, it is said "the curtain falls 
 quickly, " and frivolous critics have not failed 
 to perpetrate the cheap witticism, "very 
 necessary, too. " The amorous whinings, 
 whimperings and ravings of Tristan and
 
 DEGENERATION 89 
 
 Isolde, the entire second act of Parsifal, in 
 the scene between the hero and the flower- 
 girls, and then between him and Kundry in 
 Kling-sor's mag-ic-garden, are worthy to rank 
 with the above passages. It certainly 
 redounds to the hig-h honour of German pubic 
 morality, that Wagner's operas could have 
 been publicly performed without arousing- 
 the g-reatest scandal. How un perverted 
 must wives and maidens be when they are 
 in a stale of mind to witness these pieces 
 without blushing crimson and sinking into 
 the earth for shame! How innocent must 
 even husbands and fathers be who allow their 
 womankind to go to these representations of 
 "lupanar" incidents! Evidently the German 
 audiences entertain no misgivings concerning 
 the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian 
 personages; they seem to have no suspicion 
 of the emotions by which they are excited, 
 and what intention their words, gestures and 
 acts denote; and this explains the peaceful 
 artlessness with which these audiences follow 
 theatrical scenes during which, among a less 
 childlike public, no one would dare to lift his 
 eyes to his neighbour or endure his 
 glance.
 
 90 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 This new science of degeneration has 
 enriched our vocabulary with odd grotesque 
 forms of speech, but lately sprung up in the 
 madhouses, dissecting rooms and hospitals; 
 the doctors have been plagiarized and their 
 livery stolen for the service of literature. So 
 dressed forth, Nordau's clinic becomes too 
 physiological for the Critics' Corner in a 
 ladies' magazine, even if in that locality we could 
 endure so strong an antidote to the gentle 
 adjacent gush. The critics who hover as 
 vultures alike over the mountain peaks of 
 genius and the dead plains of mediocrity will 
 have rare feasting on what Nordau has left ; he 
 has certainly run the game to earth for them. 
 
 The art of criticism has always owed much 
 to the earlier classics. They furnished it 
 inspiration, names, titles, figures, and illustra- 
 tions. One hundred and fifty years ago no 
 critical discourse would have been thought 
 worthy a place in letters if it did not contain 
 industrious gleanings from mythology; critics 
 hunted from Rome back to Troy for whips 
 with which to scourge offenders against their 
 laws. Homer was the most constant source of 
 supply; now his verses (if I may use a bit of 
 jesting vernacular, ) have become back-numbers.
 
 DEGENERATION 91 
 
 I detest Smith's absurd book of essays; if I 
 reviewed it in the style of the last century, I 
 would call him a modern Theresites, or compare 
 him to some other equally unvalued ancient; or 
 I would suggest that he had found some bog- 
 hole and drank from it under the mistake that 
 it was the Pierian Spring. All this is old style, 
 and was very well in its day. 
 
 With the aid of this new science, I call 
 Smith a Literary Mattoid, an Egomaniac, a 
 Phraseomaniac, or some other of the hospital- 
 coined titles and epithets. It will be so much 
 more puzzling and painful for Smith, when he 
 shall find that his essays are not damned by 
 the dictionary, and that in order to know what 
 it is that I have called him, he must consult his 
 medical man. A more serious thought that may 
 well give us pause, is, what effect do these new 
 discoveries have on the law of libel and slander? 
 Is the term Mattoid, when applied to an 
 author, actionable? What should be the rule 
 of damages for an author who has been called 
 an Egomaniac? Is the term Nymphomaniac 
 calculated to excite an assault and breach of 
 the peace, and therefore indictable? Some of 
 these questions will unhappily find an answer
 
 92 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ill court, and I will not prejudice the final 
 judgment by any hasty opinion. 
 
 This excursion into Darkest Literature, 
 has all the fascinations attending new discoveries 
 in lands of strange beasts and birds and men, — 
 * * * whatever title please thine ear 
 Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air 
 Or laug-h and shal<e in Rabelais' easy chair. 
 Quoting Pope is a reminder that degenera- 
 tion has not yet been called the nineteenth 
 century Dunciad — an omission which is, I fancy, 
 entitled to some commendation. Yet prompted 
 now, so strong is the habit of fashioning the 
 divine parallel, we recur to that earlier Dunciad 
 in search of all marks of likeness or difference. 
 Pope, probably a degenerate himself, hunted 
 his enemies like a ferret out of the ratholes of 
 Grub Street ; yet he distils his poison in courtly 
 numbers and fair-sounding verse. He runs 
 the Dunciad in heroic mold, and puts Thersites 
 mockingly into the shining armour of Achilles. 
 He compels the mongrel mob in his Kingdom of 
 Dullness to walk in god -like struts before he 
 jeeringly despatches them to the shades. A 
 dunce is more of a dunce dressed in the 
 rhetorical frippery of old gods and kings, just 
 as the ass in the fable who puts on the lion's
 
 DEGENERATION 93 
 
 hide thereby becomes more of an ass. Pope's 
 heroic rhyme is like a parade of gloriously 
 equipped warriors sent out apparently to 
 honourable battle, only finally to be employed 
 as catchpoles for curbstone . criminals. The 
 rhyming garniture of the Dunciad with its 
 myriad harmonies has some obscurities that 
 somewhat dim the wit after so long a time. 
 There is a speci.es of wit indigenous to time and 
 place; it will not bear transplanting, and 
 withers a little in a strange environment. After 
 nearly two centuries have passed, we lose the 
 point of much of this venom-dripping rhyme; 
 the near-by audience laughed it to the echo. 
 We cannot bring back that fretting, fuming 
 Bohemia where Pope was king. One must 
 have seen the fribbling rout of vulgar pretenders 
 whom Pope- left howling, in order to take full 
 pleasure in their correction. We should go 
 back to Will's, and hear the daily gossip that 
 ranged from the street to the chambers of 
 great noblemen, to make us apt in the study 
 of this devilish delicate wit. Who can interpret 
 it now, or pluck the full meaning of these 
 fleshless jests from their graveyard? No more 
 can we tell all that Rabelais and Swift meant 
 by their stupendous satires.
 
 94 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 As Hamlet in sad derision picked up the 
 skull of poor Yorick, so do we take up the 
 Dunciad. It was a thing of infinite jest once; 
 but now, where be its gibes? its gambles? its 
 flashes of merriment that were wont to set the 
 table on a roar? All are gone and we are 
 sitting gazing at a stage-full of mere skeletons 
 of jests whose appearance once shook the 
 galleries. 
 
 Nordau on the other hand has constructed 
 for us a scientific treatise — a text book ; a cold 
 phlegmatic analysis that will be understood in 
 distant times, and without the aid of local 
 history. He does not adorn his labour with 
 the colouring of divine fancy as the ancients 
 decked victims for the sacrifice. He does not 
 waste strength on glowing verse and cunningly 
 turned phrases; he has no place for these in 
 his materia medica. He assumes a sterner 
 task, and stands, knife in hand, coolly dissecting 
 and expounding — the genius of the lecture- 
 room.
 
 JOHN SMITH 
 
 I FIND from my daily that the Smith family 
 is to hold a reunion near Altoona on 
 August 19. It is needless to say that this 
 reunion will be largely attended. Those in 
 charge of the affair have issued a large number 
 of invitations to members of the family in all 
 parts of the world. On these invitations 
 appears a sort of a family tree, being a state- 
 ment of the fecundity and antiquity of the 
 Smiths. It states that the name antedates the 
 building of King Solomon's Temple by forty 
 years, and the Christian era by 1855 years. 
 There will doubtless be presented at this 
 reunion, a book of Chronicles of the Smith 
 Family, compiled by some enthusiastic Smith, 
 with veracious accounts of how knightly de 
 Smiths won honour in many great battles from 
 Leuctra to Agincourt. Letters are to be read 
 at this gathering from famous absent Smiths 
 and addresses made by famous attendant 
 
 95
 
 96 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Smiths. ''Invitations." so my account runs, 
 "have been sent to the Italian Smithis, the 
 Spanish Smithos. the German Schmidts, 
 the French Smeets, the Russian Smithtowskis, 
 the Greek Sraikons, and the Turkish Seefs. " 
 I cannot find from this legend whether the 
 invitations were sent to the Smythes. and the 
 Smithes, but these aristocrats may have been 
 omitted from this felicitation, by the plain 
 Smiths, who constitute the majority of the 
 clan. Caste is a dreadful thing, but it seems 
 to have crept like an alphabetical serpent into 
 the Smith family in the form of the interpolated 
 y or e. To those afflicted with this aristocratic 
 addition, I would say that the greatest member 
 of the Smith family was plain Smith, with his 
 name-plainness still further accentuated by the 
 Christian name of John. Xot to wear this 
 matter out; — I mean Captain John Smith, who 
 fouofht robbers in Engrland and France, and 
 pirates on the }*Iediterranean, who did great 
 deeds against the Turk, cutting off the heads 
 of three Turkish champions before the walls of 
 Regal] ; who bore Turkish and Indian captivity 
 with undaunted soul, and found in the thick 
 darkness of that captivity a glowing romance 
 of love; who was saved from death by an
 
 JOHN SMITH 97 
 
 Indian girl, and who performed so many 
 prodigies of valour as to pale "what resounds 
 in fable or romance of Uther's son begirt 
 with British and Armoric knights." The 
 Knights of the Table Round with all their 
 fabled prowess taken for true, could not show 
 his fellow. He was the peer of them all, the 
 courtliest, the bravest and the greatest of soul 
 of all the brave gentlemen adventurers that 
 England sent into far countries three hundred 
 years ago. All that was said of the peerless 
 Launcelot could be said of our captain: 
 
 Thou were head of all Christian knig-hts; 
 and thou were the courtiest knight that ever 
 bare shield; and thou were the truest friend 
 to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and 
 thou were the truest lover of a sinful man 
 that ever loved woman; and thou were the 
 kindest man that ever strake with sword; 
 and thou were the goodliest person ever came 
 among- press of knights; and thou were the 
 meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate 
 in hall among ladies; and thou were the 
 sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever 
 put spear in rest. 
 
 Hero worship may run an unchecked course 
 with this great-hearted man, for all about him
 
 98 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 seems to have been fine and worthy. The 
 chance which selects parents for great men gave 
 huTi those by the name of Smith as if in derision 
 of the paltry birthright of a name. His parents 
 followed this commonplace, in an age when 
 there were plenty of Mortimers and Percys by 
 giving their eaglet the name of John. It was 
 later Smiths who have been tempted from the 
 pathway of plain and unromatic orthoepy to 
 insert the extra vowel. But our Smith could 
 afford to wear his name plain, as a prince can 
 afford to wear plain clothes. 
 
 He was born of good family in Willoughby, 
 Lincolnshire, in 1579. Lord Bacon, then a 
 young man of nineteen, was studying law at 
 one of the Inns of Court. One Sir Thomas 
 Coke was in a large practice before the courts 
 at Westminster; Queen Elizabeth was in the 
 midst of her long and glorious reign ; and there 
 was much fighting and blood-letting going on 
 all over the globe. Spain was wasting the 
 Netherlands with fire and sword. The Turks 
 were in continual war with the nations of 
 southern and western Europe. Eight years 
 before Smith's birth the great battle of Lepanto 
 was fought between the Turks and the 
 Spanish, Italians, and Venetians under Duke
 
 JOHN SMITH 99 
 
 John of Austria. Cervantes served as a 
 common soldier in this battle under the banner 
 of Spain. It shattered the sea-power of the 
 Turks; but on land they continued to terrorize 
 Europe until John Sobeski turned them back 
 before the walls of Vienna one hundred years 
 later. It was in this same year of 1579 that 
 Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brother, Sir 
 Humphrey, sailed for America on a voyage of 
 discovery under a patent from the queen, giving 
 them the right "to discover and take possession 
 of such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands 
 as were not actually possessed by any 
 Christians or inhabited by any Christian 
 people. " Rome was at open war with England, 
 and Pope Gregory issued his famous bull 
 against the heretic nation. As for Spain and 
 France, war was chronic between them and 
 England. Spain was then a mighty power. 
 She held sway over a portion of Italy and over 
 the Low Countries. Her generals were able 
 and ruthless. She had plundered the New 
 World of countless treasure in gold and silver, 
 and scores of her galleons were engaged in 
 bringing the spoil home. A papal decree gave 
 the New World to Spain, but Englishmen were 
 hurrying to dispute this claim. It was in 1580
 
 100 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 that Drake dropped anchor in Plymouth 
 harbour, having completed the circuit of the 
 globe, bringing back with him half a million 
 of Spanish treasure. Queen Elizabeth honoured 
 .the great freebooter with knighthood, and 
 wore some of the jewels he had taken from the 
 Spaniard in her crown. This was one of the 
 causes that led Philip to send the great Armada 
 against England, a few years later. By the 
 queen's command Drake again despoiled the 
 Spanish cities in the New World. In these 
 stirring times young Smith grew up. The 
 tales of Drake's adventures, and of the struggle 
 in the' Netherlands, and of the Armada with 
 its wreck of ships strewn along the Scottish 
 coast, must have inflamed his youthful imagina- 
 tion, for at the age of thirteen, he sold his 
 books and satchel and started to run away to 
 sea. His father's death, however, kept him 
 at home for a time, and his guardians, solid 
 business men, would have none of youthful folly 
 and so apprenticed him to a merchant at Lynn. 
 This merchant tyrannically refused to allow his 
 apprentice to go to sea, and so Smith went 
 without leave to France with a son of Lord 
 Willoughby. From there he went to the 
 Netherlands where there was good fighting and
 
 JOHN SMITH 101 
 
 engaged with the Spaniards for three or four 
 years, under an Englishman, one Captain 
 Druxbury, who was in the service of Prince 
 Maurice. He finally sailed for Scotland, was 
 shipwrecked on the voyage, but escaped vv'ithout 
 harm, and came again to Willoughby, but not 
 to engage in the arts of peace. He turned 
 hermit. To use his narrative: 
 
 Where, within a short time, being- glutted 
 with too much company, wherein he took 
 small delight; he retired himselfe into a 
 little woodie pasture, a good way from any 
 towne, environed with many hundred Acres 
 of other woods. Here by a faire brook he 
 built a Pavillion of boug-hes, where only in 
 his cloaths he lay. His studie was Machiavill's 
 Art of Warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his 
 food was thought to be more of venison than 
 anything else; what he wanted his man 
 brought him. The countre}'- wondering at 
 such an Hermite * * * Long these pleasures 
 could not content him, but he returned againe 
 to the Low-Countreyes. 
 
 This effort not to commit himself directly 
 to the venison, seems to have been out of 
 delicate respect for the game laws which were 
 then hanging matter. Hence the expression
 
 102 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 "His food was thought to be more of 
 venison, — " as if he was simply giving the 
 neighbourhood rumour, rather than admitting 
 a fact against himself. In going into the Low 
 Countries, his plan was to hunt up the Turks 
 and fight with them as soon as possible. He 
 thought himself fitted for this warfare for he 
 says of his acquirements: 
 
 Thus when France and the Netherlands 
 
 had taug-ht him to ride a Horse and use his 
 
 Armes, with such rudiments of warre as his 
 
 tender yeeres in those martial Schooles could 
 
 atlaine unto: he was desirous to see more of 
 
 the world, and trie his fortune against the 
 
 Turkes ; both lamenting: and repenting- to have 
 
 seen so many Christiansslaug-hter one another. 
 
 Various side adventures caused him to 
 
 deviate from his purpose to immediately fight 
 
 the Turks. He was nineteen years of age 
 
 w^hen he arrived in France. On the voyage 
 
 over, four robbers stole his baggage, and he 
 
 had to sell his cloak to pay his passage. He 
 
 landed in Picardy and went in pursuit of the 
 
 robbers. He was in great poverty, and, as 
 
 he says : 
 
 But wandring from Port to Port to finde 
 some man-of-war, spent that he had ; and in
 
 JOHN SMITH 103 
 
 a Forest, neere dead with griefe and cold, a 
 rich Farmer found him by a faire Fountaine 
 under a tree. This kind Pesant releeved 
 him againe to his content, to follow his intent. 
 Soon after he found Cursell, one of his 
 robbers, and, to follow his narrative: 
 
 His piercing- injuries had so small 
 patience, as without any word they both 
 drew, and in a short time Cursell fell to the 
 ground, when, from an ruinated Tower, the 
 inhabitants seeing them were satisfied, when 
 they heard Cursell confesse what had 
 formerly passed. 
 
 He next came to the chateaux of a noble 
 earl in Brittany, whom he had known in 
 England, and was hospitably treated there, 
 and from there he journeyed over France for a 
 time, surveying fortresses and other notable 
 objects. At Marseilles he took a ship for Rome. 
 His voyage was not a happy one and he 
 describes the ship's company thus: 
 
 Here the inhuman Provincialls, with a 
 rabble of Pilgrims of divers Nations going to 
 Rome, hourely cursing him, not only for a 
 Hugenoit, but his Nation they swore were all 
 Pyrats, and so vildly railed on his dread 
 Soveraigne Queene Elizabeth, and that they
 
 104 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 never should have faire weather so long* as 
 hee was aboard them ; their disputations grew 
 to that passion, that they threw him over- 
 board: yet God brought him to that little Isle, 
 where was no inhabitants, but a few kine and 
 goats. 
 
 He did not allow this indignity however, 
 without breaking a good many heads. The 
 next day a French ship, theBritaine bound for 
 Alexandria took him off, and he grew into 
 great favour with the captain. This was 
 always his way ; he always landed on his feet. 
 Fortune was continually reducing him to a last 
 gasp and then suddenly restoring him to 
 comfort and safety. Soon after, the Britaine 
 fell in wath a large Venetian ship with a rich 
 cargo. There did not seem to be any particular 
 occasion for a battle, but of course there had 
 to be one, and it arose over a little discourtesy 
 on the part of the Venetian. The Britaine 
 hailed her and she replied with a shot that 
 killed a sailor on the Britaine. A terrific battle 
 ensued, out of which the Britaine came off victor. 
 The Venetian ship had lost twenty men and 
 was ready to sink, and so part of the cargo 
 was transferred to the Britaine. Smith w^as 
 no deadhead in this fight, but bore his part,
 
 J O H N S M I T H 105 
 
 and when it was over, he received for his share 
 of the spoil "five hundred chicqueenes, and a 
 little box God sent him worth neere as much 
 more." In those days piety of the approved 
 sort always had Divine assistance. The spoil 
 must have been great, for Smith says: 
 
 The Silkes, Velvets, Cloth of gold and 
 
 Tissue, Pyasters, Chicqueenes and Sultanies, 
 
 which is gold and silver, they unloaded in 
 
 four and tvventte houres, was wonderfull; 
 
 whereof having- sufficient, and tired with toile, 
 
 they cast her off with her company, with as 
 
 much good merchandise as would have 
 
 fraughted another Britaine, that was but two 
 
 hundred Tunnes, she foure or five hundred. 
 
 He landed at Piedmont and thence traveled 
 
 through Italy, into Dalmatia and Albania. At 
 
 Rome he said it was "his chance to cee Pope 
 
 Clement the eight, with many Cardinalls, 
 
 Creepe up the holy Stayres, which they say 
 
 are those our Saviour Christ went up to Pontius 
 
 Pilate. " He was still eager to fight the Turks, 
 
 and finally came to the court of Archduke 
 
 Ferdinand of Austria, "where he met an 
 
 Engfish man and an Irish Jesuite; who 
 
 acquainted him with many brave Gentlemen of 
 
 a good qualitie. " Soon after he joined the
 
 106 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 army, the Turks beseiged Olumpagh. Smith 
 suggested to Baron Kissell, one of his superiour 
 officers, that he could devise a system of 
 telegraphic fires and communicate with the 
 beseiged. To quote from Smith 's narrative : 
 Kisell inflamed with this strange inven- 
 tion; Smith made it so plain, that forthwith 
 hee gave him guides, who in the darke night 
 brought him to a mountaine, where he showed 
 three torches equidistant from each other 
 which plainly appearing to the Towne; the 
 Governour presently apprehended, and 
 answered againe with three other fires in like 
 manner; each knowing the other's being and 
 intent; Smith, thought distant seven miles, 
 signified to him these words; On Thursday 
 at night I will charge on the East, at the 
 Alarum, salley you. Ebersbought, com- 
 mander of the city, answered that he would, 
 and thus it was done. 
 
 Smith has preserved for us the alphabet 
 and signals that he used. By means of this 
 plan the Duke's army and the beseiged acted 
 in concert and the Turks were defeated with 
 great slaughter and compelled to raise the 
 seige. In this same battle Smith contrived a 
 plan to deceive the Turks as to the point of
 
 JOHN SMITH 107 
 
 attack, by arranging on a line two or three 
 thousand pieces of match, which were fired all 
 at once, that it might appear that there was 
 the Duke's force with its matchlocks. Barely 
 twenty-one years of age, after this battle, Smith 
 was given command of a company of two 
 hundred and fifty men. At the seige of Stowlle- 
 Wesenburg in 1601, Smith's inventive genius 
 was again called into play. He prepared some 
 bombs by filling earthern pots with various 
 explosive and inflammable substances, together 
 with musket balls. These were thrown among 
 the Turks from slings. He describes the 
 effect : 
 
 At midnight upon the Alarum, it was a 
 fearful sig-ht to see the short flaming course 
 of their flight in the aire; but presently after 
 their fall, the lamentable noise of the 
 miserable slaug-htered Turks was most 
 wonderfull to heare. 
 
 Smith with most excellent naivete, entitles 
 these devices thus: "An excellent stratagem 
 by Smith;" "Another, not much worse." In 
 this siege the Christians took the town by 
 storm, "with such merciless execution, as was 
 most pittiful to behold." At the battle of 
 Girke, soon after, the Turks were again
 
 108 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 defeated, but Smith lost half his regiment. 
 Appealing to his narrative again : 
 
 Captain Smith had his horse slaine under 
 him, and himselfe sore wounded; but he was 
 not long unmounted for there was choice 
 enough of horses that wanted masters. 
 Soon after the Christian army beseiged 
 Regall in the Transylvania, a place supposed 
 to be almost impregnable. Now Smith gives 
 us one of the most dramatic incidents of war: 
 * * * they spent neere a month in 
 entrenching- themselves and raising- their 
 mounts to plant their batteries. Which slow 
 proceedings the Turkes often derided, that 
 the Ordnance were at pawne, and how they 
 grew fat for want of exercise; and fearing- 
 lest they should depart ere they could assault 
 their citie, sent this Challeng-e to any Captaine 
 in the Armie. That to deJig-ht the ladies, 
 who did long to see some court-like pastime, 
 the Lord Turbashaw did defie any Captaine, 
 that had command of a Company, who durst 
 combat with him for his head. The matter 
 being discussed, it was accepted; but so 
 many questions grew for the undertaking, it 
 was decided by lots; which fell upon Captaine 
 Smith, before spoken of.
 
 JOHN SMITH 109 
 
 With this luck to favour him, Smith rode 
 before the armies and met My Lord Turbashaw 
 in mortal combat, unhorsed him and cut off his 
 head. "The head hee presented to the Lord 
 Moyses, the Generall, who kindly accepted it: 
 and with joy to the whole armie he was 
 generally welcome. " He tells us also that the 
 "Rampieres were all beset with faire Dames, and 
 men in Armes. " The enmd of the Turks not 
 being- sufficiently dissipated, they sent another 
 challenge to Smith to meet one Grualgo, a 
 friend of Turbashaw. The dauntless Smith 
 took his head, and sent his body and rich 
 apparel back to his friends. No more challenges 
 coming from the Turkish camp. Smith took 
 the initiative. " * * * to delude time, 
 Smith with so many uncontradictableperswad- 
 ing reasons, obtained leave that the Ladies 
 might know he was not so much enamoured of 
 their servants' heads, but if any Turke of their 
 ranke would come to the place of com bate to 
 redeeme them, should have his also upon like 
 conditions, if he could winne it." Bonny 
 Mulgro, a Turkish lord, accepted this challenge 
 and the combatants met with great fury before 
 the armies. The first advantage was with the 
 Turk, and Smith lost his battle axe:
 
 no CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 The Turk prosecuted his advantag-e to 
 the uttermost of his power; yet the other, 
 what by the readiness of his horse, and his 
 judgment and dexterity in such a businesse, 
 beyond all men's expectation, by God's 
 assistance, not only avoided the Turke's 
 violence, but having drawne his Faulchion, 
 pierced the Turke so under the Culets thorow 
 backe and body, that althoug"h he alig-hted 
 from his horse, he stood not long' ere hee lost 
 his head, as the rest had done. 
 Smith goes on to say: 
 
 This g-ood success gave such g-reat 
 
 encourag-ement to the whole Armie, that with 
 
 a g-uard of six thousand, three spare horses 
 
 before each, a Turke's head upon a Lance, 
 
 he was conducted to the Generall's Pavillion 
 
 with his Presents. Moyses received both 
 
 him and them with as much respect as the 
 
 occasion deserved, embracing him in his 
 
 armes, gave him a faire Horse richly 
 
 furnished, a Semitere and belt worth three 
 
 hundred ducats; and Meldritch made him 
 
 Sergeant of his regiment. 
 
 These valourous performances of Smith 
 
 before the walls of Regall are worthy to be told 
 
 of Saladin or Richard the Lion-hearted, or of
 
 JOHN SMITH 111 
 
 an earlier chivalry. I cannot find that there 
 were any Christian ladies watching these 
 combats, but there must have been, for Smith 
 never lacked all the accessories of valour. 
 With the Turkish ladies watching from the 
 "Rampieres, " it would have been cruel in 
 Fortune, ever so kindly to Smith, not to have 
 supplied the scene with tearful Christian ladies 
 to welcome him back from the fearful field, to 
 bind his bruises and refresh him with words of 
 praise, and to rejoice over the downfall of the 
 cruel Turk, the enemy of all women, Turkish 
 or Christain. After a desperate struggle the 
 Christian army took Regall by storm and all 
 Turks that could bear arms were put to death. 
 To kill Turks in those days was considered a 
 work of great merit. The superfluous youth 
 of every European country, thronged to do 
 battle wnth the hated Turk. England sent 
 her share of these, and Smith gives the roster 
 of the English dead in the next great battle 
 that was fought with the Turks — Rottenton — 
 in which the Christian army was cut to pieces. 
 We take up Smith's narrative: 
 
 And thus in this bloudy field, neere 30,000 
 lay; some headlesse, armlesse, and leg-Iesse, 
 all cut and mangled; where breathing their
 
 112 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 last, they gaue this knowledg-e to the world 
 that for the Hues of so few, the Crym-Tartar 
 neuerpaid dearer. Giue mee leaue to remem- 
 ber the names of our owne Country-men with 
 him in those exploits, that as resolutely as the 
 best in the defence of Christ and hisGospell 
 ended their dayes, as Baskerfield, Hardwick, 
 Thomas Milmer, Robert Mullineaux, Thomas 
 Bishop, Francis Corapton, George Davison, 
 Nicholas Williams, and one John, a Scot, did 
 what men could doe, and when they could doe 
 no more, left there their bodies in testimonie 
 of their mindes; only ensign Carleton, and 
 Sergeant Robinson escaped. But Smith, 
 among the slaughtered dead bodies, and 
 many a gasping soule with toile and wounds, 
 lay groaning among the rest, till being found 
 by the Pillagers, hee was able to live; and 
 perceiving by his armor and habit his 
 ransom might be better to them than his 
 death, they led him prisoner with many 
 others. 
 
 Smith was sold into slavery at Axapolis, 
 and purchased by one Bashaw Bogall, who 
 sent him as a present to his mistress in 
 Constantinople, assuring her that the slave 
 was a ofreat Bohemian lord whom he had
 
 JOHN SMITH 113 
 
 overcome. "This noble gentlewoman," as 
 Smith calls her, took a more than friendly 
 interest in her sale. She could talk Italian and 
 feigned herself sick that she might make 
 occasion to talk with him. She was bound to 
 know whether Bogall really took him prisoner, 
 or whether this was a boast. Smith told 
 her that he was an "English-man, onely by 
 his adventures made a Captaine in those 
 Countreyes. " He won her like another Othello, 
 for he could say : 
 
 She loved me for the dangers I bad pass'd, 
 And I loved her that she did pity them. 
 He says : 
 
 She tooke much compassion on him ; but 
 having- no use for him, lest her mother should 
 sell him, she sent him to her brother, the 
 Tymor Bashaw of Nalbritz in the Countrey 
 of Gambia, a province of Tartaria. * * * 
 To her unkinde brother, this kinde Ladie 
 writ so much for his good usage, that he halfe 
 suspected as much as she intended; for shee 
 told him, he should there but sojourne to 
 learne the language, and what it was to be a 
 Turk, till time made her Master other selfe. 
 The brother was very wroth that his sister 
 should entertain an affection for a Christian
 
 114 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 dog, and so he treated Smith with great cruelty, 
 put him in irons and made him a slave of other 
 slaves. He was "no more regarded than a 
 beast. " Smith says of this period: 
 
 All the hope he ever had to be delivered 
 
 from this thraldome was only the love of 
 
 Trag-big-zanda, who surely was ig-norant of 
 
 his bad usag^e. 
 
 This is his last reference to his Turkish 
 mistress. Smith did not forget her, however, 
 for fourteen years later when he was surveying 
 the coast of New England, he named what is 
 now Cape Ann, CapeTragbigzanda, after her. 
 Prince Charles, with no respect for sentiment, 
 changed this name to Cape Ann. Otherwise 
 this sand dune would have been to this day a 
 geographical monument to the gallant Captain 's 
 earliest romance. How this bit of Turkish 
 color on the map would have lighted up the 
 horn-books. Smith finally killed his master, 
 the Bashaw, with a threshing bat and made 
 his way into the wilderness. After days of 
 wandering and much suffering, he came to a 
 Russian outpost on the river Don, and thence 
 found his way into Transylvania, where he was 
 received as one arisen from the dead, with great 
 rejoicing. He says "he w^as glutted with
 
 JOHN SMITH 115 
 
 content, and neere drowned with joy. " He 
 came to the camp of his commander, Duke 
 Sigismund. The Duke gave him a sum equal 
 to five hundred pounds sterling of English 
 money and a patent of arms. This patent is 
 dated December 9th, 1603, and Smith had it 
 recorded in the Herald's Office at London, 
 August 19th, 1625. I give some of its quaint 
 recitals : 
 
 * * * we have given leave and license 
 to John Smith, an English Gentleman, Captain 
 of 250 Soldiers, etc. * * * Wherefore out 
 of our love and favour according to the law of 
 Armes, We have ordained and given him in 
 his shield of Armes, the figure and descrip- 
 tion of three Turks heads, which with his 
 sword, before the towne of Regall, he did 
 overcome, kill, and cut off in the Province of 
 Transilvania. But fortune, as she is very 
 variable, so it chanced and happened to him 
 in the Province of Wallachia in the yeare of 
 our Lord 1602, the 18th day of November, 
 when he with many others, as well Noble 
 men, as also divers other Souldiers, were 
 taken prisoners by the Lord Bashaw of 
 Gambia, a Country of Tartaria; whose 
 cruelty brought him such good fortune.
 
 116 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 by the helpe and power of Almighty 
 God, that hee delivered hiraselfe, and returned 
 ag-aine to his company and fellow souldiers; 
 of whom We doe discharge him, and this he 
 hath in witnesse thereof, being much more 
 worthy of a better reward; and now intends 
 to return to his owne sweet Country. 
 Smith says of this: 
 
 With great honour hee gave him three 
 Turkes heads in a Shield for his Armes, by 
 Patent, under his hand and Scale, with an 
 Oath ever to weare them in his V Colours, 
 his Picture, [i. e., Sigismund's portrait] ib. 
 Gould and three hundred Ducats, yearely for 
 a pension. 
 
 What would not some of our tuft hunters, 
 who buv coats of arms and disport them in 
 gaudy and meretricious state, give for the right 
 to bear such a title of nobility as this? With 
 all our spleen against titles, the most ardent 
 republican might yield to temptation, if he 
 could claim such a token of noble rank as this. 
 But for one fact, I would not answer for the 
 virtue of the most ambitious of the republican 
 Smiths; no Smith can claim to be the lineal 
 descendant of this coat of arms, for he who 
 earned it with his valour, died a bachelor.
 
 JOHN SMITH 117 
 
 Unless, indeed, he should have the undlscrim- 
 inating pride of race of a certain worthy lady I 
 once knew, who claimed to be a lineal descendant 
 of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 After parting with Duke Sigismund, 
 Smith traveled through Germany, France and 
 Spain, and finally determined to go and fight 
 in the civil wars in Morocco. He sailed in a 
 French ship for Africa, but changed his 
 purpose, and brave as he was does not hesitate 
 to record that this was — 
 
 By reason of the uncertaintie, and the 
 perfidious, treacherous, bloudy raurthers 
 rather than warre, among those perfidious, 
 barbarous Moores. 
 
 He did not lack occasion for his courage, 
 however, for presently the French ship fell in 
 with two Spanish men-of-war, and they had a 
 brave sea fight lasting for two days. The 
 Frenchman finally beat off the Spaniards with 
 the loss of an hundred men. This ends Smith's 
 adventures on the continent. He returned to 
 England in 1604. 
 
 Fitting out expeditions for the New World 
 had by this time become a gentleman's 
 adventure, and many men of high degree joined 
 in these expeditions. After the voyages of the
 
 118 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Cabots under English authority in 1598, 
 England remained inactive in the New World 
 for about one hundred years. The Cabots had 
 sailed from Labrador to Florida, touching here 
 and there along the coast. Yet upon this 
 slender scintilla of discovery England before a 
 hundred years had passed, claimed sovereignty 
 over the continent from sea to sea. She was 
 always equal to such claims. She calmly took 
 seisin of a continent by the simple act of going 
 ashore for wood, water or the casual circum- 
 stances of a trade of glass beads with some 
 Indians. The other European nations spent a 
 century or two trying to get used to this British 
 habit of claiming the most of the earth. The 
 impact of the beef -eaters was too much for 
 them. By right of the discovery of Cabot, who 
 was the first white man to see the continent of 
 North America, England wrested the Hudson 
 from the Dutch and absorbed the Swedish 
 settlements on the Delaware, and fought with 
 France over territory for about a hundred 
 years, and finally compelled her ancient enemy 
 to yield up every foot of land east of the 
 Mississippi. In like manner she at a later date 
 reached for India, seized Australia and New 
 Zealand, and innumerable islands, and will
 
 J O H N S M I T H 119 
 
 soon have Africa In her grasp. It is comforting 
 to put the responsibility for this outreaching 
 on Destiny. 
 
 When she parted company with her children 
 on this vside of the Atlantic, she bequeathed to 
 them a generous portion of Destiny. Americans 
 took Texas from the weaker Mexicans, and 
 then California. Spain yielded up Florida 
 because she must have known we were bound 
 to have it anyway. Napoleon probably had the 
 same fear when he sold us Louisiana, for our 
 western pioneers, for years before he sold it, had 
 been threatening to break through the French 
 barrier at the mouth of the Mississippi. We 
 had an attack of Destiny lately and annexed 
 Haiwaii. Next comes Porto Rico, and the 
 Philippines, and by and bye, Cuba. Between 
 spells we have dispossessed the Indians of nearly 
 all the lands they once held. In view of our 
 record it seems a huge jest to see our pharisees 
 and devotees of the gospel of cant, grow tender- 
 hearted over England's greed for territory. 
 How we do pity the poor Boer, and the enslaved 
 Hindoo. When a few missionaries' sons stole 
 Haiwaii from the simple natives, we blandly 
 received this acquisition and thanked God we 
 are not as Englishmen are. At a time when
 
 120 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 we owned millions of slaves we were holding 
 mass meetings to denounce the oppression of 
 Ireland. Thus securely enthroned upon her 
 virtuous pedestal Columbia has made great 
 discoveries of motes in her neighbours' eyes. 
 Occasionally she will vacate her coign of vantage 
 long enough to grab a few principalities that 
 may happen to be lying around loose. But her 
 eyes are always rolled heavenward in holy 
 contemplation of the beatitudes of "equal 
 rights," and of "government by the consent 
 of the governed. " All would be well and we 
 should at least escape the charge of hyprocisy, 
 if we would drop Cant, and boldly avow that 
 England or America, or any other civilized 
 nation has the right to seize and hold and 
 police the lands of blood and barbarism, and 
 make them a safe abiding place for native and 
 stranger alike. 
 
 After having exhausted the pleasures of 
 European warfare. Smith came to England, 
 and threw himself with ardour into the coloniza- 
 tion of the New World. He sailed with an 
 expedition for the American continent in 1606. 
 On the way out he was accused of conspiracy 
 and imprisoned, but on reaching America, he 
 established his innocence and was liberated and
 
 JOHN SMITH 121 
 
 admitted to The Council. The lives of all the 
 men who plotted against him were afterwards 
 at his mercy, but he spared them. Once again 
 his life was attempted by vsecret plotters in his 
 own force, but he escaped although at this time 
 he was badly injured by a gunpowder explosion. 
 Every schoolboy knows his adventures in 
 Virginia. He was great-hearted, devoted, and 
 untiring, the life and soul of the infant colonies, 
 and proved that he was born for counsel as 
 well as for war. He had the craft of Ulysses 
 in his dealings with the Indians, and though 
 he was severe towards their treacheries, he was 
 humane. His treaties with them, his many 
 hairbreadth escapes, his battles with them, his 
 capture and rescue from death by the Indian 
 maiden Pocahontas, are familiar tales. They 
 cannot be recounted within the bounds of this 
 sketch. Posterity has made him the central 
 figure of one heroic incident, forgetting his 
 many-sidedness, and the many other scenes, in 
 which he faced death. As a man of letters he 
 is well-nigh forgotten, although he wrote many 
 his ories, and a partial autobiography, wherein, 
 with the modesty of a great soldier he told in 
 vivid language of his perils and adventures. 
 He was so modest in his first book, The True
 
 122 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Relation, that he did not mention the 
 
 Pocahontas incident, and one dry-as-dust 
 
 antiquarian has seen fit from this omission to 
 
 throw doubt on the story. Smith was so 
 
 familiar with death that he might well omit to 
 
 mention all his chance meetings with it. To 
 
 him this was only a casual circumstance, a mere 
 
 informal passing the time of day with Death, 
 
 and no more worthy of a chronicle than any of 
 
 the other thrilling encounters with the great 
 
 destroyer. No one doubted the story in his 
 
 lifetime, and many of his contemporaries have 
 
 testified to it. Seemingly fearful that he might 
 
 be charged with ingratitude for making no 
 
 record of it, in June, 1616, he addressed a letter 
 
 to ''The most High, and Vertuous Princesse, 
 
 Queen Anne of Great Brittanie, " as follows: 
 
 The loue I beare my God, my King and 
 
 Countrie, hath so oft emboldened mee in the 
 
 worst of extreme dangers, that now honestie 
 
 doth constraine mee to presume thus farre 
 
 beyond my self e, to present your Maiestie this 
 
 short discourse; if ingratitude be a deadly 
 
 poyson to all honest vertues, I must be guiltie 
 
 of that crime if I should omit any meanes to be 
 
 thankful. So it is, that some ten yeeresag^oe, 
 
 being in Virginia, and taken prisoner by the
 
 JOHN SMITH 123 
 
 power of Powhatan their chiefe King-, I 
 receiued from this g-reat Saluage exceeding 
 g"reat courtesie, especially from his sonne 
 Nantaquaus, the most manliest, comeliest, 
 boldest spirit, I euer saw in a Saluage, and 
 his sister, Pocahontas, the Kings most deare 
 and wel-beloued daughter, being but a childe 
 of twelue or thirteene yeeres of age, whose 
 compassionate pitif ull heart, of my desperate 
 estate, g-aue me much cause to respect her: 
 I being- the first Christian this proud King 
 and his grim attendants euer saw; and thus 
 inthralled in their barbarous power, I cannot 
 say I felt the least occasion of want that was 
 in the power of those my mortall foes to 
 preuent, notwithstanding- al their threats. 
 After some six weeks fatting- among- those 
 Saluag-e Courtiers, at the minute of my 
 execution, she hazarded the beating- out of 
 her owne brains to saue mine; and not onely 
 that, but so preuailed with her father that I 
 was safely conducted to lames towne; where 
 I found about eight and thirtie miserable 
 poore and sicke creatures to keepe possession 
 of all those larg-e territories of Virg-inia; such 
 was the weakness of this poore Common- 
 wealth, as had the Saluages not fed vs, we
 
 124 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 directly had starued. And this reliefe, most 
 gracious Queen, was commonly brought vs 
 by this Lady Pocahontas. 
 The Indian Princess fed the colonists and 
 warned them of plots against them. Finally 
 she came at a later day after Smith had gone 
 to Europe, and they told her he was dead. 
 She then married an English gentleman by the 
 name of Rolf. Smith met her after her marriage 
 and at first she was cool and would not speak. 
 As he tells of this meeting: 
 
 But not long after she began to talke, 
 and remembered mee well what courtesies 
 shee had done, saying, You did promise 
 Powhatan what was yours should bee his and 
 hee the like to you; you called him father 
 being in his land a stranger, and by the same 
 reason so must I doe you; which thoug-h I 
 would have excused, I durst not allow of that 
 title, because she was a King's daughter; 
 with a well set countenanee she said. Were 
 you not afraid to come into my father's 
 Countrie, and caused feare in him and all 
 his people [but mee] and feare you here I 
 should call you father; I tell you then I will, 
 and you shall call mee childe, and so I will 
 bee for ever and ever your Countrieman.
 
 JOHN SMITH 125 
 
 They did tell vs alwaies you were dead, and 
 I knew no other until I came to Plimoth. 
 From this it would seem that but for a 
 chance estrangement, Smith would not have 
 lived and died a bachelor. Although the dust 
 has gathered upon his fame, he was not 
 unhonoured in his own day. His companions 
 in peril and his friends in England, have given 
 him unstinted praise. Some of them marred 
 eulogy, by putting his praises into verse, and 
 we are compelled to say that none of them 
 were poets. They entered into a poetical 
 conspiracy of great magnitude against the 
 beloved one. This is probably a sure certificate 
 of fame, for no man can truly be called great 
 until admiring worshippers have written poetry 
 about him. It is true that many men of small 
 figure come to this favour, but they make fine 
 verse only a grotesque pleasantry — a tinsel 
 svt ^rd and crown. But mere doggerel gains a 
 dignity when it is spent in eulogy of real 
 greatness, as the manhood of Ulysses shone 
 through his rags and dignified them when he 
 returned to his own hall. Bad as they are, I 
 consider these loving eulogists worthy of some 
 mention. R. Braith wait indites his verse, "To
 
 126 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ray worthy friend, Captain lohn Smith." In 
 this he alludes to : 
 
 Trag-abig-zanda, Callamata's love, 
 Deare Pocahontas, Madam Shanoi's too. 
 I take the liberty of suggesting that 
 for Calamata's love we read "Calamity's 
 love, " believing that this is only another 
 form of naming the Turkish Princess, and 
 does not mean another love, and that this 
 line lost its real meaning in the transcription. 
 But what shall be said of "Madam Shanoi's 
 too?" and was she another love, and was 
 Smith a soldier of many loves? This being the 
 only record of Madam Shanoi, she will have to 
 be dismissed as an unimportant personage, and 
 a mere casual intrusion into history. It is quite 
 evident that we are warranted in maintaining 
 that Smith's real loves like those of kings, made 
 history, and when they did not do this they 
 were the merest ephemera of the affections. 
 Braithwait concludes with : 
 
 And I could wish [such wishes would doe well,] 
 Many such Smiths in this our Israel. 
 Anthony Fereby, begins his verse: 
 "To my noble brother and friend. " He says: 
 * * * for what deservedly 
 With thy lifes danger, valour, pollicy,
 
 J O H N S M I T H 127 
 
 Quaint warlike stratag-eras, abillity 
 
 And Judg-ement, thou has got, fame sets so 
 
 hig-h 
 Detraction cannot reach ; thy worth shall 
 
 stand 
 A patterne to succeeding- ages. * * * 
 Tuissimus Ed. Jorden, addresses his verse 
 "To his valiant and deserving friend." His 
 eulogy closes thus: 
 
 Good men will yeeld thee praise; then sleight 
 
 the rest; 
 Tis best praise-worthy to have pleased the 
 best. 
 Richard James, speaks of his: 
 
 Deare noble Captaine, who by Sea and Land, 
 To act the earnest of thy name hast hand 
 And heart; * * * 
 
 Ma. Hawkins achieves the worst poetry, 
 opt ling with the thrilling line: 
 
 Thou that hast had a spirit to flie like thunder. 
 Richard Meade inquires in a burst of 
 poetical emotion : 
 
 Will not thy Country yet reward thy merit; 
 Nor in thy acts and writing's take delig^ht? 
 In his closing line Edward Ingham avers 
 that: 
 
 Reader 'tis true; I am not brib'd to flatter,
 
 128 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 as if his poetry were not evidence enough on 
 this point. 
 
 M. Gartner says: 
 But verse thou need'st not to expresse thy 
 
 worth. 
 He compares Smith to the famed Ithacan, 
 and so also do I. C, and C. P., two unnamed 
 eulogists who take a strong classical vein. 
 Brian O'Rourke with true Hibernian splendour 
 of diction begins with this line: 
 
 To see brig-ht honour sparkled all in gore. 
 Salo. Tanner says: 
 
 Let Mars and Nepture both with pregnant 
 
 wit, 
 Extol thy due deserts, He pray for it. 
 Smith offered to lead the Pilgrim Fathers 
 to America in 1619, but the mission was denied 
 him because he was not a Puritan. He died 
 in 1631, having spent the last years of his life 
 in authorship. His accounts of his life and 
 explorations on this continent are filled with 
 historical facts of real value. He was not too 
 much of an historian to disdain small things, 
 and even gives the names of his comrades and 
 fellow colonists. This method of writing history 
 puts the thrill of human life into what he 
 relates. One cannot help but feel a friendly
 
 JOHN SMITH 129 
 
 interest in the Wests, theRussells, theBurtoias, 
 the Bradleys, and the Walkers, and many 
 others of familiar sound, for these are the 
 names of people all about you. You find 
 yourself wondering whether Burton, your 
 shoemaker, is a descendant of the early adven- 
 turer, and whether RuSvSell your surgeon, 
 derived any of his skill by inheritance from a 
 soldier ancestor, who went out with Smith, 
 and did his carving with the sword. As old 
 Fuller quaintly says in like case, taking as his 
 text the discovery of a Hastings among the 
 peasantry on the Earl of Huntingdon 'vS estate: 
 And I have reason to believe, that some 
 who justly own the surnames and blood of 
 Bohuns, Mortimers and Plantag-anets [though 
 ig-norant of their own extractions,] are hid 
 'n the heap of common people, where they 
 find that under a thatched cottage which 
 some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a 
 leaded castle — contentment, with quiet and 
 security. 
 
 The painted walking sticks who become 
 cabinet ministers, the accidents of birth who 
 become kings and the accidents of politics who 
 become presidents, who infest the pages of 
 history with a desicated and puerile immor-
 
 130 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 tality, cut but a sorry figure when aligned with 
 a manhood like this great captain's. The 
 Genius of Platitude and Palaver has tried in 
 vain to make them great; he is great because 
 he has done the things, and no man ever spoke 
 better of his deeds than the truth would bear. 
 An English scholar, who has compiled his 
 works, says of him : 
 
 One cannot read the following- Works 
 without seeing- that JohnSmith was something- 
 more than a brave and experienced soldier. 
 Not only in his modesty and self restraint, 
 his moderation and magnanimity, his loyalty 
 to the King, affection for the Church, and 
 love for his Country, did he represent the 
 best type of the English Gentleman of his 
 day; but he was also a man of singular and 
 varied ability. * * * It is not too much 
 to say that had not Captain Smith of Wil- 
 loughby, strove, fought and endured as he 
 did, the present United States of America 
 might never have come into existence. 
 A pleasing eulogy to read is that of two 
 of the survivors of the "starving time, " of the 
 Virginia colony, as it was called. They thus 
 testified to his worth : 
 
 * * * that in all his proceedings made
 
 J O H N S M I T H 131 
 
 justice his first g-uide and experience his 
 
 second ; ever hating baseness, sloth, pride and 
 
 indignity, more than any dangers; that never 
 
 allowed more for himself than for his soldiers 
 
 with him; that upon no danger would send 
 
 them where he would not lead them himself; 
 
 that would never see us want what he either 
 
 had, or could by any means get us; that 
 
 would rather want than borrow, or starve 
 
 than not pay; that loved actions more than 
 
 words, and hated falsehood aild cozenage 
 
 more than death ; whose adventures were our 
 
 lives and whose loss our deaths. 
 
 But the best key to his character is found 
 
 in his written works. There in simple words 
 
 th. t can charm little children, this faithful 
 
 heait is recorded. In one burst of retrospect, 
 
 he says : 
 
 Having- been a slaue to the Turks, 
 prisoner amongst the most barbarous 
 Saluages, after my deliuerance commonly 
 discouering- and ranging- those large rivers 
 and uuknowne Nations with such a handfull 
 of ignorant companions that the wiser sort 
 often g-ave me up for lost, alwayes in mutinies, 
 wants and miseries, blowne up with g-un- 
 powder; a long- time prisoner among the
 
 132 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 French Pyrats, from whom escaping in a 
 little boat by my selfe, and adrift all such a 
 stormy winter night when their ships were 
 split, more than a hundred thousand pounds 
 lost, they had taken at sea, and most of them 
 drowned on the He of Ree, not farr from 
 whence I was driven ashore in my little boat, 
 &c. And many a score of the worst of winter 
 moneths lived in the fields; yet to have lived 
 neere 37 yeares in the midst of wars, pestil- 
 ence and famine, by which many hundred 
 thousand have died about mee, and scarce 
 five living of them that went first with mee 
 to Virginia; and yet to see the fruits of my 
 labours thus well begin to prosper; though 
 I have but my labour for my pains, have I 
 not much reason both privately and publikely 
 to acknowledge it and give God thankes, 
 whose omnipotent power onely delivered me, 
 to doe the utmost of my best to make his 
 name knowne in those remote parts of the 
 world, and his loving mercy to such a 
 miserable sinner. 
 Again he says : 
 
 Who can desire more content that hath 
 small meanes; or but only his merit to 
 aduance his fortune, then to tread and plant
 
 J O H N S M I T H 133 
 
 that ground hee hath purchased by the 
 hazzard of his life? If he haue but the taste 
 of virtue and mag-nanimitie, what to such a 
 minde can bee more pleasant, than planting- 
 and building- a foundation for his Posteritie, 
 g-otte from the rude earth by God's blessing 
 and his owne industrie, without prejudice to 
 any? If hee haue any g-raine of faith or zeale 
 in Relig-ion, what can hee doe lesse hurtfull 
 to any, or more agreeable to God; then to 
 seeke to conuert those poore Saluages to know 
 Christ and humanitie, whose labours with 
 discretion will triple requite thy charge and 
 paines? What so truely suites with honour 
 and honestie, as the discouering- things 
 unknowne? erecting- Townes, peopling- 
 Countries, informing- the ignorant, reforming- 
 thing-s vniust, teaching- virtue; and gaine to 
 our Native mother-countrie a king-dom to 
 attend her; finde imployment for those that 
 are idle, because they know not what to doe; 
 so farre from wrong-ing any, as to cause 
 Posteritie to remember thee and remember- 
 ing- thee euer honour that remembrance with 
 praise? * * * Then seeing- we are not 
 borne for our selues, but each tohelpe other, 
 and our abilities are much alike at the houre
 
 134 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of our birth and the minute of our death; 
 Seeing- our g-ood deedes, or our badde, by 
 faith in Christ's merits, is all we haue to 
 Carrie our soules to heauen, or hell; Seeing- 
 honour is our Hues ambition ; and our ambition 
 after death to haue an honourable memorie 
 of our life; and seeing- by noe meanes wee 
 would bee abated of the dig-nities and g-lories 
 of our predecessors; let vs imitate their 
 vertues, to bee worthily their successors. 
 Sleep great Captain in your humble grave 
 — you who were thrice worthy to be laid beside 
 great kings at Westminster. No grave of 
 England's dead holds more kingly dust than 
 yours. We have read your story as you and 
 your companions in arms have set it down. It 
 is a tale of many lands and many peoples, of 
 life eloquent and glorious. It brings us close 
 to you and makes three hundred years seem 
 but as a day. We have walked beside you as 
 with satchel and shining morning face you 
 crept, like snail, unwillingly to school. We have 
 seen your hermitage in the woods of Lincolnshire 
 where you took the queen's deer, and communed 
 with Marcus Aurelius, dreaming of greatness 
 like his. Dear to us is every passing fancy and 
 every careless grace of that noble non-age.
 
 J O H N S M I T H 135 
 
 Dear and friendly are you as you lead us among* 
 the battle-fields of Europe, and through the 
 perils that beset you. We have fearfully 
 watched you careering down the lists at Regall 
 to meet the flower of Turkish chivalry. We 
 have felt your heart-throbs when the Turkish 
 maiden made you a double captive, and we 
 thought no ill of you that you honoured her 
 love with your gratitude, and cherished her 
 memory after many years had gone when you 
 came to name the new world. Whether in 
 school-boy cap and gown, or clad in mail, or 
 naked in slavery, or bound before Povvhattan 
 awaiting his dreadful judgment, or watching 
 and guarding Western Civilization in its very 
 cradle-time, you were a man.
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 
 
 TO A POETESS OF PASSION 
 
 YOU in the Bohemia of newspaperdom must 
 be constantly reminded as I am in other 
 places, that the age of chivalry is not yet 
 past. The pencil of the wandering hack-writer 
 still does as much for the succour of distressed 
 damsels seeking fame as did the lance of the 
 ancient knight for his lady fair. 
 
 The lady lawyer, I use this term unad- 
 visedly, argues her first case, and this becomes 
 an event worthy of an admiring chronicle. The 
 charms of toilet, the grace of manner, and the 
 erudition of the fair Portia, are set forth with 
 glowing eulogy. Young Briefless might argue 
 twenty cases and not awaken half this interest. 
 Perhaps if Portia would analyze the flattery 
 offered her she might come to doubt whether it 
 was entirely complimentary, and might feel 
 that it carried with it a certain astonishment 
 that a mere woman should do so well, instead 
 of assuming this as a matter of course. But 
 
 136
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 137 
 
 flattery is as Immune from analysis on the part 
 of the greedy, as sugar-plums. The new ways 
 of the sex bring multiform embarrassments, and 
 your critic has not the least of these. The 
 aged professor and the young medico at the 
 clinic and in the dissecting room hardly know 
 how to harmonize their new relations towards 
 the brave intruder upon their ways. Portia In 
 the court room Is apt to demand all things as 
 belonging to her of hereditary right, and to 
 concede as few obligations on her own part, as 
 possible. The seasoned practitioner hardly 
 knows how much satire or brute strength he 
 may use to check her, or how much deference 
 he should show her when he finds her tempted 
 Into trickery or pettifogging. So he shuffles 
 and temporizes and evades responsibility, and 
 saves his thunderbolts for the next bout with 
 his learned brother. 
 
 One cannot object to the emancipation of 
 sex, but can fairly object to the self conscious 
 way In which the emancipation goes on. The 
 demand upon our attention by women who 
 are admitted to the bar, or who write books, 
 or turn politicians, or practice medicine, or do 
 the other things that seem novelties to them, 
 has become a bore. It Is not necessary that
 
 138 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 these pioneers should be eternally calling atten- 
 tion to the fact that they are women. Men do 
 all these things, and, heaven knows, are vain 
 enough about it, but they do them without the 
 air of saying "You see, I am only a man, and 
 yet I can do this." May we not be allowed to 
 yet look on woman as a part of the great 
 human family and not as a distinct species? 
 
 Although literature is not a new field for 
 women, yet the consciousness of sex follows 
 them there, and becomes the worst of hyper- 
 trophied mental tissue. I cannot find that 
 "violet- weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho" 
 was thus afflicted, and it is now nearly three 
 thousand vears since she sang of love. So we 
 must now be in a time of retrogression. These 
 prefatory observations concluded, I am pre- 
 sumptions enough to think that lean, without 
 violating the proper canons of gallantry sug- 
 gest some reasons which may cause you to 
 refrain from further poetical activity along 
 certain lines. 
 
 Some trespass on gallantry should be par- 
 doned, for gallantry in our sex has been the 
 bane of your life. It has spoiled any promise 
 you may have shown in earlier years. I remem- 
 ber when you were first putting forth your
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 139 
 
 maiden efforts in verse. They were good 
 enough rhymes to be published in the cross- 
 roads weekly free of charge. It is true, as even 
 you must admit, that if you thought them 
 poetry you were more self-flattered than 
 Malvolio. They were just plain rhymes; little 
 jingles, and sometimes little jangles. I have 
 tried to give them no dull-eared search, yet I 
 cannot find a single line in them that is really 
 yours that rings with music and power. How- 
 ever, if your verse had been simply of woods, 
 and hills, and streams, and summer days, and 
 blossoming flowers, you would have lived 
 unknown to the great world, although you 
 might have been the queen of letters at the 
 cross-roads. But your constituency would have 
 been limited by the subscription list of the 
 cross-roads weekly. Whether by accident or 
 design you struck other than bucolic themes 
 and opened a vein of most amatory verse, and 
 this advertised you because it was excessively 
 amatory. You also met a lot of good fellows, 
 both young and old in the newspaper world. 
 They are always lion hunters, eager to make 
 new finds, and gallant and quick to extend 
 help to the latest female Immigrant into 
 Bohemia. They gave you the freedom of the
 
 140 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 kinpfdom in two-column laudation. Thev bade 
 Flattery play you silvery airs and agreed that 
 you should be heralded as a poet. They puffed 
 your poems, and, gross and palpable though it 
 was, you sickened not, but under this inspira- 
 tion only ground out more. They announced 
 your goings and your comings, and varied the 
 monotony of their efforts to give you fame by 
 occasionally announcing that you were about to 
 be married to a distinguished gentleman, to 
 whom, with their light and playful fancy, they 
 attached great place in wealth or position. 
 When a mere man journeys from place to place, 
 the gleaners for the press do not always attend 
 upon him, unless, indeed, he should happen to 
 be a criminal or some other person of equal 
 importance. But if you should happen to 
 make a metropolitan visit, Genial Jenkins would 
 be rapping at your boudoir door within half an 
 hour after your arrival. Then as surely follows 
 this interview which I take from next morning's 
 Daily Bangle. 
 
 The reporter for the Bangle met with a 
 pleasant reception last evening- from the 
 beautiful Poetess of Passion in her charming- 
 Boudoir at the Auditorium. She wore a pale 
 g-reen tea-g-ovvn which showed to decided
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 141 
 
 advautag-e her petite and symmetrical fig-ure. 
 Your reporter caught the merest tantalizing- 
 glimpse of a white satin slipper, tog-ether 
 with its contents, peeping- from the wondrous 
 tea-gown. The softly shaded electric light 
 shed a langorous glamour over the sparkling 
 eyes and dimpled cheeks of the poetess. 
 
 "May I ask what literary work you are 
 now engaged on?" I said, after I had been 
 . cordially greeted. 
 
 "O, I have concluded to write a novel of 
 
 the Present, which will also be a novel of the 
 
 Future," said the poetess. "It will be in 
 
 the highest form fn de siecle . 1 shall give 
 
 a realistic picture of the young man of the 
 
 present day with all his vices. It has been 
 
 said so often by the critics in this country 
 
 and Europe that I could only excel in verse 
 
 and especially in the poetry of the passions, 
 
 that I shall now produce something worthy 
 
 in prose, for I have really achieved all the 
 
 fame I care for in poetry. 
 
 Of course this is quoted from memory and 
 
 I cannot give the literal rendering of the blank 
 
 form used for these many interviews. But you 
 
 have a surer authority ; turn to your scrap-book 
 
 of newspaper clippings about yourself and you
 
 142 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 will find this interview there, tea-gow^n, slippers 
 and all. They are ancient stage properties of 
 yours, although of late years they have had a 
 diminishing use. But puffing counts in the 
 long run ; it makes prime ministers as well as 
 poets. You had some commendation that was 
 honest enough even though it was shallow. 
 Some of the people whose good opinion you 
 should have valued and respected, refused to 
 read your poetry; others read it with indigna- 
 tion, and others refused to consider it seriously 
 either for good or bad, but treated it with 
 broad humor and blunt wit, and your muse as 
 of the opera bouffe order. 
 
 Slowly the deference of the press for you 
 has become rather third class with a tingfe of 
 good-natured contempt in it. The newspaper 
 brethren like fine titles and second names for 
 every public character. They do not permit 
 any Mavericks on their range, and like to put 
 their own brand on the herds they round up 
 from far and near. When you have been in 
 their eye long enough in one capacity they fix 
 a name on you. So they created the Sweet 
 Singer of Michigan, and the Poet of the Sierras. 
 To you they gave the name of Poetess of 
 Passion, and joyed in its euphony. You have
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 143 
 
 been one of their Cherry Sisters, and they have 
 accorded you a mock deference, thinly disguised 
 as real. It must be difficult some of the time 
 to determine whether the flowers they throw at 
 you are cabbages or roses; superficially, they 
 might be either. You can hardly get much of 
 a review now, no matter how burns the lava 
 tide of your verse. You have become a stock 
 figure as much as The Grand Old Man, or The 
 Langtry Lily, and you do not need description 
 or explanatory notes, or an introduction. Your 
 epitomization is embodied in Poetess of Passion. 
 But these are horizon fancies, and I want to 
 look into the near-by heavens. 
 
 I have a copy of your Red Book, called 
 Poems of Passion. A wilder fancy than 
 mine would suggest that the blushing cover 
 was stirred by what it covered. The preface 
 alone is worth all the labour of reading the 
 book; it is a delicious bit of egotism that 
 cannot be duplicated anywhere. In its opening 
 sentence you say : 
 
 Among the twelve hundred poems that 
 have emanated from my too-prolific pen, there 
 are some forty or fifty which treat entirely 
 of that emotion which has been denominated
 
 144 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 "the grand passion love." A few of these 
 are of an extremely fiery character. 
 Then you proceed to state that you had 
 issued a prior book of verse from which you 
 had omitted these fiery sonnets. Now you 
 describe how you were called to account for 
 this most laudable expurgation, thus: 
 
 But no sooner was the book published 
 
 than letters of regret came to me from all 
 
 parts of the g-lobe, asking- why this or that 
 
 love-poem was omitted. These regrets were 
 
 repeated to me by so many people, that I 
 
 decided to collect and issue these poems in a 
 
 small volume to be called Poems of Passion. 
 
 This picture of "friends and strangers in 
 
 all parts of the globe, " crying out for their 
 
 loved ones among your love-poems, is more 
 
 affecting than authentic. It is impossible for 
 
 the healthy mind to even imagine their grief. 
 
 One w^ould like to see these devotees of passion ; 
 
 they would doubtless present some curious, if 
 
 not instructive anthropological studies. Did 
 
 these bitter disappointments well up in 
 
 Thibetan Polyandry, or by the Bosphorus, or 
 
 on the shore of Great Salt Lake, or where that 
 
 other community of Passion Worshippers taints 
 
 the air of the Empire State? One cannot
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 145 
 
 locate elsewhere, any large collection of those 
 who are ruled by Her of the Hydra Head. You 
 confess with strange pride to the authorship of 
 twelve hundred poems. The magnitude of 
 your score has tempted me to investigate other 
 poets to see if they make up 3'our sum. Keats 
 wrote fifty poems, Hood seventy-six, Burns six 
 hundred and fifty, and Tom Moore about the 
 same; Bryant, fifty, Tennyson about three 
 hundred and fifty. Pope, one hundred and 
 sixty, Wordsworth about eight hundred, and 
 Mrs. Hemans two hundred and fifty. Surely 
 these figures will still further serve to increase 
 the appreciation your admirers have for your 
 poems. One may be allowed to guess that 
 those admirers are found pretty exclusively 
 among men who have dealt in lumber or pork 
 with but little time for literature. This sort 
 of a business man is apt to imagine that if a 
 poem is not positively bad in all ways, and if 
 the mere externals of poetry have been attended 
 to, it is real poetry and not a clever counterfeit. 
 In the fruitfulness of your muse you excel all 
 the great names of English Hterature. It may 
 possibly be said that these figures are compiled 
 from merely published poems and that there 
 are others not published. If you could have
 
 146 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 considerately refrained in like manner we should 
 not now have twelve hundred publicly 
 announced poems. You have evidently lisped 
 in numbers for the numbers came, although 
 your numbers, unlike most of Pope's are of a 
 mathematical-amorous sort. This standard 
 compels us to measure poetical greatness as 
 certain loyal Americans do national greatness — 
 as if it were a matter of barrels of pork and 
 bushels of wheat. Thus our Western Muse 
 scorns her barren European sister. 
 
 You consider it necessary to explain some of 
 the poems in this book and to show why they 
 were written, and in doing this you hint, not 
 too obscurely, that they were inspired by some 
 experiences that have come under your own 
 observation. You also explain that the most 
 amorous of these verses have not so bad a 
 meaning as the superficial reader might impute 
 to them. Now this explanation only accentu- 
 ates the prevalent suspicion that these poems 
 are irretrievably bad. With delicate naivete 
 you say of one of them : 
 
 Delilah was written and first published 
 in 1877. I had been reading- history and 
 became stirred by the power of such women 
 as Aspasia and Cleopatra over such grand
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 147 
 
 men as Antony, Socrates and Pericles. 
 Under the influence of this feeling- I dashed 
 off Delilah^ which I meant to l?e an expres- 
 sion of the powerful fascination of such a 
 woman upon the memory of a man, even as 
 he neared the hour of death. If the poem is 
 immoral, then the history which inspired it 
 is immoral. I consider it my finest effort. 
 Now if this poem is a good poem people 
 don't care how you came to write it. Your 
 fame is too new and garish to warrant any 
 excessive curiosity on that score. Nor did the 
 public need to be told that you "dashed off 
 Delilah.'' It is characteristic of the young 
 poet to "dash off" his poems (in prefaces). It 
 ofives one an air of verve and fire, and careless 
 excess of power to "dash off" these rough 
 patterns, and makes one's muse like swift 
 Camilla scour the plain. You say that if the 
 poem is immoral, the history that inspired it is 
 immoral. "The history that inspired it, " — aye, 
 there's the rub; that history is immoral. 
 Aspasia and Cleopatra are not characters out 
 of a Sunday-school book. Socrates was a loose 
 fish, and Pericles was no better than he should 
 be, and we must not confound Marc Antony 
 with Saint Anthony. It may be of no signifi-
 
 148 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 cance, but I find no poem in my Red Book 
 speaking forth the woes of the wife in these 
 ancient marital difficulties. If Zanthippe could 
 have her epic, it might show how it was that 
 she lost her temper and became the jest of the 
 centuries on account of trouble over that woman 
 Aspasia. As for Mrs. Pericles, she was 
 probably a poor little mouse of a woman, living 
 a decent humble life, and not worth comparing 
 with that grand creature, Aspasia — certainly 
 not worth a nineteenth century poem of passion. 
 I think that Mrs. Caesar and Mrs. Antony 
 could tell us some things if they had a fit 
 chronicler, either in prose or verse, that would 
 demoralize the halo which poetesses of passion 
 have placed round the heads of those "grand 
 characters. " You complete your confession as 
 to this poem by stating that you consider it 
 your '"finest effort. " This practice of battering 
 yourself with boquets has something so colos- 
 sally egotistical about it, that the critic, 
 supposed to be used to the worst cases, gasps 
 for breath. Returning to our text, I quote the 
 finest lines of this finest effort of yours : 
 
 She smiles — and in mad tiger fashion, 
 As a she-tig-er fondles her own, 
 
 I clasp her with fierceness and passion,
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 149 
 
 And kiss her with shudder and g-roan. 
 And here is some more from Ad Finem, 
 which you say is another of the poems which 
 have been condemned so much: 
 
 I know in the way that sins are reckoned, 
 
 This thought is a sin of the deepest dye; 
 But I know too that if an angel beckoned, 
 
 Standing close to the throne on High, 
 And you, adown by the gates infernal, 
 
 Should open your loving arms and smile, 
 I would turn my back on things supernal. 
 To lie on your breast a little while, 
 
 To know for an hour you were mine 
 completely — 
 Mine in body and soul, my own — 
 I would bear unending tortures sweetly, 
 With not a murmur and not a moan. 
 Another of the Great Condemned is 
 Communism and in this you express yourself 
 thus : 
 
 And on nights like this when my blood runs 
 riot 
 With the fever of youth and its mad desires, 
 When my brain in vain bids my heart be quiet, 
 When my breast seems the center of lava- 
 fires,
 
 ISO CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Oh, then is the time when most I miss you, 
 And I swear by the stars, and my soul and 
 say, 
 That I would have you, and hold you, and 
 kiss you, 
 Thoug-h the whole world stands in the way. 
 
 And like Communists, mad and disloyal. 
 My fierce emotions roam out of their lair; 
 
 They hate King- Reason for being- loyal — 
 
 They would fire his castle and burn him 
 
 there, 
 
 O love, they would clasp you, and crush you, 
 and kill you. 
 
 In the insurrection of uncontrol; 
 Across the miles, does this wild war thrill you 
 
 That is rag-ing- in my soul. 
 As for your Convertion — it is so 
 Swinburnish, or Whitmanish that I desire not 
 to give it, having what you have not, a fear of 
 the repressive rules of the United States postal 
 department against aiding in the dissemination 
 of a certain kind of literature. In the title to 
 this poem you have stolen the very altar cloth 
 and dyed it scarlet. Of v^^hat avail is this 
 lawless, wanton, verse? It bears the stigmata 
 of mental debauchery and hysteria and does
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 151 
 
 not teach one valuable lesson. To the psycho- 
 pathist it may possess a curious scientific 
 interest; but to laymen this demented verse is 
 as abhorrent as the maunderings of a maniac. 
 If it does express the language of a human 
 heart is it not better that that language should 
 remain untranslated, or at least that it should 
 have no such brutal translation? Even poets 
 who have compelled us to print expurgated 
 editions of their poetry do not vapour in such 
 trite eroticism as this. In some instances Burns 
 wrote for the ale-house, evidently to win the 
 applause of his pot-companions; it is vulgar 
 enough too, but little redeemed by his splendid 
 genius. But you nowhere find him afflicted with 
 hysteria. Plain common vulgarity and coarse- 
 ness carries its own antidote against harm. 
 But Burns held the sacred things sacred from 
 poetical defilement. There is no taint in these 
 lines : 
 
 Thou ling'ring star with less'ning ray, 
 That lov'st to greet the early morn. 
 
 Again thou ush'rest in the day 
 
 My Mary from my soul was torn. 
 * * * 
 
 The golden hours on angel wings 
 Flew o'er me and my dearie.
 
 152 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 My love is like the red, red rose 
 
 Just newly sprung- in June. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Had we never loved sae blindly. 
 
 Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Never met, or never parted, 
 
 We had n'er been broken-hearted. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Fare thee wee'l thou first and fairest. 
 Fare thee wee'l thou best and dearest. 
 Do you find In the great Scottish poet of 
 the affections any trace of that tigerish affection 
 that howls for its tiger mate through your 
 poems? Civilized love is not a beast raging 
 rampantly abroad seeking whom it may devour. 
 It is not a vampire or a vulture that claws and 
 tears and drinks warm blood on occasion It is 
 decent and fair to look upon, and does not say 
 to flaming youth — Let virtue be as wax and 
 melt in her own fire. It goes with the bride in 
 her happy innocence to the altar ; it guides and 
 purifies the mother's heart as she w^atches over 
 
 her children; it makes the dullest and homeliest 
 life, noble and kindly; it follows to the end, 
 and through life's last and greatest affliction it 
 clings in dearest remembrance to the departed 
 spirit beyond the confines of the grave. It has
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 153 
 
 no affinity for that raging fever which you 
 grow eloquent over. The great alienists would 
 find something familiar in your verse. For 
 such manifestations they have a name — Sadism. 
 Here are some specimens of this poetic abandon 
 from the German philosopher, Nietzsche: 
 
 The splendid beast raging- in its lust 
 after prey and victory. Do your pleasure ye 
 wantons; roar for very lust and wickedness. 
 The path to one's own heaven ever leads 
 through the voluptousness of one's own hell. 
 How comes it that I have yet met no one 
 * * * who knew morality as a problem, 
 and this problem as his personal distress, 
 torment, voluptousness, passion? 
 You have few noble words to relieve these 
 darker passages — in fact your other verse seems 
 but a setting for them. Whittier said of Burns: 
 And if at times an evil strain. 
 
 To lawless love appealing. 
 Broke in upon the clear refrain 
 Of pure and healthful feeling, 
 
 It died upon the eye and ear 
 
 No inward answer gaining; 
 No heart had I to see or hear 
 
 The discord and the staining.
 
 154 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 This loving eulogist tells what every heart 
 must feel. The Burns of the ale-house was 
 also the Burns of Bonnie Doon and Afton 
 Water, of the Cotter's Hearth, and Highland 
 Mary. The vulgar line which comes now and 
 then is but a passing shadow cast lightly on 
 this shining gold of love and honour and 
 plighted troth, and all the hearthstone deities. 
 Your poems of peaceful refuge are too small 
 and too few to give us safe escape from the 
 surging riot that fills your Red Book. When 
 you aim at a restful poem you are bound to 
 make it a thing of silly gush and affectation, 
 as like real emotion as that depicted by the 
 painted, shrill-voiced belle of the music-hall 
 stage. Lovers named Guilo, Lippo, Beppo, 
 and Romney, and one by the Christian name 
 of Paul, are the subjects of the lighter and less 
 gustatory strokes of your prolific pen. Thus 
 does your muse make eyes at the audience 
 through the paint and tinsel: 
 
 Yes, yes, I love thee, Guilo; thee alone, 
 Why dost thou sig"h and wear that face of 
 sorrow? 
 
 So I loved Romney? Hush thou foolish one — 
 I should forg-et him wholly, wouldst thou let me;
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 155 
 
 Or but remember that his day was done 
 From that most supreme hour when first I 
 
 met thee. 
 And Paul? Well, what of Paul? Paul had 
 
 blue eyes, 
 And Romney g"ray, and thine are darkly 
 
 tender. 
 One finds fresh feeling-s under change of 
 
 skies — 
 A new horizon bring-s a newer splendour. 
 You play this tune with variations, here is 
 another form : 
 
 Why art thou sad my Beppo? But last eve, 
 Here at my feet, thy dear head on my breast, 
 I heard thee say thy heart would no more 
 
 grieve, 
 Or feel the old ennui and unrest. 
 
 What troubles thee? Am I not all thine own — 
 I, so long sought, so sighed for and so dear? 
 And do I not live but for thee alone? 
 Thou hast seen Beppo, whom I loved last 
 year. 
 
 Thou art not first ? Nay, and he who would be 
 Defeats his own heart's dearest purpose 
 then.
 
 156 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 No surer truth was ever told to thee, 
 
 Who has loved most, the best can love agfain. 
 
 If Lippo, [and not he alone] has taught 
 
 The arts that please thee, wherefore art 
 thou sad 
 
 Since all my vast love-lore to thee is brought; 
 
 Look up and smile my Beppo, and be g"lad. 
 ThivS apish verse coined in the cheap and 
 vulgar similitude of Italian love-making, soft 
 and langorous, breathing of orange groves and 
 summer nights, with its thees and thous put 
 in to hide its verbal poverty, must have been 
 thought poetry by you or it would not be in 
 the Red Book. According to this, life in order 
 to be at its happiest must consist of a quick 
 succession of casual, yet tigerish love affairs, 
 the more the merrier and the more the better. 
 This gospel may do for the man-about-town, 
 and for his compatriots in the half-world, but 
 it will hardly do to bring up a family on. This 
 verse looks easy and tempting; it fires your 
 critic into parodistic emulation. Here are some 
 verses which suffer in the same way, "tossed 
 off, ' ' of course : 
 
 My Beppo why dost thou complain, 
 Thou hast my this year's kisses;
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM 157 
 
 Lippo was my last year's swain, 
 He took those last year's blisses. 
 
 Why task me for a thing- forgot, 
 When this year I am all thine own, 
 
 That happy past remember not, 
 
 When me its bliss long- since has flown. 
 
 The rag-bag-s of the past disclose 
 One tang-led web of silken skein 
 
 Which other hands than thine have wove, 
 But which thine own must weave again. 
 
 Let loves be new and ever range. 
 
 Scorning dull ey'd Satiety, 
 Hunting content in change on change, 
 And pleasure in variety. 
 And so we take leave of the Red Book — a 
 book which contains no reason for having been 
 written.
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 
 
 IT was many and many a year ago — for so 
 the account should run with us who have 
 
 seen fast history-making, that Dickens 
 came over the sea to look at England's First- 
 born. The brat was lusty, raw and ungainly, 
 full of strange oaths, bumptious, arrogant and 
 a braggart. These qualities made its parentage 
 easily recognizable, and yet gave great offense 
 to its kinsman. Being of the same blood, 
 perhaps he should have treated the faults of 
 extreme youth more kindly, yet time softens 
 resentments, and we can now afford to laugh 
 over the follies of our whelp age. He hurt our 
 feelings terribly in Martin Chuzzlewit and 
 American Notes, yet despite the pain of 
 wounded vanity we took him into favour again. 
 Those who loved him tried to condone his guilt 
 by attributing it to British bull-headedness 
 and ignorance. 
 
 There is a strong suspicion now extant 
 that there were Americans a few decades since, 
 
 158
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 159 
 
 who were as narrow, insular and provincial as 
 the John Bulls themselves. Our avera^re is 
 better now, and still we have something to 
 mend. General Choke and Jefferson Brick are 
 no longer with us, but we have their modifica- 
 tions in the more refined, self-styled Intense 
 American. He has established the Thirty- 
 second Degree of Americanism, infested by his 
 class alone. Still, his vagaries are mild and 
 innocuous. Sometimes they are manifested in 
 a desire to run the American Flag up in all 
 parts of the landscape, and I have expected 
 that he would eventually adorn every corn-crib 
 and smoke-house in the land with it. He has 
 a theory that the daily and hourly use of the 
 Flag increases patriotism. Jacob with his 
 device of the peeled twigs for increasing the 
 number of his flocks was not more cunning 
 than our Professional Patriot with his devices 
 for increasing the number of Patriots in this 
 country. To the American who carries his 
 patriotism in his heart and not on his sleeve, 
 his country's flag tells more eloquently than 
 printed page or martial song, of American 
 valour — of brave men and brave deeds. If it 
 be a standard scarred and torn in battle, the 
 whole earth holds no inspiration like it. But
 
 160 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 he does not need the aid of artificial excitants 
 to make him love his country and her flag. 
 
 Recently an ex-president has come forward 
 with some new renditions of Flag-Service. This 
 fresh pattern of patriotism is announced by the 
 fortunate magazine that secured it — at great 
 expense — thus : 
 
 It was * * * idea that the stars and 
 stripes should float over every school house 
 in America. Now in a stirring- article he 
 carries the idea further and shows why the 
 flag- should find a place over every fireplace 
 in our country; what it would mean to future 
 generations, and why the flag should appeal 
 to every woman. 
 
 We are further informed that "the article 
 will rank with the author's most eloquent 
 public utterances." As much as we respect 
 ex-presidents, w^e cannot avoid suspicion that 
 this promised mine of rich eloquence has been 
 "salted" in the advertisement. Commonplace 
 at a dollar a line is too dear, even when it is the 
 commonplace of an ex-president. There are 
 living American women who have been taught 
 patriotism in a sterner school than the Great 
 American Kindergarten for Women. They 
 cannot gain new inspiration from pedagogical
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 161 
 
 and dllettant patriotism, addressed to a 
 magazine constituency assumed to be in its 
 milk teeth. The Firesides are not clamouring 
 to be fed new rations of spoon-victuals by 
 Eminent Hands. This nursery employment 
 does not suggest a fit answer to the common, 
 vacuous query, "what shall we do with our 
 ex-presidents?" Let us rather continue to 
 employ them for periodical deliverances of other 
 platitudes whose prosperity lies in our acutely 
 adoring ears. 
 
 With all the decadence among- the followers 
 of General Choke and Jefferson Brick they still 
 have a stifled sneer for the migratory American, 
 acknowledging ancestral fealty to the great 
 mother-land of nations, if he shall bu}^ a pair 
 of trousers in London. One of the minor 
 regulations of the intense American is that you 
 must not travel in foreign lands, or at least 
 only do so under apology, before you "have 
 seen all there is to see in your own country. " 
 You must inspect the colorless waste between 
 Saco and Waco as a conditioa precedent to 
 foreign travel. Our intense American may be 
 said to be in his richest vein when he detects 
 the harmless and necessary immigrant to these 
 shores bringing out the flag of his native land
 
 162 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 on some fete day. Only a call for troops will 
 suffice for this treason. I do not forget that I 
 first learned from Jefferson Brick of the Curse 
 of British gold, and how it was being used to 
 corrupt the free American electorate. Originally 
 it was the hideous Cobden Club that was 
 distributing this gold, and thereafter and more 
 recently the Money Kings of Lombard Street. 
 From this same well of patriotism I learned 
 that before we adopt national policies we ought 
 to find out what England wants us to do, and 
 then not do it. Upon these activities the 
 bunting trust thrives, and the voice of our 
 hustings becomes a mere hysterical echo of the 
 patriot cannon at Bunker Hill. 
 
 Since Dickens was with us in 1841 many 
 things have come to pass that the Muse of 
 History with her larg-e disdain for trifles has 
 made no note of. She only records the big 
 events in her tiresome folios and never descends 
 to chronicling small beer. The real life of 
 human kind has been left to gossips like Pepys, 
 who have saved for us the tattle of the tea 
 parties and the coffee houses. While the 
 Gibbons have been telling in sonorous phrase 
 of camps and courts, these humble chatterers 
 have remained unemulous, telfing trifling tales.
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 163 
 
 They cared not a button about the dress 
 parades of kings, nor were they fearsome of 
 posterity. They thought it important to set 
 down what they ate and drank, what they 
 wore, what physic they took and how they 
 dressed themselves or quarreled with their 
 neighbours, or amused themselves on yesterday. 
 The trial of the Seven Bishops will not lack a 
 historian, but we must look to these gleaners 
 of little sheaves, if we wish to know what Hodge 
 was doing, or how 'Arry and 'Arriet spent the 
 holidays in the English meadows in the year 
 16 — . There is a suggestion in this for modest 
 chroniclers of our own time, who are willing to 
 wait two hundred years for fame. As topics 
 for these little histories I would suggest in 
 passing : 
 
 The Rise and Fall of the Crazy Quilt. 
 
 The Age of Plush. 
 
 The Influence of Pie on National 
 Character. 
 
 The Moral Aspect of Tidies. 
 
 The Strange Career of the Pillow Sham. 
 
 Disquisitions on these subjects, sagely 
 written would in time become as valuable as 
 those of the older Tattlers and Spectators. I 
 consider My Lady Lizzard's Tucker, and
 
 164 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the gentle follies of Clarinda and Bubalina, as 
 worthy of a memoir as the stilted performances 
 of a fat-witted prime minister. 
 
 Dickens saw us before we had stolen Texas 
 or the Empire of the Golden Gate from poor 
 Mexico. It was before the Aro-onauts of '49 
 had commenced to thread the buffalo trails over 
 the plains and to hunt the passes of the 
 Sierras. Our line of expansion was into the 
 fever-and-ague belt of the Mississippi Valley. 
 The City of Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit was 
 undoubtedly a much exaggerated caricature of 
 the reality, just as Bumble the beadle, the 
 Parish Workhouse, or Doctor Squeers' School 
 were exaggerations. But in none of these 
 would you have the least trouble in finding the 
 original. Jefferson Brick and General Choke 
 and the New York Daily Sewer and the Rowdy 
 Journal, were not all a myth. The criticism of 
 Dickens touched us where we were most 
 sensitive. We always had an inner feeling that 
 slavery was an abomination. We dimly saw 
 that in its atrocities the fifth century lived 
 again and mocked at number nineteen — the 
 great pharisee of the centuries. Dickens came 
 from a nation whose w^ar-ships had patrolled 
 the African coast in crushing the slave trade
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 165 
 
 when this century was young. Through our 
 assertiveness and Fourth of July declamation, 
 we must have felt that our nation was yet 
 unripe and that our morals might be bettered. 
 Hence our anger when the exposed nerve was 
 touched by our kinsman. 
 
 Our jingoes were offensive and truculent 
 and they could smell the blood of an English- 
 man at a considerable distance, and long for it. 
 They wreaked a ruder and more brutal 
 vengeance on the Lion, than now, and the 
 spleen and hatred engendered by two wars was 
 invigorated by the presence of the crippled 
 veterans of the Revolution who were disposed 
 on all Fourth of July platforms. So buoyant 
 and joyous and obtuse was our national conceit 
 that we saw no incongruity in prating of liberty 
 and freedom, while we were holding millions of 
 human beings in slavery. We furnished rare 
 sport for a satirist like Dickens, who had never 
 spared his own country a deserved gibe. 
 
 The genius which described the Circum- 
 locution Office, the abuses of the courts, and 
 the Parish Workhouses and Charity Schools of 
 England would naturally riot in the wealth of 
 raw material found here. 'Tis a vain task to 
 balance all the gains and losses of fifty years.
 
 166 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 It must be admitted that when Dickens first 
 saw us we were somewhat imperfect in the use 
 of the fork, and we ate our meals with such 
 dispatch that one who sat at meat more than 
 ten minutes was k)oked on as a person of 
 sedentary habits. We frescoed the floors in 
 public places with tobacco, and the hotel towel 
 was the subject of frequent and acrimonious 
 remark. Pie was still our national dish and 
 dominated all more effete refections from 
 Passamaquaddy to Carondelet. 
 
 Life in 1841 had some advantages however. 
 The Fifth Empire of the Distended Hoop was 
 still in the womb of Fashion. Women did not 
 adorn their backs and heads with the monstrous 
 pads of a later time. The Age of Plush had 
 not yet arrived. The Japanese gewgaws, and 
 Chinese decorative misfits, the hand-painted 
 china and ceramic fads, the hideous tidies and 
 inflammable strawstack lamp chimneys, and 
 above all, the crazy quilt, were unknown. 
 Woman partook of literature in those golden 
 days by the simple method of sitting down and 
 reading a book. She did not pursue Culture 
 with a Club, bristling with constitutions and 
 by-laws and presidents and vice-presidents and 
 boards of directors and committees and a
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 167 
 
 general hurrah and whirl of parliamentary 
 practices. She did not chastise the Tyrant 
 Man, with the vigor recently shown. She did 
 tatting, crocheting and penwipers and woolly 
 dogs. If she was literary she wrote nice stories 
 for whatever magazine was the embryonic 
 Ladies' Home Journal oi the time. She did 
 not "wallow" in conventions and congresses 
 then as now. It was a day when the sepulchral 
 Best Room was the good housewife's shrine, 
 and the what-not and the fair, round center- 
 table, were her household gods. 
 
 If a reincarnated Dickens should return 
 here, he might still find some food for satire. 
 We should probably accept his corrective offices 
 more kindly now in these days of close fraterni- 
 zation between the Lion and the Eagle. On 
 the way over he would be sure to meet a young 
 lady — one of Cook's, from Cherry Valley, III, — 
 who would pester him for his autograph. He 
 would have to triple-plate himself In dogged 
 British reticence to withstand the assaults of 
 our Indefatigable reporters. The Lotos Club 
 or some other club would feast him, and smooth 
 lawyers and well-fed brokers of a literary turn, 
 would smother him with after-dinner adulation. 
 
 In his purblind British way he would seek
 
 168 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 to find out something about New York politics. 
 He would see Piatt and Croker in their busy 
 whirls and would never be able to tell which 
 was which. Among other reflections, he would 
 conclude that this was the Age of Woman, and 
 that this gentle metal was to take its place in 
 the social formation with stone and gold and 
 iron. We have woman's magazines and news- 
 papers, and woman's corners, .and woman's 
 supplements to great dailies, and woman's clubs 
 and conventions and congresses, and a woman's 
 revision of the Bible, and a religious cult 
 established by a woman, principally for women. 
 The Pilgrim Mothers having been non- 
 progressive in their day, a movement has been 
 organized to rescue them from obscurity, and 
 to compel equal mention for them with the 
 Pilgrim Fathers. We have woman doctors, 
 and lawyers, and drummers and undertakers. 
 We are industrously building up a separate 
 literature for woman, strictly antiseptic and 
 free from coarse rude things. Letters are 
 becoming Bokized — male and female created 
 he them. Perhaps the time will come when 
 we have sufficiently segregated woman from the 
 great human family, that it will be considered 
 as improper for men and women to read each
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 169 
 
 other's literature, as it Is now for them to wear 
 each other's clothes. The Expurgated Novel 
 has appeared, evidently censored by the Order 
 of Decayed Clergymen. Ladles' magazines are 
 edited with the camera, and the kodac is 
 mightier than the pen. The Genius of Tatting 
 ig* at the helm. With all this favour to The 
 Young Person, the newspaper still brings its 
 daily muck of crime into our homes; although 
 but lately Dickens' novels were excluded from 
 a New England public library as immoral. 
 Having once reaped so well in our field of folly, 
 Dickens, if he could return would get good 
 gleanings from the aftermath of that field. 
 
 But perhaps Dickens would be best 
 charmed with Chicago — behemoth, biggest 
 born of cities, the chief shrine in the Gospel of 
 Bigness. Here, as In all other places where the 
 sole of his un blest British feet should seek 
 rest, he would be compelled to "see the 
 town." This rite of American hospitality 
 would not be omitted, either in Chicago, or 
 Oshkosh, Kalamazoo or Topeka. No matter 
 what the town was, or how" little there was to 
 see, he would have to undergo this supreme 
 ordeal. He would have to go and gaze 
 admiringly at factories and shops and other
 
 170 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 monuments to civic pride. Seeing the town in 
 Chicago would certainly embrace the stock- 
 yards, where as the prideful native informs all 
 strangers, they kill a hog a second, the year 
 round. The reporters would give out that he 
 was "very much impressed with Chicago." 
 That is the way in Chicago; the traveler from 
 Mars, the New Zealander, the man from poor 
 old London, and from poorer old New York, is 
 always "very much impressed" when he reaches 
 Chicago. 
 
 If the wayfaring stranger is not apparently 
 impressed offhand and at first blush, the priests 
 of the Gospel of Bigness have this formula of 
 attack. First inform him that Chicago has 
 two millions of people, and that fifty years ago 
 it was a village of log cabins. This ought to 
 fetch him, but if it fail, then refer to the 
 Chicago Fire, and to the New Chicago spring- 
 ing Phoenix-like from its ashes. If he be still 
 stubborn-kneed, bring on the Stock Yards 
 with its toll of death, or the tunnel under the 
 lake — that wonder of the world twentv-five 
 years ago. If he remain obdurate, the new 
 thirty million dollar sewer may fetch him. If 
 everything else fails, he must succumb to the 
 World's Fair. This is Chicago's chef-d'oeuvre.
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 171 
 
 On this subject look out for the inquisitors, for 
 if you have not seen this wonder, you will have 
 meted to you supreme pity and contempt. 
 You will be made to wish that the Fair had 
 been swallowed up before you heard of it. 
 However, this would not ease your pain, for 
 ever after it would be spoken of as the greatest 
 swallowing-up in history. Dickens would find 
 the Great Fire still celebrated with rejoicings, 
 and lurid woodcut flames in the newspapers. 
 The Fire has really lost all the advantages it 
 once had as a public calamity, but its fame for 
 Bigness will endure forever. From the Chicago 
 point of view, pity and contempt for New York 
 rises to the sublime; the island city is a mere 
 wart on the face of the earth. 
 
 It is a trait of municipal callowness to brag. 
 London and Paris never yell their brags at one 
 another. Their secure position does not need 
 to be continually asserted. Let a journalistic 
 wag in New York fling a grotesque gibe at 
 Chicago and she arises in majesty and pours 
 vitriol on her decrepit rival. I quote from 
 memory a waggish leader on Chicago that 
 appeared in a New York paper : 
 
 As you approach Chicag-o, she becomes 
 foully manifest by a dull, livid cloud that
 
 172 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 obscures the sky. You burst into this 
 mephitic drapery, feeling as thoug-h you had 
 tumbled into a sewer. * * * It is a common 
 thing- to see her merchant princes in their 
 shirt sleeves sitting- on the front porches of 
 their palatial homes enjoying- an evening- 
 smoke. * * * The knife-swallowing act 
 can still be seen at the hotels. The Gent 
 flourishes in Chicag-o — it is his natural home. 
 Few Chicago families have grandparents; 
 they cannot afford to. 
 
 The Home Guards in Chicago took this 
 waggery seriously. They asserted that Chicago 
 was as good as anybody, and that her pedigree, 
 sanitation and manners were A. 1. 
 
 These are the reflections of new readings 
 of American Notes. If Dickens could come 
 again, he would find a nation mellowed and 
 ripened with the years. He would find that 
 the old order had given way to the new. He 
 would find cities provincial and rustic then, 
 cosmopolitan now. He would find a national 
 life and ambition broad and catholic, not 
 narrow and jealous. He would find a nation 
 that remembers slavery as a horrible dream is 
 remembered in the clear light of mid-noon, a 
 nation purified by war, and the long, smoulder-
 
 AMERICAN NOTES 173 
 
 ing embers of that war, dead and lifeless. He 
 would find us able to laugh at the follies and 
 vices he mocked. He would find the great 
 republic of the west living in happy amity with 
 its mother land, the old hatreds and bickerings 
 gone forever.
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE. 
 
 THE critic who ventures discussion of 
 American literature, risks an encounter 
 with the Intense x\merican. The jurisdic- 
 tion of this national policeman is to see that 
 the patriotism of his countrymen suffers no 
 diminution or abatement. Of late he has paid 
 some attention to the literary part of his 
 authority. He insists on running the American 
 Flag up in the library, as a lighthing rod to 
 protect American authors from any chance 
 thunderbolts of criticism. The British critic is 
 especially warned to keep off the green growth 
 of American letters. Our watchman's oath of 
 allegiance to American authors, excludes loyalty 
 to all others, and so he becomes an uncomfort- 
 able and uncompromising person. I have long 
 wanted to criticise Longfellow for the didactic 
 character of some of his poems, and the ticketed 
 and labeled moral that is so often intruded. A 
 good tale is often spoiled by the intrusive moral. 
 If it were not rank treason I would like to say 
 
 174
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 175 
 
 that Hiawatha as a poem is partly spoiled 
 because of its form as a long monotonous chant 
 in which the refrain of the unvariant lines is 
 early worn out, and thenceforth becomes a 
 weariness. We learn from the Intense American 
 that some of our authors have Intense Ameri- 
 canism; that Bryant was a "thorough 
 American," and that a "spirit of True 
 Americanism breathes in Longfellow." These 
 awe-inspiring terms not being defined, we may 
 take them to be simply an exercise in phrase- 
 mongering. 
 
 Perhaps after all, this True, this 
 Thorough, this Intense Americanism, is only 
 a State of Mind, in which Patriotism uplifts 
 itself into a seventh heaven by simply tugging 
 at its boot-straps. The vocabulary of uncritical 
 adulation in Europe does not seem to have an 
 equivalent term. He would be a daring idolator 
 indeed who should insist that Dickens, or 
 Thackeray, or Reade were gifted with Intense 
 Britishism, for they committed many treasons 
 by attacking every British institution from the 
 House of Lords down to the dinners of snobs. 
 It is difficult to discover that Cervantes had 
 True Castileanism, or Plato True Greeceianism, 
 or Dante True It^dianism. Our own Brander
 
 176 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Mathews has set us some lessons in literary 
 patriotism, the humour of which seems uncon- 
 scious on his part. Thus does he warn youngest 
 readers against the deadly snare of British 
 literature : 
 
 It cannot be said too often or too 
 emphatically that the British are foreig^ners, 
 and that their ideals in life, in literature, in 
 politics, in taste, in art, are not our ideals. 
 From this author we also learn that it is: 
 In consequence of the wholesome 
 Americanism imparted in the school room, 
 that American boys and girls have increased 
 their demand for American books. 
 Foolish Americans have always had the 
 same weakness for foreign authors, that they 
 have for foreign goods, and this unnatural 
 appetite must be checked by authority. The 
 sad admission must be made that it is too late 
 to put a tariff on British brains — the serpent 
 has already crept in. The Dogberrys of our 
 literary police will call out in the street, but 
 despite their warnings, vagrom Englishmen 
 will to some extent still commit breaches of our 
 peace in prose and verse. I refuse to thrill over 
 the spectacle of the American Youth becoming 
 so infected with True Americanism of the
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 177 
 
 Brander Mathews kind that he rapidly turns 
 to American authors. If there is any one 
 primal and unchanging element in the character 
 of the American Youth, it is his disregard of 
 the authors who write his books. Nor does he 
 care very much about the exact locus in quo 
 of his fiction. Robi?tson Crusoe, The Swiss 
 Family Robinson, and Tom Brown, mean 
 just as much to an American boy as to an 
 English boy. Such books have no nationality; 
 they are written for the universal boy. For like 
 reasons the Eton boy could gloat over Tom^ 
 Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, without 
 disloyalty to the Crown. 
 
 So many of us Yankees are Jacobites at 
 heart, drinking secretly to the king over the 
 water; we find creative genius where we can, 
 undeterred by the True American. Our nation 
 drones through one generation in deadly peace, 
 hearing no sound but that of mill and loom, 
 and the pleasant tinkle of little verses. No 
 minstrel of our own breaks the silence, but 
 from across the seas comes a strain of daring 
 music from England's new singer. The 
 majestic Recessional has set her heart afire and 
 made us wish that heaven w^ould send us such 
 a poet. This poem would have an equal
 
 178 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 appeal for the Pharaohs, for Moses and Aaron, 
 for the nations of later times, that grow 
 drunken with power. It has the measured 
 majesty of the speech of the prophets when 
 they foretold the doom of nations. It is a lost 
 fragment from Jeremiah or Isaiah. It has a 
 Scriptural eloquence, sonorous, uplifting, called 
 from the clearer hill-tops to the valleys below. 
 It is a battle hymn and also a hymn of peace 
 for the time when battles are over. It seems 
 to close the century with the sound we have 
 been listening for. This singer surely does 
 not belong to the puddering rout of birth-day 
 ode-makers who periodically sing lullabys to the 
 English people. Perhaps he stole his fire from 
 strange lands where he wandered, loving every 
 spot where there was a man alive. Was there 
 some alchemy in the branding Indian sun that 
 made his soul great so that he could stand 
 stern-browed at England's jubilee and tell her 
 in Homeric verse that all her pomp was one 
 with Nineveh and Tyre? This psalm is his 
 title deed to Westminster. None but he could 
 smite the chords with might, as there was but 
 one in that heroic test of long ago, who could 
 bend the great bow of Ulysses and make the 
 string "sound sweetly as the swallow's song."
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 179 
 
 The lines of Coleridge seem meant for this 
 music: 
 
 And now 'twas like all instruments, 
 
 Now like a lonely flute ; 
 And now it is an ang-el's song 
 
 That makes the heavens be mute. 
 
 We would like to feel that he owed some 
 debt to New England, where he tarried awhile, 
 but it is plain that he is English to the core, a 
 child of the Thames, and not of the Ganges or 
 the Merrimac. A little later when our ambi- 
 tion was leaping ocean barriers he sobered us 
 by telling how basely or how nobly we might 
 bear The White Man's Burden, 
 
 Shall we shut any part of this inspiration 
 from our ears because it did not come from the 
 banks of the Hudson or the Mississippi? 
 Could our army of flag-wavers with their 
 artificial devices for manufacturing artificial 
 patriotism, so move a great race? Meanwhile 
 Brander Mathews and his constabulary will 
 continue to pick their flints and fight Bunker 
 Hifl over again against the British invader. 
 
 The even-blooded American who does not 
 care whether an author has the ingredient of 
 True Americanism in his inkwell or not, will 
 stiU claim free trade rights with British litera-
 
 180 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ture. Perhaps this weakness of Intense 
 Americanism is responsible for the belief, 
 current in certain quarters that A Man With- 
 out a Country, is a great romance. This 
 patriotic sermon — this high class Fourth of 
 July oration has been given the title of the 
 Great American Story. It is really quite inter- 
 esting and instructive for fifteen-year-olds. It 
 is the history of a youth, who in a moment of 
 silly pique, being nagged by his captors, said 
 that he wished he might never hear of the 
 United States again. This was only the bitter 
 froth of his real sin, for he had intrigued with 
 Aaron Burr against his country, and that 
 fascinating traitor had woven him tight in his 
 web. The Powers-That-Be could forgive the 
 real treason, and let the head traitor go free, 
 but they could not forgive the boy's petulant 
 lack of lip service. So they sent him on the high 
 seas, where he wandered for many weary years a 
 remorseful derelict, and by great command he 
 was never to hear his country spoken of. They 
 adopted towards him an Americanized version 
 of the punishment of the Wandering Jew and 
 of Tantalus, until old age came and death 
 relieved him of his pain. This a pretty story 
 with a moral as obvious as a mountain. Later 
 
 1
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 181 
 
 editions of It are spoiled somewhat by the 
 egotism of authorship, which impels Mr. Hale 
 to explain that it is a myth, and his reasons 
 for writing It and all about the lesson that it 
 teaches. But the moral somewhat loses its 
 flavour with the callow^est youth, when he sees 
 around him many patriots who wave the Old 
 Flag with one hand w^hile they reach for a fat 
 appropriation or a swindling government 
 contract with the other. Aaron Burr at least 
 did not buy legislatures and boards of aldermen. 
 
 The moral seems to be superficially, that 
 to be immune, you need only shape your 
 schemes for the destruction of the institutions 
 of your country to the prevailing fashion. You 
 can then found an orphan asylum or a great 
 university, and the hats will fly ofF as you go by. 
 
 All this may be thought a by-path from 
 books, but human life is stretched along the by- 
 ways as well as along the main traveled roads. 
 This preface brings to mind some Americans 
 who have not made a strutting parade of their 
 patriotism. In example of this we have such 
 Americans as Lowell, whose patriotism and 
 love of country had no dross upon it; whose 
 scholarship was as broad and generous as the 
 seas that wash our shores; who never penned
 
 182 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 provincial and rustic cant about True 
 Americanism ; who loved books as a man and 
 not as an American, and who could love a book 
 neither more nor less because of the nationality 
 of the author ; who held close fellowship with 
 the great of every land without a thought that 
 it made him any the less an American. With 
 him the world of letters had no narrowing 
 partition lines that could separate Shakespeare, 
 Cervantes and Moliere from Hawthorne and 
 Poe and Emerson and make one less than the 
 other. The dead who sleep at Westminster 
 were his blood brothers. With him we can 
 safely place Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and 
 Holmes. The fame of these rests on their 
 genius and not on the accident of nationality. 
 The many influences that may have somewhat 
 dwarfed American scholarship, have not 
 modified Lowell's genius. He would have 
 honoured any land. As a poet and essayist 
 he had a ripened wit and learning that places 
 him as the first of American scholars. He had 
 a broader and more varied scholarship than 
 either Holmes or Emerson. He entered into 
 the death grapple with slavery with a stern 
 and knightly courage and ardour that never 
 swerved or turned aside. His words were
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 183 
 
 "battles for freedom," when freedom most 
 needed defenders. He was the peer of England's 
 greatest scholars, and his fame will brighten 
 with the years. 
 
 New soils do not always fatten genius. In 
 a new land the activities of the people are 
 expended in subduing the wilderness, in 
 building great cities, and in developing material 
 resources. With this justification it should be 
 no blemish on our patriotism that we esteem 
 Tennyson as greater than Longfellow, and 
 Scott than Cooper. It should not shame us 
 that we find a richer, deeper tone in Caledonia 
 and Bannockburn, and that they crowd so 
 closely in our affections the songs of our own 
 lands. We have much didactic verse and dainty 
 verse and here and there an anthem full of 
 power, but few of our poets have put such 
 inspirations into verse as Scott, and Tennyson, 
 Burns, and Kipling. It may be that Columbia 
 lingers too long in the market place listening to 
 the music of the ticker and the song of the 
 stockjobber, forgetting the dreams and inspira- 
 tions that can alone make her children great. 
 
 Is it not a question whether our battle 
 hymn has yet been written? Yankee Doodle 
 is a silly jingle; The Star Spangled Banner
 
 184 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 is of limited compass, Marching Through 
 
 Georgia, and some other war songs are a mere 
 
 matter of music without fit words, and besides 
 
 they cannot be as well sung in Georgia as in 
 
 Wisconsin. Few of our patriotic songs will be 
 
 long remembered ^llthough they are dressed in 
 
 stirring music for the mob. They have but a 
 
 spark of that immortal fire that blazes in 
 
 Kipling's latest verse, or in Tennyson's epic, 
 
 the battle of the one against the fifty-three. 
 
 Our Spanish War has no poet, although it has 
 
 inflicted upon us any amount of doggerel and 
 
 raphsodical music. There was no residium of 
 
 verse after our war of 1812, and the Mexican 
 
 war was not provocative of poetry. Perhaps 
 
 the American Muse was ashamed of that 
 
 conquest and remained silent even over the 
 
 glories of Chapultepec and Monterey. I had 
 
 almost forgotten a song however, with some 
 
 fine lines in it written by one Hoffman : 
 
 We were not many, we who pressed 
 
 Beside the brave who fell that day: 
 
 But who of us has not confessed 
 
 He'd rather share their warrior rest 
 
 Then not have been at Monterey. 
 
 This seems to be the solitary poet of the 
 
 Mexican War. Who hath remembrance of him
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 185 
 
 now? In our first struggle for freedom, no 
 Koernor turned the soldier's barracks into 
 temples where liberty was deified in song. The 
 battle against slavery called out some stormy 
 verse, yet how little we now remember of the 
 scathing passion, the tender, burning words, 
 that Whittier and Longfellow breathed over 
 the wrongs of our bondmen. Some of our 
 jewels it is true are covered with later rubbish. 
 Like a dimly remembered song heard in remote 
 childhood is that eloquent fragment of 
 Emerson's commencing: 
 
 By the rude bridg-e that arched the flood. 
 
 Joaquin Miller's Song of Peace is not half 
 so well known as the Recessional. We seem 
 to miss the nearer music and remember best 
 the rival lines of Scott and Burns and Kipling. 
 
 Upon what meat do these islanders feed 
 that they have such power to charm us with 
 their songs,, and make us forget old wrongs, 
 old feuds and old battles? It may be their 
 ocean empire with its outposts on every main. 
 The declamations of our schoolboys bind the 
 race together and annul the bitterness sown by 
 politicians. When we turn from the American 
 poet to his English likeness we are apt to find 
 an enlarged edition.
 
 186 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Whittier's poetry is a crystal winding 
 brook, reflecting summer days and moonlit 
 nights, and the leaf and flower of forest and 
 meadow. But Tennyson's verse is a river 
 running in stormier measure, and mirroring a 
 larger life. Nature has dealt kindly with us; 
 she has given us sunnier days and mightier 
 lakes and rivers, but in partial mood she has 
 added an Attic savour to the wind that blows 
 across the island kingdom that our more arid 
 breezes have not. The Mississippi Valley lacks 
 several things to make it a place of poetic 
 inspiration. Its mountain fringes lie a thousand 
 miles apart with a flat between. It has no 
 ruins, no traditions, no history except the new 
 and yeasty product begun since our possession 
 of it. Very early, no doubt the human family 
 sent out some meager outposts to this continent. 
 A thousand generations have since flitted 
 through its forests, yet they have died like the 
 cave bear and made no sign. Their literary 
 remains consist in a few attenuated traditions. 
 Even Cooper's book, or artificial Indian could 
 furnish no theme for the poet. Longfellow 
 tried to fuse this stubborn personality of the 
 Red Brother into song, with something of a 
 success considering the material, but the form
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 187 
 
 of his verse is a long, oft-repeated chant, with 
 the monotonous rhythm of the prayer-drums at 
 a Chippewa corn dance. At such a festival, 
 the prayer-drums booming through the wilder- 
 ness, typify the Indian character. It is an 
 unchanging, ceaseless roll that carries with it 
 the somber unchanging history of the race. It 
 has no vital, living music in it. It belongs to 
 and is a part of the unchanging forests and 
 prairies, and the endless flow of lonely streams 
 where nature broods alone over her own and 
 all things remain as in the first day. Centuries 
 of silence and shadow have passed over this 
 race, and yet its history can be read in a few 
 scattered arrow heads. Such a people could 
 not fatten a soil with legend and story. 
 
 I fancy Scott and Burns would have sung 
 no songs had they been born on Bark River 
 Flats, their only indigenous inspirations an 
 occasional flint spear point, or an ancient Indian 
 trail blazed through the forest. They owed all 
 to the mountains of Scotland, her heathery 
 hills and moors, her tarns and brooks peopled 
 with the legends of men outworn. For them a 
 thousand rude singers from the cave-man down 
 had been building a rich alluvium of romance 
 and story. In such a soil poets grow spontan-
 
 188 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 eously and involuntarily. Poetry is an exotic 
 in a flat country and not of natural growth. 
 Mountains have always been a great boon to 
 letters; the gods dw^elt on a mountain, and 
 the muses on a high hill. The level plains and 
 flat surfaces of earth have always been the 
 abode of cattle herders and uninspired men. 
 Burns was not a sudden creation ; his poetry 
 was in the nature of inherited wealth. He was 
 the heir of many singers, and all the currents 
 of Scottish poetry from the earliest times 
 converged in him. Whittier says: 
 
 I saw the same blithe day return, 
 The same sweet fall of even. 
 
 That rose on Wooded Cragfie-burn, 
 And sank on Crystal Devon. 
 
 I matched with Scotland's heathery hills 
 
 The sweetbriar and the clover, 
 With Ayr and Doon my native rills 
 
 Their wood-hymns chanting- over. 
 
 Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time. 
 
 So Bonny Doon but tarry, 
 Blot out the epic's stately rhyme, 
 
 But spare his Highland Mary. 
 Whittier wrote some of the sweetest minor
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 189 
 
 poetry in our language, but he could not 
 transplant to the banks of the Susquehanna, 
 or the Connecticut, the ruined castle of Scotland 
 with its thousand-year-old volume of human 
 life, or the myriad legends that throng the 
 banks of the Doon and the Ayr. His song to 
 Burns is a tribute to the richer life, to the 
 deeper power and passion of Scotland's poet. 
 It is the generous tribute of a poet who stands 
 in a new land barren of tradition, to the land 
 hoary with age and recorded legend. 
 
 In our first half-century we had great 
 soldiers and orators and statesmen, but the 
 crop of letters was scanty. There must have 
 been many unsung Odysseys in the lives of 
 those hardy adventurers who came with Raleigh 
 and Smith, and whose descendants later drifted 
 down the Ohio and the Mississippi and over 
 the plains, driving the Indian and the buffalo 
 before them. But we had no Homers to put 
 this pioneer wonder-land into verse. Life was 
 too stern and exacting and pitched in too 
 intense a key, so we built literature slowly in 
 our pioneer age. This early poverty had its 
 effect on the really great builders like Longfellow 
 and Cooper, who came later.
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 
 
 IT is now more than sixty years since the 
 death of John Marshall, yet each 
 
 recurring year brings for his character some 
 new praise. The danger that confronts the 
 eulogist of this eminent American is that of 
 falling into the weak commonplace of conven- 
 tional biography. It is not with such trite 
 praise that we best remember him. We appoint 
 this day for his remembrance; we turn again 
 to his life and work, to the written page where 
 his toil and genius stand recorded ; we adjure 
 the younger men of our generation to consider 
 his character anew, and to take guidance from 
 him as the greatest and worthiest example 
 which our profession has given them. So we 
 frame his eulogy more earnestly than by ordered 
 and studied speech. 
 
 The lives of many of those who have made 
 a considerable figure in history need at least a 
 century of perspective, for no nearer judgment 
 avails to properly place them. Such is the 
 
 193
 
 194 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 force of habit and suggestion that the claims 
 of restless Mediocrity, espoused by the foolish 
 and thoughtless, fret and hamper us long after 
 our better judgment has pronounced its 
 condemnation. Dr. Johnson once said: "It 
 is wonderful, sir, with how little real superiority 
 of mind men can make an eminent figure in 
 public." Many modern instances prove the 
 truth of this observation. Often the quack and 
 the mountebank are unmasked only after death 
 has been long in the enjoyment of its mortal 
 reversion. Some fames suffer so much diminu- 
 tion in Time's winnowing that we are taught 
 not to trust the biographers overmuch. We 
 finally come to know many of them for what 
 they are, — masters of fiction, high priests of 
 humbug, cant, and palaver, their gospel that 
 of the little, their creed that of triviality. They 
 form the donkey chorus in the drama of history; 
 they weave haloes for smug Mediocrity, and 
 pretentious Dullness owes them all its bays. 
 They are the valets of deified shams, dressing 
 them in the lion's hide; they are mere tailors 
 of historical figures with a plentiful supply of 
 padding. They artistically conceal this blemish 
 and that deformity; they accentuate every 
 trifling advantage, and virtues and traits which
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 195 
 
 are but commonplace they adorn so that the}- 
 shall appear grand and stately. They are 
 courtiers, bowing low before kings of shreds 
 and patches. They first ostentatiously ask, 
 "what is truth? " And then make no search 
 for an answer, but hunt up and mass together 
 as many tawdry falsehoods as will serve their 
 turn, and call their work, — Biography. So it 
 happens that the accidents of birth who become 
 kings and the accidents of politics who many 
 times become presidents or otherwise achieve 
 great place are largely tailor-made. 
 
 The courtiers of the bed-chamber who 
 were graciously permitted to look on while the 
 king of France awoke from his morning slumbers 
 and made his toilet, were so overawed bv the 
 divine condescension that they saw nothing 
 vulgar or grotesque in the ceremony; the king 
 in his night-gear was as awful and majestic 
 to them as the kinsj in ermine. For in the 
 biographical circles of kings and rulers, the 
 sense of humour stands in arrested development. 
 Our biographers who write "Lives," of 
 presidents and of temporary notables are 
 unconscious purveyors of exquisite satire. They 
 spare neither age nor youth in their idol-making 
 task. The real boy, fated to be prCvsident or
 
 196 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 to command listening senates probably stole 
 melons, played truant, fought with his mates, 
 and passed through the silly season of 
 hobbledehoyhood as other boys. But the 
 biographer takes this boy in hand and he 
 emerges a different being. In his bright and 
 ornate lexicon the melon episode is surrounded 
 by all the glamour which fiction attaches to 
 the slightly irregular performances of Robin 
 Hood ; the boy-battles grow from mere heated 
 discussion over a strenuous game of marbles, to 
 avengements of wrong and injustice worthy of 
 Sir Galahad. If this boy, in training for fame, 
 is called on to perform the plain duty of telling 
 who stole the jam, any finesse in statement on 
 his part, gives clear promise of the future 
 Talleyrand, or the eminent lawyer. The tallow 
 dip by which he breathlessly devours yellow- 
 backed fiction becomes a sacred flame in the 
 light of which he hangs enamoured over Horace 
 and Homer. When the tailors are through 
 with this book, or artificial boy, his own mother 
 would not know him. Consider him also in 
 biography, grown to manhood, and his kindred 
 and all his belongings. The faithful kodac of 
 the biographer is turned upon his ox and his 
 ass, his horse and his dog, his children, his
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 197 
 
 wife and his remote ancestors. The latter are 
 dragged from their forgotten graves and made 
 to give prophecy of the greatness of their 
 illustrious descendant. His children and grand- 
 children are ennobled, and compared with them, 
 Little Lord Fauntleroy would be a mere street 
 gamin. Innumerable helpless infants, and even 
 horses and dogs are cursed and weighted with 
 his name. The courtiers of the bed-chamber 
 chronicle him going and coming, rising up and 
 lying down, eating and drinking, and thinking 
 — even when of this last there is no visible 
 evidence. His wife is always the queenliest of 
 her sex and has poems dedicated to her in 
 her own right. If she warm his slippers or 
 administer to his wants in sickness, Genial 
 Jenkins a-tiptoe at the door, writes himself 
 awe-striken at this instance of wifely devotion. 
 Worst of all, the easy commonplaces of the 
 Exalted One become pearls of great price, and 
 are published as Gems of Thought. Such is 
 biography as it is written. Macauley's New 
 Zealander who is to sit on London Bridge and 
 gaze on the ruins of St. Paul's, will, if he fare far 
 enough, inspect the ruins of our ex-presidents 
 and ex-statesmen, and give to a distant age the 
 benefit of much valuable rumination.
 
 198 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 While biographers thus elevate men of little 
 consequence, they often do what they can to 
 spoil the fame of really great men, by servile 
 adulation and a surfeit of superlatives. Ever)'^ 
 hero is bound to have a Bos well to make him 
 appear both excessively wise and excessively 
 foolish. Thus it is that we owe much to 
 biography for the prescriptive rights which 
 certain ancient lies acquire to pass for truth. 
 But the art of biography has never been able 
 to spoil the fame of John Marshall, and the 
 multitude of biographers have never cheapened 
 or vulgarized any act of his. Whether in 
 school-boy garb poring over Milton and 
 Shakespeare, or as a soldier of the infant 
 colonies at Brandywine, or in the blood-stained 
 snows of Valley Forge, or serving their councils 
 when peace came, or as the master-mind of our 
 great tribunal for many years, he was every 
 inch a man. 
 
 It is not given to any other profession in 
 this country to have one universally accorded, 
 pre-eminent name. We could not agree on the 
 greatest soldier, poet, philosopher, novelist, or the 
 greatest statesman or preacher; but I think we 
 would all name Marshall as our greatest jurist. 
 
 One of the qualities of hero-worship is its
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 199 
 
 demand for a constant succession of heroes. At 
 fifteen we devour Plutarch's Lives, and the 
 deeds of his worthies will not let ys sleep. We 
 kindle over the showier pageants of history, over 
 Patrick Henry and Clay, and all those notables 
 who have figured in some dramatic climax. 
 Grown older, we demand that our idols be of 
 greater proof. We find, as Emerson says, that 
 "history is made up of the biographies of a few 
 stout souls." Mingled with these, we see many 
 pretenders at the work of history-making, yet it 
 sometimes takes us half a life-time to separate 
 what is true and stable from that which is 
 pretentious and false. But it is a fine quality in 
 the character of Marshall that whether we 
 come to him early or late, he always has for us 
 the same unchanging manhood and serenity, 
 the same moral elevation. 
 
 Bacon took bribes. Our admiration for 
 Lord Eldon flags when we find that he set his 
 face against every reform proposed for mis- 
 governed England, that he had no principles, 
 that he urged religious persecution, was 
 ignorant of Hterature and of systems of juris- 
 prudence, and was a toadying place-hunter. If 
 we turn to Lord Mansfield, we finally come to 
 know that he was cold and unfeefing, and
 
 200 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 lacked moral courage and that his love of justice 
 was not ingrained, but a matter of professional 
 training of a like quality with the love of some 
 men for philanthropy; they love business so 
 well that they make their good works a matter 
 of business and not of innate benevolence. If 
 we attempt hero-worship with Lord Thurlow, 
 our ardour is checked by the knowledge that 
 he thought the patriot Home Tooke should be 
 pilloried rather than imprisoned, because he 
 was of sedentary habits, and imprisonment 
 would be no punishment to him; by his puerile 
 plan for subjugating the colonies by a writ of 
 scire facias and by his opposition to all inter- 
 ference with the slave trade. Even grand old 
 Coke was brutal and unfair towards the helpless 
 victims of oppressive laws whom he prosecuted 
 for the crown. As for Blackstone, a careful 
 study of his life does not entirely impress us 
 with his scholarship as a lawyer or his breadth 
 as a man. Nor can Lord Hardwicke's fame 
 claim our homage when we have read of him 
 that; — "He was undoubtedly an excellent 
 Chancellor, and might have been thought a 
 great man, had he been less avaricious, less 
 proud; less unlike a gentleman. " 
 
 Coming nearer to our own time, if we
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES - 201 
 
 thrill over the eloquence of Pinkney we shudder 
 when we find him wearing kid gloves in court. 
 Contemporaneous verdict wrote Ichabod on the 
 front of the god-like Webster because he did 
 not bravely meet the storm that was gathering 
 over the question of slavery. 
 
 So we ruefully survey the broken idols of 
 boyish years, thankful if some salvage of 
 character be left out of these many wrecks. 
 But Marshall is not one of these; we still 
 stand before him reverently and uncovered, our 
 faith unshaken, our admiration and respect 
 unchanged. As a practitioner at the bar, he 
 was patient and considerate with the court, and 
 did not, so far as can be learned, ever make the 
 near-by tavern a court of dernier ressort, in 
 which to prosecute a blasphemous appeal from 
 an adverse judgment. Nor was he bumptious 
 and arrogant with the court, seeking to gain 
 by rudeness and noise what he could not win 
 with argument. Nor did he wring unjust 
 decisions from a weak and halting judge by 
 overawing him with his reputation or superior 
 learning, or by quoting to him the street 
 opinion of Mr. So-and-so, an eminent lawyer, 
 (whom he knew the judge looked on as 
 infallible), to the effect that the opposite party
 
 202 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 had no case. While he had a natural wit 
 sufficient for all purposes, he did not wear it 
 out by continual exercise in court so that it 
 became as laggard as a founderous horse, (as 
 was the wont of many lawyers in his day, and 
 since.) Nor did he encourage attempt at wit 
 in court on the part of lawyers without wit, 
 who driveled in pointless wooden jests under 
 the impression that they were funny. Nor did 
 he laugh servilely and hilariously at the 
 attempted wit of the judge, or flatter or cajole 
 him, but treated him in all respects as if he 
 were a mere human being. Nor did he try to 
 entrap the judge at //^^/-/r^^s into committing 
 an error against him which should work a 
 reversal of the cause on appeal. Nor did he 
 soar on eagle wings in argument just for the 
 sake of soaring, or tear a passion to tatters, to 
 very rags, in order to split the ears of the 
 groundlings. He never laid himself open to the 
 rebuke which Baron Alderson once administered 
 to a young lawyer who was soaring into the 
 empyrean, — "Don't go any higher, for you are 
 already out of the jurisdiction of the court. " 
 With Marshall the best eloquence was the 
 eloquence of simplicity, of naturalness, of ear- 
 nestness and love of truth, unspoiled by self-
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 203 
 
 consciousness or vanity. He listened patiently 
 to the most foolish and verbose client, knowing 
 that now and then, comes a man into a lawyer's 
 office who must first give the history of his own 
 and his wife's relations, and of a previous suit 
 he has had, and of a highway robbery and a 
 murder case that once occurred in his neighbour- 
 hood, before he talks of the case he came to 
 consult about. Beloved old Fuller thus 
 describes these banal clients : — "Many country 
 people must be impertinent, before they can be 
 pertinent, and cannot give evidence about a 
 hen, but they must first begin it'in the egg." 
 There was a like freedom from error in 
 Marshall's conduct when he came to the 
 bench. As a judge he was patient and ready 
 to listen to the most tedious barrister, knowing 
 that now and then even the most tedious v/ill 
 let drop a few words of sense and pertinence. 
 I cannot find however, that he had the saving 
 sense of humour of Chief Justice Gibson, who 
 once playfully boasted that he had achieved the 
 height of his ambition, namely, — "To be able 
 to keep my eyes fixed on a dull speaker while 
 my thoughts are employed with more agreeable 
 objects, — this is certainly a great judicial 
 triumph. " Some of my experiences in arguing
 
 204 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 cases, have led me to believe that other judges 
 than Gibson have acquired this happy facility. 
 Marshall had the first qualification of a good 
 judge, that of being a good listener. He heard 
 the last word of the wordiest barrister, knowing 
 that it might contain the whole matter. He 
 interrupted counsel sometimes with pertinent 
 suggestion and interrogation, but never for the 
 purpose of airing his own learning, and only 
 that he might the better elucidate the subject 
 in hand. He never delighted in small shows of 
 authority over the members of his bar, and it 
 is certain that when he presided at nisi prius, 
 he did not aim to impress the galleries, or use 
 the occasion of an application for a continuance 
 to harangue the rear benches. Nor did he 
 play politics in court intending that the benefit 
 should return to him in the shape of political 
 advancement or favour. His character was such 
 as to assure us that no matter what judicial 
 position he might occupy, he would never curry 
 favour with the people by disloyalty to the bar. 
 The striking feature of his court, was the 
 absence of hurry. The court seemed to have 
 plenty of time, and calmly and leisurely took 
 up the cases before it and heard them exhaust- 
 ively presented before passing on them. The
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 205 
 
 modern practice of writing opinions while you 
 wait, was happily not in vogue then. MARSHALL 
 was not haunted by the fear of an overclogged 
 calendar, and thought it more important that 
 causes should be properly considered and 
 determined than that he should keep his 
 calendar clear. In commendation of his 
 practice, it is not too much to say that half the 
 errors that creep into the decisions of our courts 
 now, are caused by lack of time to properly 
 argue and present cases, and then by lack of 
 time on the part of the courts to consider the 
 cases and write out their opinions. We 
 feverishly and hurriedly argue cases, watching 
 the while the threatening clock, and the judges 
 listen feverishly and hurriedly also watching the 
 clock, and, still watching the clock, feverishly 
 and hurriedly write out their opinions. The 
 tyranny of the clock should be banished from 
 our courts. The blind goddess has always 
 been depicted as holding the scales and the 
 sword, but never the hour-glass. It should be 
 enough of a disability that she is blind without 
 making her travesty Father Time, by stealing 
 for her a part of his equipment. To paraphrase 
 the poet's sentiment, we should, in court, live 
 in thought, and in ripened judgment; not in
 
 206 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the shadow of the fingers on a dial. The 
 understanding of a complicated case only grows 
 to matured perfection through that growth 
 and evolution which is the law governing all 
 human endeavour. The fruits of haste in court 
 are unripe judgments, commanding no respect 
 and satisfying no obligation. Nor is undue 
 haste solely a vice of our courts of last resort. 
 We have all seen trial judges in trials involving 
 the liberty or other important rights of the 
 citizen, unduly limit jury argument, leaving 
 counsel to stumble hurriedly on, with the 
 harrassing thought that the judicial gavel 
 would at last fall inopportunely on his hopes. 
 As lawyers we should meet these encroachments 
 on our rights and duties with that rugged 
 independence that is ours as equal ministers 
 and officers of justice with the judge upon the 
 bench. It is good to turn from this picture of 
 haste to the serene atmosphere of Marshall's 
 court, where, as you may know, no haste or 
 carelessness would be tolerated. 
 
 The bar did much for MARSHALL. Before 
 him came the great lawyers of his day. There 
 came Martin and Harper, Ingersoll and Dexter, 
 and the lawyer-poet Key ; there came from the 
 west the great Kentuckian, Henry Clay, and
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 207 
 
 with him Marshall the younger; there also was 
 the exiled Emmet, who fled from his native 
 land after his brother gave up his life to English 
 justice; to that court also came Rawle and 
 Dallas, Binney and Sergeant, the eloquent 
 Pinkney, Stockton, Wirt and Adams. Early 
 in the century Webster appeared there, rugged 
 and somber as his own New England mountains, 
 a figure of heroic port, fit to hold a world in awe. 
 Some of these lawyers of Marshall's court, 
 like Swann, and the Lees, who argued scores 
 of causes before him, had not fame enough to 
 accord them a place in the enclopaedias, — those 
 dusty crypts of the immortals. So often it is 
 that the fame of the great lawyer is written in 
 the running water; you may search and you 
 shall find but his name, or a handful of dust, 
 in I know not what forgotten graveyard. It 
 was an age of saddle-bags and circuit-riding, — 
 the golden age of the American Bar. Not 
 golden in fat fees for the lawyer, but golden in 
 its wealth of high ambitions and aspirations, in 
 its leisure for study and reflection. The lawyer 
 was not ruffled or discomposed by the roar and 
 clang of a hurrying civilization. Calmly he 
 could welcome the pale midnight lamp and the 
 day of toil succeeding. The great lawyers who
 
 208 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 came to Marshall's court had the primal 
 vigour of a new race. A new heaven and a new 
 earth were in creation, and the morning song 
 of that creation made vibrant music in the heart 
 of man. The mighty youth of our nation, 
 awkward, yet strong and virile, was breaking 
 from its swaddling clothes. Life was full, and 
 warm and glorious, untrammeled by king or 
 caste, or adamantine social formations. Bunker 
 Hill and Yorktown were near at hand and the 
 tumult of the seven years' battle yet thrilled 
 the air. By farm, and forge, and shop, in the 
 pulpit, at the bar, and on the bench, were 
 found the patriots who had faced the veterans 
 of the king in the great struggle for indepen- 
 dence, and when evening came they told by 
 their firesides, again and again, the tale of 
 valour and devotion. Mother earth never before 
 cradled so heroic a race. For what it had been 
 and was to be, it was worthy the prophetic 
 benediction bestowed upon the Patriarch, 
 Abraham — "Look now towards heaven and 
 tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. 
 So shall thy posterity be. ' ' 
 
 It was already turning towards the bound- 
 less west, where unknown rivers ran, and 
 unknown mountains and plains, mocked and
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 209 
 
 beckoned it with visions of greater emprise. 
 The century was yet young when we added 
 Louisiana to our heritage, and beyond that, in 
 the gorgeous cloudland of the setting sun, lay 
 the empire of the Golden Gate. We ask now 
 in wonder, what pulsing sap of high endeavour 
 was it that sent the hardy pioneers of our race 
 over the mountain barriers, and down the 
 westward-flowing rivers, into the dark and 
 bloody ground, while yet half the seacoast was a 
 wilderness, and millions of acres there, were 
 untouched by axe or plough. "They were 
 blooded to the open and the sky; " they heard 
 the voices of the mysterious myriad-tongued 
 wilderness of the west, calling to them to come 
 farther and still farther. Through all the 
 western wild, they founded new republics. 
 To-day you might look upon a land wrapped 
 in the changeless sleep of unnumbered centuries; 
 to-morrow came, and the forest rang with the 
 sounds of the pioneer combat with nature. 
 Upon the pioneer hearthstone they kindled the 
 beacon fires, to guide the thronging tide that 
 followed after. They carried with them as their 
 ark of the covenant, the vsacred inheritance of 
 liberty and law. Under all the ranging st£irs, 
 this was the true romance, the unsung and
 
 210 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 unwritten epic, greater than that of any warrior 
 host of olden time. It vivified even the dullest 
 township records. Nature molded and bounded 
 and placed them. They took their lands, not 
 in formal squares, to delight a surveyor's 
 science, but from tree to hilltop, from river to 
 mountain, from buffalo trail to Indian trail. 
 Sometimes their title records were written in 
 blood, and a devolution of ownership from 
 father to son is told with the simple inscription, 
 — "Killed by the Indians." Their abstracts 
 of title are not the dry and tedious records that 
 we are wont to peruse as daily tasks ; the dull 
 parchment glows with the light of the blazing 
 roof-tree, and stains darker than ink, tell of 
 the awful woodland tragedy. The lawyer of 
 those infant communities carried his rifle in one 
 hand and his Coke and Blackstone in the 
 other. It was the battle of the strong, and 
 this near-b}'^ boundary line of peril and adven- 
 ture made men great. It gave Boone and his 
 fellow frontiersmen to the world of romance and 
 story; it gave Marshall, and his compeers to 
 the bench and the bar. From the loins of the 
 young republic so invigorated, sprang the great 
 lawyers who counselled with MARSHALL, and 
 aided him through many years of toil to build
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 211 
 
 that monument of learning that is our delight 
 and admiration. I think the influence of such 
 an age produced in the pioneer lawyer the 
 happiest blending of the man of action and of 
 affairs, sternly contending with the problems of 
 infant statehood, and the scholar, unhampered 
 by closet wisdom, or any of the decayed 
 scholastic regimen of older lands. The fable 
 of the ancient athletes, who, thrown to earth, 
 leaped up invigorated by the momentary contact 
 with the great mother, had in it something 
 more than fable. Men newly sprung from the 
 soil have nurtured in them best the eternal 
 harmonies of nature, and their rugged strength 
 brushes away the conventions and customs of 
 outworn men. It was this that gave the 
 Corsican adventurer power to make a new 
 science of war, and to shake the thrones of 
 Europe, while enfeebled kings and nobles stood 
 panic-stricken in trembling imbecility. 
 
 In the youth of our nation, its people were 
 given no child-age. They had the simplicity of 
 shepherd and peasant, yet theirs w^as no shep- 
 herd peace; no bucolic calm where village sports 
 and minstrel songs beguilded the time, and all 
 the currents of life ran kindly and undisturbed. 
 The old men dreamed dreams and the young
 
 212 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 men saw visions, but dream and vision alike 
 were of the Titan tasks before them. All the 
 poetry and romance that heaven ever gave to 
 the imagination of man, environed them in land 
 and sea and sky, yet they but meagerly recorded 
 these in letters. Their poets were dumb: their 
 sages did not sit by the winter's fire and tell 
 old tales, but bore the burdens of youth. 
 England and France harried our commerce on 
 the seas, more than willing in their fierce hatred 
 for each other to involve the safety of the little 
 republic. On the other side the savage 
 threatened, and every pioneer outpost became 
 an armed camp, where even the women stood 
 ready to drop the distaff and take up the rifle. 
 Domestic discord prevailed and a seething 
 ferment of conflicting- claims seemed ready to 
 destroy all that had been gained by the 
 Revolution. In this tense, overcharged atmos- 
 phere men became statesmen and warriors, 
 stern -faced and serious. 
 
 The lawyer of those days did not have 
 many books. Some one has said that we 
 should read books in order to learn to do with- 
 out them, as if in disdain of the mere slave of 
 books, who has no sufficient wisdom outside of 
 them, and whose learning degenerates into mere
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 213 
 
 pedantry, clinging weakly to line and page for 
 its faith. A companion apothegm is, — "Fear 
 the man of one book. " The Sage of Malmsbury 
 said, "If I had read as many books as other 
 persons I should probably know as little. " The 
 pioneer lawyer with his well-thumbed Blackstone 
 and Coke had to learn to do without books. 
 He was a real Robinson Crusoe, cast into a 
 bookless land, and commanded by dire necessity 
 to build and construct with native skill and wit 
 alone. Perhaps it was better so. It may be 
 doubted whether Webster would have exceeded 
 his argument in the Dartmouth College Case, 
 or in Luther vs. Borden, if he had had at his 
 command all the wealth of our libraries. We 
 are hag-ridden by the multitude of precedents. 
 They haunt our higher courts along with the 
 dread specter of The Unfinished Calendar. But 
 the curse of many books falls heaviest on the 
 bar. We have abundant proof that there are 
 law book factories running overtime, where text 
 books of the gold brick order are manufactured 
 in vast quantities. The wooden machinery of 
 manufacture is a corps of indigent young men, 
 who can each readily toss off a few text books 
 every year for a modest stipend. A mental vision 
 of the interior of one of these factories discloses
 
 214 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 long rows of young men at quarter-sawed desks, 
 with clerkly pens stuck artistically behind their 
 learned ears, turning out piece-work, their 
 hours of labour rigidly fixed by the factory 
 whistle. Each has his certificate of admission 
 to the bar hung handily before him, to which 
 he can refer for information from time to time. 
 Anon, the manager appears and gives 
 commands, — "Mr. Jones, I am astonished that 
 you have not completed that work on Constitu- 
 tional Law. You have been at it for at least 
 two months. I shall have to lay you off for 
 thirty days; Mr. Tompkins will take your 
 place. " "Mr. Smith, the Employers National 
 Defence Association, has given us an order for 
 the manufacture of their work on Contributory 
 Negligence, and you may commence it at once. 
 They sent me a list of cases which they did not 
 want cited in it and you must see that none of 
 them get in by any mistake. We must fill this 
 order in thirty days. When it is finished, I 
 have plans and specifications all ready for two 
 lines of works that you will begin on, one to be 
 called "The Vest Pocket Series, Or Law In 
 Little;" the other "Baby Text Books. " So 
 the great man passes on vscattering law right 
 and left. His knights of the road perpetrate
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 215 
 
 their genial hold-ups in our offices, and fill our 
 shelves with very much abridged and expurgated 
 sheep covered obscurities. If, having a case 
 outside the beaten rut of authority, you should 
 be subjected to the inevitable inane demand of 
 the bench for a precedent, do not make search 
 in these callow commentaries, for it will be 
 fruitless, and will only inspire you with a lethal 
 hatred of your fellow men. The enterprise of 
 our law book factory makes a fine accord with 
 that of some of our jurists, — text books while 
 you wait, and opinions while you wait. 
 
 But we willingly turn from these vexing 
 humours of the law to our earnest theme. In 
 biographical study we search far and near for 
 events that may have affected the subject of 
 our study. We eagerly interrogate excelling 
 nature for the secret of her treasure house that 
 has nurtured genius. We grope for the 
 inspirations of a great manhood not only in the 
 environment of youth, but also in the deeds of 
 ancient days — Marathon is still the nursing 
 mother of heroes, and every battle for freedom 
 breeds patriots even in distant times. The roar 
 of the patriot cannon at Bunker Hill summoned 
 a race of warrior statesmen from every walk of 
 life. No conscription or mercenary hiring
 
 216 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 compelled their devotion. In Freedom's line of 
 descent, they were the lineal heirs of Hampden 
 and Sydney. They did not stand in awe of 
 kings for their near ancestors had seen one 
 English king brought to the block, and another 
 driven forth from his kingdom an unthroned 
 exile, because of their oppressions. They felt 
 the potent spell of that earlier defiance of kingly 
 aggression that sprang up in the meadow of 
 Runnymede, and of the later confirmation of 
 what was there pledged. 
 
 Marshall was born into the world, and 
 grew up to manhood at a time when great 
 events were moving the nations. In 1755 
 England was ringed round with foes, yet on 
 the eve of her greatest achievements. She had 
 become slothful and lethargic through a long 
 period of parliamentary corruption, during 
 which the market price of a borough was five 
 thousand pounds and Walpole held in his 
 pocket the votes of the country members. 
 Rotten boroughs and sinecures were the pawns 
 of politics, and great noblemen and fawning 
 place-hunters played for them with cogged dice. 
 The Gentlemen of the Long Robe were 
 pleasantly employed in hanging their fellow 
 men for stealing rabbits and loaves of bread,
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 217 
 
 and in hunting down those mallgnants who 
 committed treason by objecting to the existing 
 order of things. The Man With the Hoe 
 patiently tilled his field, and waited and prayed 
 under skies of brass. It was in 1757, two years 
 after Marshall was born, that the elder Pitt 
 assumed leadership of the island kingdom. In 
 a short space of time under his indomitable 
 genius, the English people had changed the 
 map of the world. He supplied Frederick The 
 Great with English troops, and a vast annual 
 subsidy for his defence. In 1759 English 
 admirals defeated two French fleets in the Bay 
 of Biscay and off the coast of Portugal. Clive 
 was winning imperishable renown in India 
 against the French, and shortly the Phillipine 
 Islands fell into the hands of England. In 
 those glorious days Englishmen awoke in the 
 morning and asked exultantly "What new 
 victory to-day. " 
 
 The lion's whelp was also ranging wide in 
 the new world. With the aid of colonial troops 
 Amherst captured Ticonderoga, and Johnson 
 Niagara, while Wolf stormed the Heights of 
 Abraham and captured Quebec, and with it 
 half a continent. It was in 1762 that an 
 English and colonial force captured Havana
 
 218 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and with it the Island of Cuba. Almost in a 
 day England found herself mistress of one great 
 empire on the Ganges and another on the St. 
 Lawrence. By means of her invincible navies, 
 and the tireless grip that she maintained on the 
 mighty fortress that stands in sentineled 
 majesty at the gateway of two continents, she 
 held supremacy on the seas against all foes. At 
 Havana, Quebec, and Ticonderoga, and in 
 many bloody battles with the red men, her 
 children in the New World held her honour and 
 prowess safe. They earned with their blood a 
 better requital than she was to give them. The 
 time was soon to come when she was to 
 ruthlessly sacrifice their dearest rights at the 
 behest of a weak and foolish ministry. Even 
 in the hour of her greatest triumphs, the storm 
 was gathering that was to sweep away her 
 power in the land that Raleigh, and Penn, and 
 Smith, had w^on for her from out the unknown 
 void. Cavalier and Roundhead, Quaker and 
 Puritan, had learned too well the lessons of 
 liberty that outlive the dungeon and the 
 scaffold, to submit to all the tasks of tyranny. 
 The eloquence of Burke and Chatham could 
 not shame or deter her from her course. 
 
 The youth of Marshall was spent in this
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 219 
 
 wonder-age, this surging ferment of great 
 forces, presaging greater things to come. His 
 father, Thomas Marshall, Is said to have been 
 "A man of extraordinary vigour of mind and 
 dauntless courage. " He was the friend of 
 Washington, and was one of the first to take 
 up arms against the king. He was with 
 Washington at the crossing of the Delaware, 
 and shared In the honour of that daring exploit. 
 Father and son both, were at Brandywine, and 
 the son was also In the battles of Germantown 
 and Monmouth, and was with Washington's 
 army through that deadly winter in the snow- 
 bound camp at Valley Forge. It is our special 
 pride that in all of the recurring tragedies of war 
 through which we have passed, the soldier- 
 lawyer has borne well his part. He has won 
 the knighthood of honour on every battle-field 
 of the republic from Bunker Hill to Appomatox. 
 In no other land have those of our profession so 
 freely put off the advocate's gown and taken up 
 the sword. When our civil war came, thousands 
 of kindling youth yet In their novitiate, threw 
 down their books and hurried to the front, 
 generously exchanging the court for the camp, 
 and the peaceful vigils of the lamp for the ruder 
 vigils of the soldiers bivouac. In peril and
 
 220 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 privation they attested their devotion to their 
 country, and many of them lie buried in 
 Southern soil. Some of them returned to jjain 
 great distinction at the bar and on the bench, 
 and hold in fee the rewards of two great 
 professions. Theirs should be the three-fold 
 blessing of the Great King, — "Length of days 
 in their right hand and in their left, riches and 
 honour." Ihavefancied that this dual education 
 and experience has blended in them a broader 
 and kindlier resultant of character than is given 
 to others. Of this type of manhood was John 
 Marshall. He loved books better than war 
 but when the call to arms came, he left the 
 scholar's retirement and ease and took his 
 place with his countrymen. We give him, dead, 
 the four-fold meed of praise, — as soldier, lawyer, 
 statesman, and jurist; yet I am sure that, 
 living, he felt that heaven could make him no 
 kindlier gifts than the memories he held of 
 Brandywine and Valley Forge. 
 
 Marshall had literary leanings in his 
 earlier years, not in the direction of the law. 
 He cultivated the Muse of Poetry with at least 
 some small result in verse. He had the example 
 of the great lawyers who have occasionally 
 dropped into poetry. But with him, as with
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 221 
 
 them, it vseems to have been a mere casual and 
 accidental fault, — an instance of Homeric 
 nodding. It is true the lawyer's license covers 
 the right to borrow, and this, no doubt, can 
 be interpreted to mean that he may warm his 
 heart with the verses of other people, and adorn 
 with vernal bloom the aridities of the law. 
 Coke quaintly says of this commendable 
 practice, — "Verses at the first were invented 
 for the help of memrie, and it standeth well 
 with the gravitie of our lawyer to cite them. " 
 Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia was sometimes 
 a poet, but with him it was a mere incident of 
 the strenuous life. I think he embalmed some 
 verses in the amber of his opinions, in mere 
 frolic, as Marshall sought relaxation from the 
 cares of the bench in the game of quoits. Judge 
 Cranch was a musician, but not a poet, but he 
 did allow his son to write poetry. It is 
 unnecessary to add that the son never achieved 
 the father's fame. Judge Finch of the New 
 York Court of Appeals wrote college songs, but 
 this seems to have been a vice of youth. Often, 
 when the bar supposed Chief Justice Gibson 
 was listening, he was writing poetical skits, or 
 drawing fancy sketches. But this was probably 
 done in self defense. In early childhood Judge
 
 222 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Story was a poet, but he recovered from it 
 along with other infantile ailments, except for 
 an occasional lapse, — governed by the maxim 
 de minifnis non curat lex. It is related of 
 Marshall that in his earlier years he wrote a 
 small volume of verses, but, as his biographer 
 felicitously puts it, "He exhibited in this 
 matter the same rare good sense that character- 
 ized him in all things, he never published it ." 
 Certainly the offence was grave, yet he nobly 
 redeemed himself and afterwards lived it down. 
 In spite of these wayward examples from the 
 lives of good men and great, it is rightly 
 considered as much as a lawyer's reputation is 
 worth, to be known as a poet. The law is a 
 jealous mistress and makes wry faces at the 
 Muse of Poetry. The lawyer must busy his 
 imagination and creative talent with the nice 
 sharp quilletts of his hornbooks, baking his 
 brains in the swift fire of our multitudinous 
 reports, even though it shall give him the 
 blemish of "boiled eyes," which Dickens avers 
 he found bulging from the physiognomy of the 
 barristers of the Inns of Court. If the lawyer 
 have the literary instinct, he may build as did 
 Chitty and Cooley; he may make his briefs 
 models of clear and lucid reasoning, with noV
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 223 
 
 and then a permissive jest of such rare point as 
 that it will disturb the court in its daily 
 slumbers. All the treasures of literature are 
 his to do with what he will, and he may in the 
 divine passion of forensic argument invoke all 
 the poets and sages to do him tasks. He may 
 seek a place on the bench, and there, with the 
 aid of a- good memory to enable him not to 
 overrule to-day that v^'hich he decided yesterday, 
 lay up for himself better treasures than the 
 toys of poesy. I cannot learn that Marshall 
 ever indulged, judicially at least, in a joke. 
 The nearest he ever came to it, — and it was not 
 very near, was on one occasion when he was 
 standing on a step-ladder in the library and fell 
 to the floor under a load of books. He 
 remarked, "I have laid down the law often, 
 but this is the first time the law ever laid me 
 down." But this was in the library, with no 
 one but the librarian to witness this relaxing 
 jocularity. Marshall never gave way to any 
 like weakness on the bench. The nimble play 
 of wit and fancy which has been the delight of 
 some able jurists, was not his forte. He made 
 a serious business of his judicial duties. The 
 foregoing solitary example wall show that he 
 was thus a total abstainer, from inaptitude and
 
 224 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 not from choice. We cannot think that he was 
 deterred by the fact that repute as a wit some- 
 times detracts from the well-deserved fame of 
 public men for sobriety and wisdom; although 
 it is something of a truth that dullness inspires 
 confidence, while wit is feared and suspected, 
 and the ability to discourse platitude and 
 commonplace is the best ticket to favour with 
 the mass. 
 
 No doubt Marshall had a keen sense of 
 humour, yet in court I doubt whether he would 
 have bestowed more than the tribute of a wintry 
 smile upon those familiar ancient jokes that are 
 so loudly laughed at by their narrators. And, 
 as he always remained a novice in the field of 
 jocular law, so he never strayed from the 
 prescribed path to indulge in primrose dalliance 
 in general literature. He never adorned his 
 opinions with that classical lore w^hich adds 
 variety and entertainment to the most ponder- 
 ous legal learning. He wrote a life of Washington 
 in five large volumes. It is a valuable work in 
 some respects, yet it has suffered some at the 
 hands of the critics. It was the task of love 
 and respect, yet one alien to his great talents. 
 
 He had many endearing personal qualities. 
 In great men these often attract and win us
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 225 
 
 far more than their important actions. Finer 
 than Waverly, or Ivanhoe, finer than any of 
 those heroic shades that people his land of 
 dreams, is the noble spirit of the Wizard of the 
 North, cheerfully facing adversity, and coining 
 his life to pay his debts. Dante, "Holding 
 heart-break at bay for twenty years, not 
 allowing himself to die until his task was done, ' ' 
 is greater than the Divine Comedy. Lamb, 
 "winning his way with sad and patient soul 
 through evil and pain and strange calamity," 
 it is more to us than the exqisite Essays of Elia. 
 We love the man because he ever jested lightly 
 with sorrow, and lightly broke her ashen crust, 
 and because he did not wax old in the evil 
 shadows of circumstance. Washington's per- 
 sonality is greater than his deeds. What 
 public act of Lincoln appeals to us like the 
 pictures we have of that homely stooping figure 
 and furrowed face, shadowed and softened bv 
 the vast griefs through which he had passed. 
 Grant was never dearer to this people than 
 when with the slow agony of death creeping 
 over him, he finished his last task. It is to the 
 man that we give our first and best allegiance, 
 rather than to the soldier, scholar or statesman. 
 It is over the primal traits in Marshall's
 
 226 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 character that we may wish to linger longest 
 and not over the dry chronology of the ency- 
 clopaedias, — those gigantic tumuli, wherein has 
 been elaborately deposited the mere skeleton of 
 history. Marshall's leading characteristics 
 were those of true greatness, — simplicity and 
 directness, with an entire absence of pretence 
 or affectation. He never made it possible for 
 any man to speak better of him than he 
 deserved. I have learned from the veterans of 
 our civil war that the crucible of the soldier's 
 life tested men's metal, and speedily determined 
 whether it was true gold or pinchbeck. The 
 long march is cold and wet, the hunger and 
 hardships of the camp where comfort was 
 unknown, tried men as no other environment 
 could do. The good fellow of the street or 
 club, or of the social circle at home, as a soldier 
 oftentimes became a whining, selfish com plainer, 
 shirking every kindly office that made hardship 
 bearable. Marshall was thus tested and not 
 found wanting. Our soldiers suffered incredible 
 hardships at Valley Forge. The \vinter was 
 very cold and the snow deep, and they were 
 almost naked, and without shoes or blankets. 
 Washington said of this time of trial, — "No 
 history now extant can furnish an instance of
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 227 
 
 an army suffering such uncommon hardships 
 and bearing- them with the same fortitude and 
 patience." Part of the time the army was 
 destitute of food. Yet there was not lacking 
 some element of the grotesque to cheer their 
 privations. In the history of the camp at 
 Valley Forge, there are strong traces of the 
 national thirst for pie which even then seems to 
 have been unquenchable, and which has ever 
 since given pie a dominating influence over all 
 more effete refections throughout our common 
 country. We read that the neighbouring 
 Dutchwomen used to ride into camp seated on 
 great sacks of pies, which were of such con- 
 sistency, and made in such manner as that they 
 could be thrown across the room, and yet suffer 
 not the slightest disintegration. The historian 
 says that these adamantine stratifications 
 "were considered a great delicacy, and were 
 much enjoyed." We cannot wonder that the 
 soldiers who could enjoy these pies were able to 
 endure all lesser hardships, and we can even 
 understand how they might cross the Delaware 
 in the midst of floating ice, and esteem it but a 
 holiday pastime. One of Marshall's mess- 
 mates says of his conduct at this time, — "He 
 was the best tempered man I ever knew. During
 
 228 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 all his sufferings at Valley Forge, nothing 
 discouraged, nothing disturbed him. If he 
 had only bread to eat, it was just as well; if 
 only meat, it made no difference. If any of the 
 ofl5cers murmured at their deprivations, he 
 would shame them by good natured raillery, or 
 encourage them by his own exuberance of 
 spirits. He was an excellent companion, and 
 idolized by the soldiers and his brother officers, 
 whose gloomy hours he enlivened by his inex- 
 haustible fund of anecdote. " He was much 
 esteemed for his fairness, and acted as deputy 
 advocate, and was often chosen to arbitrate 
 differences between his brother officers. He 
 afterwards modestly attributed his success at 
 the bar to the friendship of his soldier comrades. 
 They found that republics are ungrateful, and 
 looked on him as their spokesman. He never 
 intrigued for political preferment, and all his 
 honours came unsought and unbought. His 
 associates, sometimes not too kind to him, he 
 looked upon without malice or uncharity. He 
 envied no man and disparaged no rival. He 
 bore: 
 
 No envy of another's fame * * * 
 Nor rustling- heard in every breeze 
 The laurels of Miltiades.
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 229 
 
 Marshall was admitted to the bar in 1781 
 and at once rose to eminence, first in Fauquier 
 County, and thereafter at Richmond, where he 
 moved. There were able lawyers at Richmond 
 and Marshall soon ranked as their leader. 
 Usually the young lawyer who leaps suddenly 
 into prominence, does so because of some art of 
 address or catch of oratory, or because he is 
 apt at cultivating and winning popular favour. 
 He may, withal, it is true, have more solid and 
 enduring qualities, that will in any event bring 
 him ultimate recognition. But it is the showier 
 and more pretentious traits that many times 
 furnish the best proofs of learning to the 
 multitude. With these alone, the mere pre- 
 tender will often pass the toiler, who may 
 foolishly think that it is only hard work and 
 merit that count. The. smallest modicum of 
 brains and learning, if accompanied by impud- 
 ence and push, frequently bring more speedy 
 rewards than all the toils of the midnight lamp. 
 Marshall's early fame was not built upon 
 these shifting sands, and he made his merit 
 known by no meretricious arts. 
 
 He was always genial and talkative enough 
 for all the offices of good fellowship. He was 
 no dullard, creating by reticence the seeming of
 
 230 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 wisdom, studiously holding his tongue that he 
 might appear to hold all knowledge. He did 
 not aim at that sententious dullness, at those 
 continuous "brilliant flashes of silence, " which 
 some men cultivate in order to give themselves 
 a factitious learning and solidity. 
 
 The biographers have generally insisted 
 that Marshall's character was "unredeemed 
 by a single vice, " and yet I cannot but believe 
 that he had an abundance of good, honest, 
 hearty, human hatred for cant, for all shams 
 and humbugs. He could not have always kept 
 his keen wit in sheath, when he saw financial 
 magnates — and others, paying court to judges 
 with green turtle and cold bottles, or with tips 
 for little flyers in the field of speculation ; or 
 when he saw how easy it was for judges' sons 
 to have thrust into their raw apprentice hands 
 the retainers of powerful corporations, or saw 
 them achieving great place without effort, while 
 their fellow novices of humbler birth were 
 plodding in the dust, and counting with their 
 heart throbs the troubled years that separated 
 them from fame. Perhaps we are "to dumb 
 forgetfuflness a prey, " and these mysterious 
 freaks of Fortune never did happen and inspire 
 cynic mirth on this round globe, but in distant
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 231 
 
 spheres, and only cognizant to us through 
 vagrant dreams. If so, will she of sword and 
 scales and bandaged eyes, forgive the sin. 
 
 We who now see our nation honoured and 
 respected among the nations of the earth; 
 courted and flattered by kings and diplomats, 
 and any alliance with it held in high esteem ; 
 its ever widening power extending from "lands 
 of snow to lands of sun, " can hardly imagine 
 its dependent and almost helpless condition but 
 a little more than one hundred years ago. It 
 lay broken and exhausted by the Revolution, 
 as some spent swimmer who has battled long 
 with wind and tide, and at last drags himself 
 wearily upon the shore, victorious over death, 
 but without strength to protect himself from 
 further dangers. The war had impoverished 
 the infant colonies beyond conception, and 
 every evil force in society was unleashed and set 
 free. The colonies were full of warring factions, 
 and discord, unrest, and suspicion were rampant 
 everywhere. Patrick Henry had said in a 
 supreme burst of eloquence in the first 
 Congress, — "The distinction between Vir- 
 ginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and 
 New Englanders, is no more. I am not a 
 Virginian, I am an American. " The leaven of
 
 232 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 this sentiment was working but it was overlaid 
 and stifled by baser passions. The Congress 
 of Delegates, "soon after the Revolution, ceased 
 to have any power for good and became merely 
 an arena for recriminations and fruitless strife. 
 It was often without a quorum, and when a 
 quorum was present, it was impotent to make 
 treaties; to raise money to meet national 
 obligations, or to transact business of any kind. 
 The mother country, sullen and untractable in 
 defeat, lent no helping hand, but aided rather 
 in embroiling us further. Her great rival, 
 France, assumed that we would be her ally 
 against England, because of the aid she gave 
 us in the Revolution. Her representatives 
 insulted our government with swelling rodomon- 
 tade, asserting the adoration France had for 
 freedom, and adjuring us to join France in a 
 crusade against the "tyrant of the seas. " 
 Genet came here from France, lawlessly intent 
 on using our ports as depots of supplies to 
 make war on England, and when the president 
 refused his sanction to the.se high handed 
 proceedings, Genet threatened to appeal to the 
 American people. The little gods who preside 
 over the comedies of nations must have had 
 great mirth over the grotesque vanity of France,
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 233 
 
 yet in the non-age of freedom, thus reproaching 
 a race that held cherished memories of Runny- 
 mede, of Preston Pans and Marston Moor, of 
 the Long Parliament, of the trial of the Seven 
 Bishops, and of the death and outlawry of 
 tyrant kings. 
 
 In spite of our grateful declamation, we 
 know that the aid of France was not extended 
 to us In our hour of trouble, disinterestedly, or 
 from pure love of freedom and human rights. 
 It was upon consideration and for an antici- 
 pated equivalent. To say this we need not 
 detract from the fame of the immortal 
 La Fayette, but the ruling powers who sent 
 him here to aid us, hated freedom with the 
 hatred of tyrants. They held with iron 
 despotism that inheritance of tyranny under 
 which France had groaned for centuries. The 
 example that they helped us to give to the world 
 was doubtless one cause of their own undoing. 
 But a few years after our struggle was ended, 
 their day of retribution came and their doom 
 was written on the pages of history with bloody 
 hands. In that atonement of blood the debt 
 of a thousand years of despotism was but 
 poorly paid. It was the leaders of that 
 unlicensed mob, the legitimate successor of
 
 234 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 oppreSvsion, that Intrigued here against 
 England. The}^ could claim no natural alliance 
 with us, for Frank and Saxon never yet have 
 been blood-brothers. Their seeming love for 
 us was but another form of hatred for England. 
 It is a curious coincidence that the love of 
 France for England's enemies has always been 
 exactly measured by her hatred of England. 
 She was baffled in her attempt to communicate 
 to us that disease of national hysteria by which 
 she has been smitten since her revolution. Since 
 then it has needed but little to bring on the 
 worst attacks. Boulanger, the Dreyfus Case, 
 or the fermenting muck of Paris, may any of 
 them on occasion be sufficient excitants. When 
 none of these are present in active eruption, 
 there sits perfidious Albion, ruler of the waves, 
 holding "dominion over palm and pine, " cooly 
 surveying with good-natured contempt her 
 mercurial rival ; or there is Germany, phlegmatic 
 and unmoved behind her vast military equip- 
 ment ; or, there is Russia, adroitly patting the 
 hysterical patient on the back, setting her 
 on England and always holding before her 
 eyes the hope of an alliance that never comes. 
 I will admit that we have slight attacks of 
 hysteria at regularly recurring intervals, but we
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 235 
 
 have the comminfrled blood of Latin, Saxon 
 and Teuton, to keep the balance true. Ours 
 comes every four years, and when the fit is on 
 us I expect that my neighbours will call me 
 an anarchist, a traitor, or a plutocrat. But this 
 reviling is done in a Pickwickian sense, and as 
 a necessary part of the game of politics. When 
 the kindergarten madness effervesces, we jog 
 along very comfortably together. After Citizen 
 Genet had been driven out, a state of war 
 between this country and France, practically 
 existed. Although at first there was a con- 
 siderable French party here, indignation grew 
 apace under the repeated insults of France, and 
 preparations for war were made. Reprisals on 
 French shipping were ordered and Washington 
 was made commander-in-chief. Finally, in the 
 interests of peace a special commission of three 
 eminent men was appointed to go to France. 
 Marshall was one of the members of this 
 commission. It was insultingly received in 
 France and it is a matter of history that 
 Talleyrand approached the commissioners for a 
 bribe. They finally left France in bitter 
 indignation. The lines of the poet, — 
 Talk not of freedom to the Franks, 
 They have a king- who buys and sells.
 
 236 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 might have been written for the admonition of 
 the commissioners. The trouble with France 
 was finally compromised and war averted, but 
 it left with us bitter distrust that gratitude 
 could not wholly cure, and also left a luxuriant 
 crop of claims arising out of the spoliation of 
 our commerce by France. Many of these are 
 still rotting in mildewed ease in our Court of 
 Claims, a rich blessing for our profession, and 
 a painful legacy for the posterity of the original 
 claimants, even to the tenth generation. By 
 skillful nursing, they had assumed aldermanic 
 proportions, and a venerable dignity, when the 
 southern mule and cotton bale of loyal parentage 
 and ownership, were yet babes in the arms of 
 the lawyers. Let us hope that together they 
 will continue to infest the watches of the moon 
 and gladden the hearts of our professional 
 successors for many generations. 
 
 On his return to this country, Marshall 
 was received with acclamations. He was given 
 a public dinner by both houses of Congress, 
 "as an evidence of affection for his person, and 
 of their grateful approbation of the patriotic 
 firmness with which he had sustained the 
 dignity of his country during his important 
 mission. " In 1798 he was offered the position
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 237 
 
 of associate justice of the Supreme Court, but 
 declined it, his chief reason for so doing being 
 that he had just been nominated for Congress. 
 He was elected, but resigned his seat to accept 
 a position in the cabinet of President Adams. 
 On January 31, 1801, he was appointed Chief 
 Justice of the Supreme Court, which position 
 he held until his death, July 6, 1835. I \v\\\ 
 not dwell upon the full chronology of the 
 honours that were bestowed upon him; they 
 are known to every school-boy. Whether the 
 place he filled was great or small in the 
 estimation of men, he made it great by the 
 strength of his personality. 
 
 There were strong rivalries among the 
 public men of Marshall's day. He and 
 Jefferson were never at harmonv, althougrh 
 Jefferson w^as the more critical and censorious 
 of the two. In his way he was as great as 
 Marshall, yet with some minor w'eaknesses of 
 character, not apparent in Marshall. As 
 the author of the Declaration of Independence, 
 and in the part he played in the drama of the 
 Revolution and in the reconstruction period 
 following it, he was second only to the great 
 Washington, in the estimation of the people. 
 He was bold and daring in his views, and more
 
 238 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 far-sig-hted than any of his associates except 
 Hamilton. He had the paradoxical personality 
 of a democratic aristocrat. In social position 
 he was a Virginia country gentleman, with 
 every inducement to respect his class and uphold 
 its privileges. Yet he was always in rebellion 
 against this class, and manifested a passionate 
 love of the people and a pure democracy from 
 which every trace of fuedalism and patrician 
 privilege should be eliminated. In Virginia, he 
 proposed measures for the disestablishment of 
 the church and for complete religious freedom, 
 and abolishing the laws of entail and primo- 
 geniture. Himself a slaveholder, he hated 
 slavery as an aristocratic institution, and he 
 advocated a bill forbidding the importation of 
 slaves into Virginia. When Congress was 
 legislating for the Northwest Territory, he 
 framed a clause interdicting slavery in this 
 territory after the year 1800, in almost the exact 
 language of our Thirteenth Amendment. His 
 theories were almost diametrically opposed to 
 those of his great rival Hamilton. The cleavage 
 line between them became strongly marked 
 when they were together in Washington's 
 cabinet. From that time on party alignment was 
 that of Federalist and Democrat; of States
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TLMES 239 
 
 Rights and Centralized Government. Jefferson 
 believed ardently in the people; Hamilton had 
 a certain distrust of popular government, 
 founded on the belief that it would never realize 
 the anticipations of its advocates, and would of 
 necessity have many defects and weaknesses. 
 He believed in a strong national government, 
 with power to enforce all measures for its well- 
 being, even against the will of the states. 
 Jefferson believed in States Rights so called. 
 Practically, he proved that he was ready to go 
 far in opposition to his own theories. Jefferson 
 and his following believed that the Hamiltonian 
 view would lead to the destruction of the rights 
 of the states. Washington seemed to occupy 
 middle ground between these two opposing 
 schools, with an inclination towards the 
 Federalist side. As soon as peace came, he saw 
 that the confederation had no governmental 
 power. He spoke of the contempt that would 
 would be felt for us abroad, when it was seen 
 that the states were sovereigns or not as best 
 suited their purposes; "in a word, that we 
 were one nation to-day, and thirteen to- 
 
 morrow." 
 
 Marshall held to this opinion, and no 
 doubt much of his labour thereafter in
 
 240 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 construing the powers of the national govern- 
 ment, was inspired by his experience and 
 observation of this period of weakness and 
 imbecility. The states were jealous of each 
 other and jealous of any government they 
 might jointly establish. Marshall was really 
 a conservative Federalist, more of a Democrat 
 than Washington, not so much of a Democrat 
 as Jefferson. While Washington lived, Hamilton 
 moulded the new government his way. Jefferson 
 w^as the greater of the two in his ability to win 
 and hold the people. He harmonized himself 
 with them, and was always ready to go with 
 them a little, in order to induce them to go with 
 him as far as he wished. He followed, in order 
 that he might lead. Out of power he was a 
 radical, the terror of those who believed in the 
 established order; in power he was a careful 
 and prudent conservative, acting in the main 
 wisely and justly. He presents in this, not the 
 only instance in history of the sobering influence 
 of power and responsibility upon the radical, 
 who before was a volcano of fierce and startling 
 declamation. When he became president he 
 speedily recovered from his fear of the dangers 
 of a strong government. In some ways he 
 seemed to have had a marvelous foresight. He
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 241 
 
 sent the Louis and Clark expedition to explore 
 the territory northwest of the Louisiana 
 Purchase, in 1804, and thus laid the foundation 
 for our claims to the country on the Columbia 
 River. He saw at least some of the potentialities 
 of the Louisiana Purchase, and closed the 
 bargain for it with the First Consul, hurriedly 
 and secretly. This was an act of daring 
 statesmanship that collided directly with the 
 States Rights doctrine as to the limited powers 
 of the Federal Government. It is doubtful 
 whether Hamilton, in Jefferson's place would 
 have dared to go as far, for it was thought to 
 be an exercise of power outside of the constitu- 
 tion. Jefferson could so act, because he knew 
 his own power with the people and that he 
 could justify his course to them. As to this 
 and other measures, long before his administra- 
 tion closed, we find Jefferson sitting in the seat 
 of the Federalist and not afraid. It is said that 
 he inspired the Kentucky and Virginia 
 Resolutions, which declared the extreme doctrine 
 of States Rights, yet during his administration, 
 he was so busy building up the powers of 
 government that he overlooked them. At the 
 same time he was criticising Marshall severely 
 for the Federalistic trend of his decisions. The
 
 242 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 discredit attached to the Alien and Sedition 
 Laws, and the success of Jefferson's administra- 
 tion, caused the slow disappearance of the 
 Federalist party. Its existence was in a 
 measure useless for its work was being done by 
 the Democratic Party. But the grhostlv 
 Cassandra of States Rig-hts would not down. 
 It croaked balefully, first with one party and 
 then with the other. Of all propagandas, it 
 has been the most mercenary and changeable. 
 Now it turns up in New England, now in 
 Pennsylvania, now in South Carolina, and then 
 again in highly virtuous Wisconsin. It presided 
 at the birth of the Kentucky and Virginia 
 Resolutions; it was the leading spirit of the 
 Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania; it shrieked 
 with the New England Federalists, in the days 
 of the Hartford Convention when Massachusetts 
 was seriously contemplating seceding from the 
 Union ; it defied Jackson in South Carolina, 
 and inspired the nullification of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law in Wisconsin. Democrat, Federalist, 
 Republican and Whig, — the advocate of States 
 Rights and the advocate of a strong national 
 government, have alternated, and veered and 
 shifted, and stolen each others' places, and 
 have kept countenance through it all with
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 243 
 
 marvelous effrontery. Sometimes this magnil- 
 oquent phrase played comedy, sometimes 
 tragedy. The last act of comedy that we need 
 consider here, Is Jackson issuing his proclama- 
 tion against the nullifiers of South Carolina, 
 and threatening to hang them if they persisted 
 in their course, and being complimented therefor 
 by all the old Federalists, who had thus seen 
 the fullness of national salvation. 
 
 Disraeli said of the wars and hatreds of 
 nations, "All is race." So In the world of 
 politics, all is phrase. In the Kingdom of 
 Fools, the phrase-monger is the chief potentate, 
 and the world of politics being the main 
 province of this kingdom, the fools who Infest 
 it aver that all wisdom and righteousness is 
 vested in the twaddle of a phrase. Thus 
 presidents are made and unmade by a shibboleth 
 of empty words. States Rights was for long 
 a strutting phrase, the pet of politicians, and 
 the god of both fools and knaves for three 
 quarters of a century; yet always lllce a tale 
 told by an idiot, "full of sound and fury^ 
 signifying, — nothing. " As a toy to charm the 
 people it was reasonably harmless at first. 
 Finally it became linked with the slave-power 
 in hideous brotherhood of crime and shame,
 
 244 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and they died together, leaving as mute 
 witnesses to the power of a phrase, a million 
 graves. These things are suggested in passing ; 
 they help to enflesh the dry bones of history, 
 and to quicken them with life. Much of this 
 history proves how rare and precious and how 
 remote from mortal ken is the jewel of 
 consistency; like the Holy Grail of Knight 
 Errantry, that none might secure save the 
 pure in heart. 
 
 Through the turbulent unrest of this early 
 time, Marshall toiled, building and strength- 
 ening the edifice of constitutional law. We 
 cannot look back to one of his decisions 
 construing the powers of the states or of the 
 national government, and wish that it had 
 been different. He was a son of Virginia, the 
 slave-holding home of States Rights, yet his 
 construction of the constitution forged for us 
 the mightiest weapons with which to free the 
 slaves, and to smite into cureless ruin the 
 doctrine that a state might dissolve the Union. 
 He went upon the bench at a time when the 
 right of the courts to nullify laws because of 
 their unconstitutionality, was but reluctantly 
 conceded. He was not the pioneer of this view, 
 although he became its most eminent champion.
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 245 
 
 In 1786, in Rhode Island, the court held an act 
 of the legislature void for this reason. For 
 this the judges were impeached, but were not 
 removed, although the legislature, refusing to 
 re-elect them, put more pliant judges in their 
 places. In 1803, in Ohio, a statute was held 
 unconstitutional, and this led to the impeach- 
 ment of the judges, but they were acquitted. 
 In 1795, in Pennsylyania, in the United States 
 Court, a statute which attempted to divest one 
 man of his property and give it to another, was 
 held unconstitutional. In 1798, in the same 
 state, it was held that a law, contrary to the 
 first principles of the social compact, was void, 
 as not being a rightful exercise of the legislative 
 power. This broad principle has been 
 sanctioned by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, 
 in Durkee vs. Janesville, 28 Wisconsin 464. 
 Marbury vs. Madison was the first case in 
 which Marshall refers to this power in the 
 judiciary as an established rule. Thereafter he 
 supported it with all the ardour and strength 
 of his great genius. It has been the priceless 
 adjunct of free government, the mighty shield 
 of the rights and liberties of the citizen. It has 
 been many times invoked to save him from 
 illegal punishment, to save his property from
 
 246 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the greed of unscrupulous enemies, and to save 
 his political rights from the unbridled license of 
 victorious political opponents controlling legisla- 
 tive bodies. Nor does It now sleep, except as a 
 sword, dedicated to a rig-hteous cause, sleeps In 
 its scabbard. We had never more need of It. 
 The shop-keeper of petty instinct who desires 
 to crush out business rivals or to keep non- 
 resident competitors out of the state; the 
 producer who seeks to make a market for his 
 own wares by taxing- a rival commodity out of 
 existence; the suitor who tries his cause in the 
 legislature, in order that he may secure there 
 that which the courts cannot in justice give 
 him, — and all unworthy covetors of their 
 neighbour's lands or goods, are now, as ever, 
 shameless constituents of our social structure, 
 calling for the constant vigilance of the courts 
 in the protection of constitutional rights. Nor 
 have we yet reached the perfection of constitu- 
 tional government. We cannot attain it until 
 we have cut down the Upas Tree of Privilege 
 to the very roots and have torn the roots from 
 out the soil. It is an alien grow^th, our legacy 
 from the Dark Ages ; hoary and venerable with 
 years, sanctioned by custom and tradition, its 
 worst excesses elevated by its worshippers into
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 247 
 
 religious rites; watered and nurtured by the 
 perennial greed and selfishness of man; out- 
 lasting all other change, ancj all other 
 governmental tyranny, and escaping by 
 unfortunate mischance to this day the Ithuriel 
 spear of Freedom. We need additional 
 constitutional guaranties that will give to every 
 citizen the right to prevent by appropriate 
 remedy legislative grants of gifts and bonuses 
 out of public moneys to private business 
 enterprises, and to prevent the gifts of public 
 franchises that are the property of the whole 
 people. Until we have thus perfected free 
 institutions, we may well feel the shame of the 
 prophet, of whom it is said, — "And he went a 
 day's journey into the wilderness, and sat 
 himself down under a juniper tree; and he 
 said, — Now O Lord, take away my life, for I 
 am not better than my fathers. " 
 
 This anniversary of honor will fix our 
 attention anew on those fundamental principles 
 upon which free and equal government must 
 rest. The opinion of the bar will go far to 
 secure such new guaranties of the rights of the 
 citizen; and such new limitations on the power of 
 those who band together to use government 
 for their own selfish ends, as may be necessary.
 
 248 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Tyranny has ever a new face. It now 
 gains by guile and stealth what it once seized 
 brutally and with the strong hand. Every 
 score of years we need a new Runnymede, 
 where we may beard our captains of Privilege, 
 and wrest from them a new charter of rights. 
 I have no fear of the conventional anarchists. 
 Free speech is the best cure for their activities, 
 as it is the best safety valve for the escape and 
 dissipation of all the humors in the body politic. 
 But for the greater anarchists who sit enthroned 
 in high places and purchase legislatures and 
 municipal officers, and who are insidiously 
 subverting our liberties, and filching from our 
 pockets, what is not theirs, we need all our 
 vigilance. Freedom and equality have a deeper 
 meaning than the frothy interpretations of our 
 professional flag- wavers, — especially such of 
 them as wave the old flag with one hand, and 
 reach for the public treasury with the other. 
 Unjust laws which unjustly and unequally 
 distribute the wealth, earned by the toil of our 
 people are not a part of the inheritance received 
 by us from the fathers of the republic. They 
 are of the bastard, changeling brood of 
 Oppression. Our real greatness lies not in the 
 vast bulk of our swollen census reports, where
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 249 
 
 we keep the toll of our ag-gregate wealth, for 
 the debit side of the account will show that 
 through legislation born of greed, a few have 
 gained more than thrift and industry can 
 rightfully give them. 
 
 Of what avail the plow or sail, 
 Or land or life if freedom fail? 
 But recently new responsibilities have come 
 to us that must be met wisely and justly. They 
 call for the talent of the statesman, not of the 
 politician. I do not assume to make a standard 
 of conscience for others, but only to be a poor 
 keeper of my own, yet from the beginning of 
 the war in the Phillipines, I have been one of 
 those of an opposite political faith to the 
 president, who have felt that it was our duty 
 to uphold the administration in carrying on 
 this war. For our country is nearer to us than 
 our politics; its flag is ours, its battles and its 
 honour are ours, no matter who may live in the 
 White House, or who may hold prate and 
 debate in our two houses of palaver. So we 
 have felt that our armies must put down armed 
 resistance to our authority, at whatever cost in 
 blood and treasure. As Americans we should 
 stultify ourselves by allowing any political 
 convention, or any partisan considerations to
 
 250 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 swerve us from this course. When our fellow 
 citizens return from fighting our battles, they 
 cannot shame us with the bitter reproach that 
 we fired at them from the rear. Under the 
 inspirations of our mighty theme, I have 
 thought best to refer to some of the weighty 
 problems that are pressing upon us. — the 
 weightiest that we have met since the slave- 
 power went down in battle thunder and flame. 
 Whether it was wise to take our island 
 possessions, depends upon how wisely we 
 execute our trust towards the simple and 
 dependent peoples who have confided in our 
 integrity. Shall we generously share with 
 them our destiny, or shall we only allow them 
 to come to our father's house as step-children 
 and poor relations? Shall we keep them in the 
 vestibule of the temple of liberty, while we 
 gather close to the altar? We have placed our 
 own fundamental rights in the constitution, 
 where no chance or change can destroy them ; 
 shall theirs be as highly placed, or shall they 
 be cast out on the shifting cnrrent of our 
 politics, to be the sport and mock of the time, 
 mere bondmen of the fickle grace and favour of 
 our changing political dynasties? If American 
 manhood still remain clothed in its full nobility
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 251 
 
 it will assuredly not bestow the rights of freedom 
 with miser care on these wards of our 
 civilization. An ex-president in a near-by state, 
 who has proved that an ex-president may be a 
 statesmen, and not a mere oracle of common- 
 place, says of this matter, — "It has been said 
 that the flash of Dewey's guns in Manila Bay, 
 revealed to the American people a new mission. 
 I like to think of them as revealing the same 
 old mission that we read in the flash of 
 Washington's guns at Yorktown. God forbid 
 that the day should ever come, when in the 
 American mind the thought of man as a 
 'consumer, ' shall submerge the old American 
 thought of man as a creature of God, endowed 
 with 'unalienable rights. ' " 
 
 This observance will surely lead us to a 
 greater respect for fundamental rights. 
 Marshall watched beside constitutional 
 government on this continent in its very cradle- 
 time. It is not too much to say, that because 
 of his fostering care, it has defied the mutations 
 of Time, the struggles of a nation in arms, and 
 all the storms of war and peace, until now in 
 its mid-noon splendour, it is an example to 
 the whole earth. Those who fear for the 
 perpetuity of American institutions, if they
 
 252 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 will read well our histor}^ need not be 
 disma3^ed over the dangers that lurk along our 
 pathway. The rocking pine that has stood 
 before the whirlwind, does not fall prostrate 
 before the summer breeze. If the Union could 
 grow out of the warring elements of the 
 Colonial Confederation; if it could survive the 
 evil days that followed its establishment, w^hen 
 its enemies were straining its untried strength; 
 if it could acquire and absorb peacefully the 
 vast territory west of the Mississippi ; if it could 
 endure through the hell of human slavery, and 
 through the dreadful war that made our land 
 one great charnel house, and finally spring 
 stronger and wnser from the shock and 
 dismemberment of that war, it surely cannot 
 come to wreck because of this or that policy of 
 protection or free trade or finance, or, because 
 we mav grasp, even though unwisely, new lands 
 beyond our ocean boundaries. Having endured 
 so much it surely can endure little. It has 
 firmly withstood both foreign and domestic 
 war and the machinations of bitter and powerful 
 enemies both at home and abroad; it cannot 
 be that any pigmy peril will shatter it. It has 
 lived through the valley and the shadow of 
 death; it stands now in the open, in
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 253 
 
 unshadowed dignity and power, where every 
 wind of heaven brings it favour. So I would 
 say, let us be not afraid. For us who believe 
 in and trust the American people, the trilling 
 contentions of heated political campaigns light 
 no danger signals that we can regard. These 
 things are but for a day; our destiny lies with 
 the centuries. We have always with us the 
 great covenant of our faith, and through storm 
 and confusion, the wisdom of John Marshall 
 shines forth like the light-house beacon that 
 guards the seas. Let it be our mission to see 
 that no cunning hand shall undo his work, and 
 that no pretence of expediency and no clamour 
 of the opportunist, shall be allowed to wring a 
 paltering decision from our highest tribunal 
 and thus loosen the bonds of our respect for it. 
 The argument of policy and expediency never 
 weighed with him ; let us also be deaf to such 
 Ignoble considerations. For over thirty years 
 he expounded with jealous fidelity the charter 
 of our rights ; let us expound it with like fidelity 
 through our span of years. If we as lawyers 
 shall refuse to take our convictions ready-made 
 from party platforms ; If we shall remain 
 unmoved in the midst of party faction, holding 
 fast to the unchanging verities that were so
 
 254 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 dear to him; if we shall refuse to yield servile 
 approval to judicial decisions inspired by 
 prejudice or popular clamour, or rendered at 
 infamous political behest, or upon careless or 
 insufficient consideration, but fearlessly maintain 
 that independence which is the grandest 
 tradition of the bar, then indeed shall we be 
 worthy pupils of the great pioneer jurist whose 
 life work is our priceless inheritance. 
 
 And now the grateful task which you have 
 so kindly and generously given me, is finished. 
 The thronging inspirations of this work and of 
 this hour, will not soon depart from me. I feel 
 still that moving awe and veneration which 
 must accompany him who walks where heroes 
 sleep. It has been a dear and valued privilege 
 for me to add my portion to the great sum of 
 eulogy, which this day brings to the memory of 
 John Marshall. His, was the rounded and 
 perfect life, of more than Roman virtue and 
 manhood; his, the reward, richer than that 
 bestowed upon great kings who sleep at 
 Westminster. Divine Providence generously 
 gave him a greater length of years than that 
 usually alotted to man, that his work might be 
 well done. Upon his grave at Richmond we 
 place as great a tribute as affectionate
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 255 
 
 remembrance ever paid to man. As was said 
 of New England's greatest son, so we may say 
 of Marshall : 
 
 In toil he lived, in peace he died, 
 When life's full cycle was complete, 
 Put off his robes of power and pride 
 And laid them at his Master's feet.
 
 NOTE 
 
 Among the comments made since the 
 publication of the first edition of this book, 
 there are portions of two letters which may be 
 of interest to the reader. 
 
 Mr. George R. Peck of Chicago says: 
 
 * * * One of the finest essays in the 
 book, in my judg-ment, is the one on 
 "Americanism." It is a fitting- rebuke to 
 those who suppose that our literary diet 
 should be entirely American. * * * 
 
 But I cannot forg-ive you for the 
 contemptous way in which you speak of "The 
 Man Without a Country." I believe it to be 
 absolutely classic, — a little classic of course, 
 but yet a classic that will be read a thousand 
 years from now. It is of no consequence 
 that Aaron Burr, who lured poor Philip 
 Nolan into his troubles, escaped punishment. 
 Burr was tried by the civil courts, while 
 Nolan, of course a purely fictitious 
 character, was tried under the harsher 
 
 256
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 257 
 
 procedure of a military court. It is an 
 unreasonable story, but not more unreason- 
 able than all the great stories that have 
 charmed the world. It is pure fiction, but in 
 my judgment the noblest short story ever 
 written. I remember the first time I read it 
 as I lay in the trenches in front of the enemy, 
 and how I then resolved to stand by the 
 United States forevermore. I believe it was 
 worth a hundred regiments to the Union 
 cause. It was a lesson to the young soldiers 
 who were carrying the flag, and made them 
 understand the miserable condition of a man 
 who could be so unfortunate as to have no 
 country. 
 
 But I do not rest my opinion solely on 
 the patriotic lesson inculcated. As a piece of 
 pure literature, of mere art, I think it without 
 an equal among short stories. It has always 
 seemed to me that some sort of inspiration 
 must have dropped into the heart of Edward 
 Everett Hale when he wrote it. You may 
 think this extravagant language, but you 
 must admit that your own condemnation of 
 the story is quite as much so. It is not a 
 question whether Philip Nolan's sentence 
 was too severe. I should be likely to agree
 
 258 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 with you as to that. But the question is 
 whether it is not a fine piece of literary work, 
 of artistic work, of such work as only once 
 or twice in a g^eneration is done by any author. 
 
 I am not much g-iven to hysterics. I have 
 read "The Man Without a Country" perhaps 
 a hundred times, and I have never read it 
 without tears. Can it be that a story which 
 can produce such an effect, is only interesting" 
 and instructive for fifteen-year-olds? 
 
 I have said this about "The Man Without 
 a Country" because you and I are friends, 
 and have a rig-ht to differ. There is hardly 
 a thing- in your volume to which I could not 
 subscribe, except what you said about "The 
 Man Without a Country, " and I cannot g-ive 
 you my views without frankly saying" that I 
 do not think you are partly wrong-, but 
 absolutely and entirely so. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang says: 
 
 As to Captain Smith; I am sorry that as 
 far as his Pocahontas story g-oes, I fear that 
 the critics are rig-ht who think that he 
 romanced. I think I have written on the 
 matter, perhaps in the preface of the new 
 edition of my "Myth, Ritual and Religion," 
 and I have read American criticisms to that
 
 JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 259 
 
 effect. However, he is amusing whether he 
 is inventive or not. I never read the story 
 of Tennyson and the £300 before. But even 
 if it is true, it was only his fun and chaff, 
 uttered in the presence of some dull ass, who 
 repeated without understanding it.
 
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