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 HORIZONS 
 
 WTV. OF CATJF. TTRTUKV. T OS
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 
 
 IRELAND 
 
 A CRITICAL EXAMINATION
 
 HORIZONS 
 
 A BOOK OF CRITICISM 
 
 BY FRANCIS HACKETT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 MCMXIX 
 
 19 1 \
 
 COPYRIGHT 1918 BY B. W HUEBSCH 
 PRINTED IN U S. A. 
 
 Published June, 1918 
 Second printing, January, 1919
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY, 7 
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, i 
 
 CORRECTNESS, 13 
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, 21 
 
 MRS. WHARTON'S ART, 31 
 
 MRS. WHARTON'S LIMITATIONS, 37 
 
 THE GENTEEL TRADITION, 43 
 
 A NEW NOVELIST, 50 
 
 To AMERICAN WORKINGMEN, 57 
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 2 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH, 65 
 
 HENRY JAMES, 74 
 
 THE WAY OF ALL FLESH, 83 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER'S NOTE BOOKS, 92 
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 3 
 
 THE MODERN, 101 
 THE POLITICAL COMET, 109 
 RESHAPING THE WORLD, 118 
 MR. WELLS DISCOVERS GOD, 125 
 MR. WELLS ESPOUSES GOD, 131 
 THE OLD WIVES' TALE, 139 
 CLAYH ANGER, 147 
 THESE TWAIN, 156 
 GREEN SICKNESS, 163 
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 4 
 WAR AND PEACE, 171 
 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, 178 
 
 2130291
 
 DRAMA AND THE THEATRE, i 
 
 JOHN SYNGE, 189 
 SHAW ON MARRIAGE, 198 
 TIME CANNOT WITHER, 203 
 THE GOLDEN AGE, 208 
 HARRIS'S PLAYLETS, 213 
 
 DRAMA AND THE THEATRE, 2 
 
 SUNSHINE COMEDY, 221 
 TWENTY YEARS AFTER, 226 
 THE LIGHT TOUCH, 231 
 FOR THE ELEVENTH TIME, 236 
 THE POPULAR HIT, 241 
 THE NEGRO PLAYERS, 246 
 
 VARIA 
 
 WHITAKER'S ALMANACK, 253 
 THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, 258 
 THE SICKBED OF CULTURE, 263 
 A STYLIST ON TOUR, 268 
 THE RUPERT BROOKE LEGEND, 274 
 
 POETRY 
 
 1887-1915, 283 
 VACHEL LINDSAY, 288 
 NEW GROUND, 296 
 ILLUMINATIONS, 305 
 
 THE WAR 
 
 BELGIUM, 313 
 
 PATRONIZING THE WAR, 320 
 
 BEYOND PATRIOTISM, 328 
 
 DOMESTICATING MARS, 337 
 
 THE COST OF PEACE, 345 
 
 UNDER FIRE, 353 
 
 THE WAYS OF WAR, 359 
 
 ~*HI BOOKS AND PLAYS, 366
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 It did not occur to me when I was writing these 
 reviews that they might ever appear in a book. 
 With one exception they were written week by week, 
 either for the literary review of The Chicago Eve- 
 ning Post, 1908-1911, or for The New Republic 
 1914-1918; and most of them were written about 
 current productions, books or plays. When I left 
 Chicago in 1911, I thought, indeed, that I had done 
 with book reviewing. I had slipped into the trade 
 without any apprenticeship, drawn by love of it; and 
 I left it because it seemed like writing in water. But 
 one's past is the parent of one's future; I returned 
 to it in 1914. When it was suggested to me that 
 these reviews be reprinted I felt ashamed of them 
 and wanted to rewrite them. They had been pre- 
 pared at the moment for the moment, and I had the 
 pleasant illusion that I could do better. But why, 
 after all, I said to myself, should I long to come 
 forward in full dress when it was my habit to go 
 around in a tennis shirt? And so these reviews are 
 reprinted with not twenty words changed. 
 
 My reason for not changing them is the obvious 
 one that no revision could alter their character as 
 plain field notes of criticism. The deeper criticism, 
 as I see it, is managed in a different way. Far 
 from being a dead art, as the professors so often 
 
 [ 7 ]
 
 mistake it, it is an art of the living world and the 
 living age, not less generous and sanguine because 
 wise but it does deviate from the common notion 
 of spontaneity by considering principles rather than 
 particular instances. If there is a study of pathol- 
 ogy, for example, beyond and above the work of the 
 general practitioner, there is also a study of criticism 
 beyond and above the work of the reviewer, and 
 the passion of the critic is not less real because less 
 immediate. His is the kind of passion, generaliz- 
 ing from living particulars, that really molds the 
 perception of an epoch. It calls for work spaciously 
 planned and bravely carried on, with every art to 
 serve it and its sights set for posterity. Its aspira- 
 tion far surpasses the aspiration of the reviewer; it 
 mingles with the schemes of statesmen and the 
 dreams of poets. I understand and respect this 
 work too well to confuse my own with it, or to wish 
 any one to mistake my intention. 
 
 But I do not propose, on this account, to defer 
 to the current American superstition that pedantry 
 is the equivalent of ideas. To quote Simon Gry- 
 naeus's preface to the Lyons Plato of 1548 may be 
 the clinching blow of an argument; it may also be, 
 it is much more likely to be, a bit of portentous 
 nonsense. A critic should be a linguist, a philolo- 
 gist, a psychologist, a man who knows literary and 
 aesthetic ideas as well as history, social and economic 
 and political: but all of it is cold inanimation un- 
 less the flame of sympathy is touched to it. Criti- 
 cism is an art limited by the capacity of the critic 
 for emotion. Without rapport, there can be no 
 criticism. In the newspaper world it is unnecessary 
 to say this. In the newspaper world the clown is 
 
 [8]
 
 supposed to be as close to the marvel of Cleopatra 
 as Antony himself. The newspapers look on the 
 critical as persons who are unable to take a gener- 
 ous attitude toward life, puny persons, persons who 
 fancy themselves, persons thin-blooded and finespun. 
 They represent their own patrons as rugged, power- 
 ful, straightforward, good red blood in their veins. 
 Silly as it is to have the herd traits exalted and 
 imposed in this fashion, the contrary superstition of 
 exclusiveness is more serious. My objection to the 
 pedant is not based on the fact that he is excluding, 
 but that his exclusiveness is cold, snobbish, sterile. 
 If anything is clear in the history of men it is their 
 pretentiousness. Prophets and kings and priests 
 and judges, the guise of authority is myriad, its 
 deceits multitudinous. To challenge authority may 
 not be the last step toward liberty, but it is the first 
 step, the step most disputed, the step most needed 
 in dealing with reputable American criticism. 
 
 When literary demagogues appear, one must be 
 prepared to resist them, but not at the cost of vitality 
 that our professors of English literature have de- 
 creed. Whether or not the cause of the professors' 
 feebleness is a buried " inferiority complex," as the 
 analysts term it, the fact is patent; they do not 
 savor the wine of literature until they see the ortho- 
 dox date and the orthodox name on the orthodox 
 cobwebbed bottle. Our universities are crowded 
 with such teachers. They do not arouse and foster 
 the feeling for literature, they thwart and kill it, 
 and they have made the American college graduate 
 a by-word for literary insensitiveness. 
 
 One of the great army of American newspaper 
 book reviewers, my own aim has been to report the 
 
 [9]
 
 emotions with which I have pursued my enterprise. 
 The word emotion, I dare say, is suspect. Seeing 
 what great cities are, and the havoc they play with 
 attention and susceptibility, it cannot be denied that 
 the quality of aesthetic judgment is subject to all 
 sorts of contortion; and there are many elements 
 which stimulate feeling which do not reside in the 
 thing " itself." But however close one may be to 
 the attenuated and denatured, the persons whose 
 brains twitter in their skulls when taxed by any 
 genuine effort, it is part of the task of criticism to 
 keep independent, and the measure of my useful- 
 ness must be the degree to which my impressions 
 are my own. If I sympathize with novelties, it is 
 not for the sake of excitation, not for love of black 
 flowers and green suns. It is because our age is 
 once more a renaissance. The old Mother had 
 her wisdom deep and disregarded; but she was an 
 exacting Mother, peremptory, greedy, intrusive, 
 anti-everything, and I am one of those who think 
 she was only a step-mother in the mansion of life. 
 I see back of her, in her creaking vestments, an 
 older creature with wild eyes and scrabbling hands 
 and battered dugs, a naked old thing called Nature 
 who really bore me and who had been demeaned 
 by this insolent intruder. Our renaissance promises 
 to be a new understanding of nature, outside priests 
 and kings and pedants. If I have caught any accent 
 of it, I am fortunate. There can be no wise criti- 
 cism that is unaware of the new world in travail. 
 
 [ 10]
 
 CORRECTNESS 
 
 To the readers of The New York Nation Mr. 
 Sherman's name is familiar as one of the few serious 
 literary critics in the country. The articles in this 
 volume have all appeared in The Nation, contributed 
 from the professorial realm of Urbana, Illinois. 
 How Urbana manages to keep Mr. Sherman is an 
 academic mystery; but now that he has shown the 
 amazing difference between words printed in a peri- 
 odical and words collected in a book, the eyes of uni- 
 versity trustees elsewhere ought to be wheeled upon 
 him, and Urbana compelled to guard or to yield. 
 Certainly few American university trustees can know 
 their own business if they neglect a professor who 
 does so well the thing that they most admire. 
 
 The essence of Mr. Sherman's criticism is Ameri- 
 can correctness, that bloodless correctness to which 
 New England has given its wintry favor. Mr. Sher- 
 man is himself an lowan, but he breathes New Eng- 
 land and there is nothing of Iowa about him. He is 
 a man of mind, grave, responsible and careful, never 
 guilty of that exuberance which is so incompatible 
 with a full considerateness, and determined not to 
 bring forth any more ideas than he can perfectly 
 pasteurize. But he is not wholly in a mould. An 
 accomplished exponent of the native moralism, he 
 does more than preserve his fine thin narrow preoc- 
 cupation with righteousness. He insists on it, as 
 
 On Contemporary Literature, by Stuart P. Sherman. Holt, New 
 York. 
 
 [ 13 ]
 
 part of a grand counter-revolution, not only in his 
 peregrinations through the unwholesome modernists, 
 but also through the vulgar democracy of Mark 
 Twain, the continent art of Arnold Bennett, the tol- 
 erated liberalism of Anatole France, the sunken 
 laughter of John Synge, the " aesthetic idealism " of 
 Henry James, the " humanism " of George Mere- 
 dith until he relaxes cautiously in the end, safe in 
 the arms of Shakespeare. It is correctness rampant 
 j that makes Mr. Sherman's crest different from the 
 ordinary heraldry; and the main delectation of his 
 book is its conservative call to arms. 
 
 What is the issue? To Mr. Sherman himself it 
 seems that it is the same great issue which underlies 
 the war. If we are fighting the Germans because 
 they have broken treaties and scouted honor and dis- 
 regarded humanity, then we must also repudiate and 
 cast out those mechanistic, monistic, scientific " nat- 
 uralists " who have the same immorality as the Ger- 
 mans. The dragon of naturalism has drawn his 
 filthy trail across our literature. We must slay the 
 dragon. H. G. Wells, Theodore Dreiser, George 
 Moore, even John Dewey, do not recognize certain 
 rights and principles, but " humanity does after all 
 recognize certain rights and principles as fixed and 
 established," and therefore, by St. George, we must 
 draw the shining sword. As Mr. Sherman sums it 
 up, " the victory of the Allies should logically be re- 
 flected in a literature exalting the vindicated ' law 
 for man.' Haunted by memories of the fiery ruin 
 wrought by those who made lust and law alike in 
 their decree, it should not seek in nature for the 
 order, stability, justice, gentleness, and wisdom that 
 only man has ever desired or sought to create. It 
 
 [ 14 J
 
 should mirror a society more regardful of its ascer- 
 tained values, more reverent of its fine traditions, 
 more reluctant to take up with the notions of windy 
 innovators. It should, in short, suggest in its own 
 subtle way the desirability of continuing to work out 
 in the world that ideal pattern which lies in the in- 
 structed and disciplined heart." 
 
 This, we may take it, is a cri de coeur. Litera- 
 ture has suffered from the libertines, and literature, 
 " in its own subtle way," must make amends by lift- 
 ing us to a higher plane. As against the practices 
 of those naturalists who would bring us to the level 
 of the Germans it must, in the end, edify. 
 
 One might linger among the details of Mr. Sher- 
 man's conservatism. If he is setting out to show 
 that " the old moral abstractions " mean nothing to 
 Germany, for example, he has his work cut out for 
 him. The odium of scientific monism may be at- 
 tached to certain ruthless Germans, especially Ger- 
 man legalists, but you cannot start out to annex 
 such a convenient equipment as the old moral ab- 
 stractions without hearing a loud squawk from the 
 Kaiser. The trouble is, Mr. Sherman's counter- 
 revolution has in it a preposterous amount of that 
 German specialty, " instinctive obedience " ; and, as 
 he says himself, " we have trusted our instincts long 
 enough to sound the depths of their treacherous-, 
 ness." But the fact that German junkers hate 
 " windy innovators " quite as much as Mr. Sher-! 
 man does, and that official Germany equally adores 
 the " ideal pattern," does not go to the heart of the 
 matter. The heart of the matter, so far as under- 
 standing Mr. Sherman is concerned, does seem to be 
 in recognizing his profound conviction that life i
 
 in no sense an experiment, is in reality an ingenious 
 examination paper set by God in conjunction with 
 Matthew Arnold. " Stemming the tide of natural 
 impulse " that is one great way to reach the right 
 solution. Also believing that " society is in great 
 part an organized opposition to nature." The high 
 principle is Arthurian self-control. 
 
 It is a permanent question, this one of the liber- 
 tinism of all radicals, the morality of all stand-pat- 
 ters. But where G. K. Chesterton has proved him- 
 self an artist in the ways of counter-revolution is in 
 his public espousal of beer. By establishing his re- 
 lationship with Falstaff, by talking like an obstreper- 
 ous brewery-drayman, Mr. Chesterton has left no 
 doubt that when he says " restraint " there is ac- 
 tually something to restrain. If Mr. Chesterton 
 were to say, " It is of the essence of a man to lay 
 down his life out of reverence for his great-grand- 
 father," you would feel that he was incurably roman- 
 tic and would hope that his wife and family could 
 keep him from being hurt. But when Mr. Sherman 
 says it, and he does say it, you feel not altogether se- 
 rious. No one ought to have a great-grandfather 
 fit to mention in either Iowa or Illinois. And when 
 Mr. Sherman talks of restraint, you contemplate his 
 one terrific outburst of violence, " If I may be par- 
 doned a violent expression, Mr. Wells would like 
 to slay all the Victorians." Restraint, on these pure 
 lips, implies something that the intoxicated Gilbert 
 did not intend. You feel at once that it is something 
 you have, not something he himself has, that Mr. 
 Sherman wants to restrain. Yours, of course, is the 
 tide of natural impulse that he is longing to stem. 
 
 And so we find it. He admires Mark Twain, 
 [16]
 
 feels like explaining the great barbarian to the " sav- 
 ing remnant," rejoices in his " domestic rectitude and 
 common morality," but he is queasy about Mark 
 Twain's " savory earthiness," " golden mediocri- 
 ties," " undisciplined strength." He sees Mark 
 Twain as reckless, prodigal, garrulous, uproarious, 
 nai've, homely, arrogantly candid, impudent, not fine, 
 not profound, " not a drop of the aristocrat in his 
 veins." He yearns in connection with Mark Twain 
 toward " the discipline of an older and firmly strati- 
 fied society." It may not seem a grudging refer- 
 ence, but the fact that Mark Twain ridiculed pure 
 art like Jane Austen and The Vicar of Wakefield 
 sticks endlessly in his teacher's crop, and he actually 
 dares to dismiss masterpieces like Tom Sawyer and 
 Huckleberry Finn as " almost entirely delightful." 
 It is the intimidation of another positive vitality 
 that impairs H. G. Wells for Mr. Sherman. He 
 likens Wells to Rousseau, to the godless Shelley. 
 He blames him for irregularity. He calls him a 
 " zoological moralist " because Wells does not see 
 that " in the course of some thousands of years of 
 civilized society the elementary principles of con- 
 duct have been adequately tested, and are now to be 
 unequivocally accepted. They constitute a standard 
 of ' right reason ' outside themselves, to which we 
 should vigorously subject our treacherous individual 
 sensibilities." And, if you please, Mr. Sherman re- 
 calls the cant that training in the sciences leaves 
 " the moral nature undisciplined and inclined to ca- 
 price and eccentricity," as if Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, 
 Tyndall, had not shown the world, precisely in the 
 sphere of moral nature, what magnificent beings 
 English scientists could be. This miserable little 
 
 E i7 ]
 
 slander is on a par with identifying H. G. Wells's 
 advocacy of " efficiency " with the Belgic " effi- 
 ciency " of Germany, classing Mr. Wells with ruth- 
 less " imperially-minded men." You might as well 
 say that Benjamin Franklin was a Prussian because 
 he favored punctuality, or that Mrs. Bill Jones is a 
 materialist because she employs a carpet-sweeper. 
 And, indeed, when one explores the prejudice against 
 " naturalism," when one sees the humble pot-boilers 
 of Arnold Bennett hailed as rare sanity and sobriety, 
 there is almost no argument that does not seem pos- 
 sible in this battle against fearful odds. 
 
 But the supreme perversion in Mr. Sherman's 
 book is too full of savory heavenliness not to be 
 quoted. It is his exhibit in the case of The Brook 
 Kerith's indecency. 
 
 " It is shortly after the descent from the cross 
 and during the convalescence that the following con- 
 versation takes place : 
 
 " ' Joseph asked, not because he was interested in dog 
 breeding, but to make talk, if the puppies were mongrels. 
 Mongrels, Jesus repeated overlooking them; not altogether 
 mongrels, three-quarter bred ; the dog that begot them was a 
 mongrel, half-Syrian, half Tracian. I've seen worse dogs 
 highly prized. Send the bitch to a dog of pure Tracian 
 stock and thou'lt get some puppies that will be the sort that 
 I used to seek.' 
 
 " This is not the most nor the least quotable of 
 the innumerable passages by which our ingenious 
 author gives to his narrative a kind of sex-interest 
 in which the gospel story is quite deficient." 
 
 A clearer example of pruriency it would be hard 
 to find. " We of the English race," as Mr, Sher- 
 
 [ 18 ]
 
 man puts it, may be quite right to " resist Moore 
 though he is a pretty writer to save Shakespeare, 
 whom, on the whole, year in and year out, we pre- 
 fer." But 'granted that there is a sinister move- 
 ment on foot to dethrone Shakespeare in favor of 
 George Moore, and that Moore ought to be hero- 
 ically resisted by " us of the English race," still when 
 Moore wanted to refer to sex he never did fall back 
 on so quaint a subterfuge as hinting that Jesus knew 
 a little about breeding dogs. 
 
 As between low vitality and high vitality there is 
 no reason why high vitality should be a bully's. H. 
 G. Wells and Theodore Dreiser are by no means ex- 
 quisitely sensitive to the rights that they depict as 
 betrayed. But this business of " stemming the tide 
 of natural impulse " converts a critic into a nursery- 
 maid, and puts men of genius in a perambulator that 
 is several sizes too small. Mr. Sherman calls him- 
 self a humanist. He thinks Mr. Wells is a dan- 
 gerous faun and Mr. Dreiser a satyr and Mr. 
 Moore a half-animal of obscene ways. But what 
 he really resents in these men is their irregular in- 
 sistence on " treacherous individual sensibilities." 
 They have disregarded what he considers " the first 
 duty of man, which is to perpetuate in and through 
 himself the moral life of the race." 
 
 Is the criterion of that moral life to be Mr. Sher- 
 man's correctness, and is any such correctness the 
 proper touchstone of art? Not even his measured 
 praise of George Meredith and his sensitive appreci- 
 ation of Henry James can buttress such egregious 
 rules. It might be an excellent thing for the United 
 States if a clear division were made between the 
 sheep and the goats of criticism. On the side of
 
 the sheep, as Mr. Sherman sees it, there would be 
 a collection of eminent names Paul Elmer More, 
 W. C. Brownell, Professor Babbitt; and, I suppose, 
 Brander Matthews, Barrett Wendell and Mr. Sher- 
 man. But before this division can be accepted, 
 with all the eternal verities falling on the side of the 
 sheep, Mr. Sherman must do better in the way of 
 an offensive than disapproving of contemporary 
 vitality. When Shakespeare was contemporary, the 
 mandarins frowned on him. When George Mere- 
 dith first appeared he was hounded. It took Mark 
 Twain a generation to get the slightest professorial 
 recognition. With such examples of timidity, why 
 counsel timidity? Mr. Sherman preaches a forlorn 
 gospel when he begs us to cower behind the moral 
 life of the race to peer at art. 
 
 January 12, 1918. 
 
 [20]
 
 A CRITICAL study of William Dean Howells 
 is needed in America. Mr. Harvey thinks that the 
 lack of it is due to British literary superstition. Mr. 
 Howells, he believes, has not been highly, or highly 
 enough, esteemed in London, and the English 
 underestimation has been slavishly adopted here. 
 Whether this is the true cause or not, the fact is in- 
 disputable. The most eminent man of letters in the 
 United States is not half so well established in the 
 literary consciousness of our present generation as 
 any one of a dozen Englishmen. 
 
 American criticism, such as it is, has done very 
 little for our leading novelist. There are Conti- 
 nental writers, indeed, thanks partly to Mr. Howells 
 himself, whose work and whose personality arouse 
 a desire that is incommensurably greater than the 
 desire which he arouses. For all the exciting lit- 
 erary recommendation that is so common in America 
 the tone about Mr. Howells, with a few thrilling ex- 
 ceptions, is exceedingly mild. He is installed in 
 good repute. He is circulated. He is eulogized. 
 He is honored. But he is not treated as a positive 
 living force. The reasons for this, considering his 
 eminence, are worth inquiry, since American criti- 
 cism has long owed it to his genius to do something 
 toward breaking up its merely ceremonial attitude. 
 
 William Dean Howells, by Alexander Harvey. Huebsch, New 
 York. 
 
 [21 ]
 
 Clever and admiring as Mr. Harvey's book is, 
 it does not satisfactorily avail itself of the oppor- 
 tunity that William Dean Howells afforded. Mr. 
 Harvey selects important aspects of Mr. Howells's 
 work for lively and assertive advocacy, but it is 
 abundantly clear from the start that Mr. Howells 
 is a point of departure rather than a goal. Like a 
 caged canary that catches a sound only to burst into 
 his own song, Mr. Harvey listens to Howells only 
 to break forth about the Philistinism of Boston, the 
 frustration of Charles Francis Adams, the erotic 
 symbolism of Edgar Allan Poe. It makes a sug- 
 gestive book, but it neglects the case in point. An 
 arduous task confronted Mr. Harvey. There were 
 not only the thirty-odd novels to consider, but farces 
 and comedies and books of travel and criticism and 
 reminiscence making a total of nearly a hundred 
 volumes, all coming from a man whose recollection 
 spans half the life of the Republic. There was a 
 critical study to be made not only of the production 
 that Mr. Howells has achieved, but of the national 
 substance from which it came. It must be said that 
 in being loosely oracular and discursive, instead of 
 attentive, Mr. Harvey has missed his hour. 
 
 The special nature of woman seems to be a sub- 
 ject of compelling interest to Mr. Harvey, for 
 example, and he insists on looking to Mr. Howells's 
 novels for a satisfaction of this proclivity. But Mr. 
 Howells is the wrong person for a man with such 
 an objective. It is like going to Chicago for the 
 lotos. There is something to be said for the con- 
 tention that, " from the standpoint of literature re- 
 garded as a fine art, I consider The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham the greatest novel ever written. ... In 
 
 [ 22 ]
 
 the matter of form, structure, style, whatever we 
 choose to call that part of the novelist's equipment 
 which reveals him as an artist, this tale of the Lap- 
 hams is more finished than the masterpieces of Flau- 
 bert." But there is very little to be said for the 
 violent contention that " it is a tale of the love of 
 Irene for Tom and of Tom for Penelope, every de- 
 velopment of the plot being critical to us because it 
 bears, in a manner near or remote, upon that in- 
 tense affair. I have been unable to call to mind a 
 novel in which the sentiment, indeed the passion of 
 love has been steeped in so unsparing a realism with 
 such an intimate knowledge of the subject matter. 
 . . . The most remarkable feature of The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham is that it has two heroines." 
 
 Is Mr. Harvey entirely sincere in proffering this 
 novel as another Romeo and Juliet? It has the in- 
 tense interest of Tom and Irene and Penelope. 
 The unmerited misery of Irene and of Penelope, the 
 fire underneath such a simple phrase as, " Penelope 
 Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that 
 man away on my account? " these things do make 
 it a passionately human love story. But " the mys- 
 tery of pain and loss " is in nowise confined to the 
 girls. Mrs. Lapham " had never heard of the fate 
 that was once supposed to appoint the sorrows of 
 men irrespective of their blamelessness or blame, 
 before the time when it came to be believed that sor- 
 rows were penalties; but in her simple way she rec- 
 ognized something like that mythic power when she 
 rose from her struggle with the problem, and said 
 aloud to herself, ' Well, the witch is in it.' ' That 
 fate afflicts Silas as well as Irene, and in the rise 
 and fall of Silas Lapham, in his promotion to pros- 
 
 [23 ]
 
 parity, in his collision with a different order of civili- 
 ties, there is an epic which is subsidiary to nothing 
 else. So accurate is the delineation of Back Bay 
 that impatient Bostonians say: " But we know all 
 that." It is the main achievement of this novel that 
 it drives us to realize the inexorable necessity and the 
 equally inexorable cruelty of exclusiveness, social and 
 sexual, in direct proportion as we have imagination. 
 If we suppose that the statement of these cruel neces- 
 sities is a matter of no moment to Mr. Howells and 
 comes from a juxtaposition caught by the accident of 
 the camera, we naturally conclude that The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham is merely a bit of skillful representa- 
 tion and we have no emotions about it except for its 
 virtuosity. But such a supposition of detachment is 
 too naive. Silas Lapham is alpine with the inflec- 
 tions its author has given it. 
 
 It is a great novel especially, as Mr. Harvey says, 
 because of the relevancy of its material, the aesthetic 
 consequence of its arrangement. Take any little 
 passage like this: " Penelope began hastily to 
 amend the disarray of her hair, which she tumbled 
 into a mass on the top of her little head, setting off 
 the pale dark of her complexion with a flash of crim- 
 son ribbon at her throat. She moved across the 
 carpet once or twice with the quaint grace that be- 
 longed to her small figure, made a dissatisfied grim- 
 ace at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a 
 drawer and slid it into her pocket, and then de- 
 scended to Corey." Has this the remorseless in- 
 clusion, the jejune literalness, of a photograph? It 
 is faithful to fact in the sense that it conveys Penel- 
 ope to us by letting us see her in movement, but it 
 
 [24]
 
 is a picture suffused with feeling, feeling for her 
 charm, her characteristic gesture, her humorous self- 
 consciousness, her daintiness. Contrast this "real- 
 ism " with a conventional verbal portrait: " So, in 
 the blinding glare of cloudless morning, under the 
 dark, overarching orange trees, on a street, narrow, 
 dirty, and anything but straight, they met. The 
 tall, well-knit young man in quiet, close-fitting brown, 
 was small-faced, with clear, gray-blue eyes, a hooked 
 nose, and pink, boyish cheeks. The man, rubicund 
 all over an ample countenance, his eyes watery gray, 
 his surface suety, his outline pear-shaped, wore a 
 loose, flapping suit of soiled, spotty, snuff-streaked 
 black." It is only persons having no particular 
 feeling for literary art who can go astray about the 
 deceptive simplicity and artlessness of Mr. Howells 
 an " artlessness " which this real artlessness re- 
 veals. 
 
 And yet on this very point Mr. Harvey goes hope- 
 lessly astray. In his chapter on the limitations of 
 Mr. Howells he says, 
 
 His novels, his novelettes, his experiments with the short 
 story, his farces, his criticisms never take us to the depths 
 of anything. There are, he seems to say again and again, 
 no depths. Life is a surface. . . . He is like those older 
 psychologists who kept us so carefully within the limits of 
 consciousness that they never suspected the existence of the 
 subconscious. The matter might be put in a different fash- 
 ion by noting that the genius of Howells is objective and 
 not in the least subjective. He can tell us with subtle 
 observation what Grace Green said when she confessed her 
 love, how she looked, the way she raised her arms and what 
 she wore. He never dares to say what went on within her 
 
 [ 25 ]
 
 soul. How could he ever know the subconscious? In 
 avoiding all that he avoids likewise the symptoms or the 
 depths of passion, its essence, as the poet might say. 
 
 And again, 
 
 To tell the truth it is impossible to read the literature of 
 the psycho-analytic school of Freudian psychology without 
 marveling at the completeness with which the whole fabric 
 of the Howells criticism collapses and disintegrates. It is 
 all surface and no depth. . . . These people [the native 
 Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin] have never explored life 
 subjectively. The American subconsciousness is to all in- 
 tents and purposes a sealed book. . . . Howells is a re- 
 porter a reporter of genius, to repeat, a humorist of the 
 rarest gifts, an artist with words, but still a reporter. 
 
 What Mr. Harvey means by " objective " is not 
 clear. Take such a novel as A Modern Instance; 
 it is so little confined to reporting that it is actually 
 and almost specifically a morality. We witness the 
 steady deterioration of Bartley Hubbard, " the de- 
 cay of whatever was right-principled in him." The 
 novelist is not detached. He takes sides against his 
 villain and stigmatizes his " corrupt nature." When 
 Marcia has Bartley in her arms on the eve of their 
 fated wedding, before the discrepancy in their de- 
 sires is completely manifest, Mr. Howells does not 
 aim for one moment to remain a reporter. 
 
 ". . . if only you would let me take back " 
 " Yes," he answered dreamily. All that wicked hard- 
 ness was breaking up within him; he felt it melting drop 
 by drop in his heart. This poor, love-tossed soul, this fran- 
 tic, unguided, reckless girl, was an angel of mercy to him, 
 and in her folly and error a messenger of heavenly peace 
 and hope. . . . She took his head between her hands and 
 
 [ 26]
 
 pressed it hard against her heart, and then wrapped her arms 
 tight about him, and softly bemoaned him. 
 
 If Mr. Harvey had not himself derived a " How- 
 ells philosophy of women " from the novels, it might 
 be necessary to insist further that Mr. Howells is 
 more than a reporter, has indeed that " precious in- 
 sight " into the heart of life that is a synonym for 
 psychology. 
 
 Insofar as Mr. Howells was weaned from his 
 Germanic strain and caught the New England spiri- 
 tual accent, he shared, I should imagine, in the voli- 
 tional pessimism, the voluptuous sense of sin, of his 
 adopted community. ' The wish to be sincere, the 
 wish to be just, the wish to be righteous," he himself 
 puts it, " are before the wish to be kind, merciful, 
 humble. A people are not a chosen people for half 
 a dozen generations without acquiring a spiritual 
 pride that remains with them long after they cease 
 to believe themselves chosen." In his later books 
 Mr. Howells is so genial, so indulgent, so lambent, 
 one cannot associate him with the New England 
 righteousness, but in A Modern Instance he is a little 
 more sure of Hartley Hubbard's baseness than he 
 has any right to be. In the father's jealousy of his 
 daughter's husband, so faithfully depicted, there is 
 an unsuspected morbid element that would have set 
 poor Mr. Gaylord by the ears. And then there is 
 that nasty-nice self-concerned righteousness of Hal- 
 leek. (" Don't you see that his being in love with 
 her when she was another man's wife is what he 
 feels it to be an indelible stain? . . . There was 
 a time when he would have been glad to profit by a 
 divorce." Atherton shares Halleck's guilty feeling 
 
 [ 27 ]
 
 about this phenomenon of love without a marriage 
 license.) More knowledge of the unconscious 
 would undoubtedly have kept Mr. Howells from 
 being quite so disedified by the Hartley Hubbards, 
 quite so impressed by the Calvinistic contortionists. 
 One has only to read that extraordinary book, 
 A Boy's Town, to discover Mr. Howells's constitu- 
 tional shyness. He was destined to be impressed 
 by New England, by anything that presented itself 
 as having a special worthiness to which he hardly 
 dared aspire. It is as if he had always lived under 
 the aegis of a frowning deity, had the heart to be 
 adventurously gay, but was too devout to discount 
 those evidences of a reproving godhead that en- 
 veloped him. A sweet reasonableness comes in the 
 end to pervade his work, and he is never without a 
 continent humor, but there is a deference in the early 
 days, particularly to stuffy Bostonians, which makes 
 one ache for him. " It is good for the literary as- 
 pirant," he says in his pleasant way, " to realize 
 very early that he is but one of many, for the vice of 
 our comparatively virtuous craft is that it tends to 
 make each of us imagine himself central, if not sole. 
 As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not 
 revolve around any one of us; we make our circuit 
 of the sun along with the other inhabitants of the 
 earth, a planet of inferior magnitude. The thing 
 we strive for is recognition, but when this comes it 
 is apt to turn our heads. I should say, then, that 
 it was better it should not come in a great glare and 
 a loud shout, all at once, but should steal slowly 
 upon us, ray by ray, breath by breath." And so 
 on. It is excellent counsel for most men, but Mr. 
 Howells obeyed it too well himself. He was al- 
 
 [ 28 ]
 
 ways ready to spoil others with recognition, " Mr. 
 James or Miss Jewett, Kielland or Bjornson, Mau- 
 passant, Palacio Valdes, Giovanni Verga, Tourgue- 
 nief." For himself he claimed nothing. It is, as 
 it now appears, lamentable. Beautiful as is the con- 
 siderateness that distinguishes Mr. Howells, deli- 
 cate as is his apprehension of every other person- 
 ality, utterly reliable as is his democracy, scrupulous 
 as is his virtue, there is a retardation of impulse, for 
 all his productiveness, which afflicts one like the 
 thought of living in a land of perpetual cloud. And 
 yet there is never any dullness because of his subor- 
 dination of impulse. " After seeing Mme. Bern- 
 hardt's Hamlet no one can altogether liberate him- 
 self from the fancy that the Prince of Denmark was 
 a girl of uncertain age, with crises of mannishness 
 in which she did not seem quite a lady." Mr. 
 Howells never loses his capacity for this kind of 
 critical amusement, whatever his American circum- 
 spection. 
 
 Where Mr. Howells is circumspect in a national 
 sense it is rather with reference to the human herd 
 than to any social class or any political order. The 
 undemocratic irony of poverty he never forgets. 
 " Where, in what business of this hard world, is not 
 prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, 
 who still endeavor their poor best, and writhe and 
 writhe under the burden of their brothers above, till 
 they lie under the lighter load of their mother 
 earth? " Not on such an issue as war is he defer- 
 ential. His disgust for war, " that melancholy and 
 humiliating necessity of war," its " monstrous in- 
 consequence," is similarly unsparing and candid and 
 free. The circumspection he shows is, as it were, 
 
 [ 29 ]
 
 projected out of the representative witenagemot that 
 his conscience and his taste provide. So close is 
 he to his kind, he is humanely colored lest he upset 
 them, and however he may disagree with them, even 
 passionately, he observes certain conditions of 
 brotherhood, or tribal gregariousness. The sub- 
 tleties of this national circumspection are too easily 
 ignored by Mr. Harvey. It is certainly not the 
 finest moral contrivance there is, but it is the most 
 significant contrivance of the age Mr. Howells has 
 represented and it calls for keen and close and sym- 
 pathetic interpretation. 
 
 The task of interpreting Mr. Howells still awaits 
 American criticism. So faithful and disinterested 
 an artist as himself has stored up treasures of na- 
 tional consciousness which will gain in value as time 
 goes on. There is nothing about him, not even the 
 oppressed patience which seems so large a part of 
 his goodness, that vitiates his artistic being. He is 
 the one American figure on whom literary criticism 
 has failed to focus as it should, and from whose 
 large intentions and richly freighted performances 
 too few national writers have renewed themselves. 
 
 April 21, 191 j. 
 
 I 30]
 
 MRS. WHARTON'S ART 
 
 MRS. WHARTON comes very near giving com- 
 plete gratification with this volume of short stories. 
 She takes her subjects as only an artist can take them, 
 for the values, the resonances, they happen to have 
 for her; and the fact that she writes mainly of a 
 restricted class seems at the moment irrelevant. It 
 would be really irrelevant if Mrs. Wharton didn't, 
 in a subtle enough way, become condescending to 
 persons who live on, and off, the fringe. Sometimes 
 as between a perfectly initiated pet and a bounding 
 newcomer one gets a whiff of sublimated sensibili- 
 ties. Of such assaulted class consciousness as this 
 sort of thing implies, Mrs. Wharton occasionally 
 gives signs. Among the petty bourgeoisie she 
 moves with comparative sympathy. Among more 
 formidable representatives of the same ilk she moves 
 with something not unlike a sniff. She is difficult to 
 please, but the difficulty is not always due to in- 
 trinsic considerations. For a person of such lancing 
 intelligence she is strangely deficient in comedy. It 
 is not that one wants her to have a richer palette or 
 a more dashing line. It is not that one wishes her 
 to burst on the world exuberantly, with a yawp. 
 It is merely that with a higher sense of comedy other 
 realities would emerge in her landscape which, un- 
 
 Xingu, and other stories, by Edith Wharton. Scribners, New 
 York. 
 
 [31 ]
 
 der the light that is habitual with her, is somewhat 
 acid, cold and bleak. 
 
 But astringent as one may deem Mrs. Wharton's 
 mood, it would be absurd to miss her deep excel- 
 lences on that account. There are many manifesta- 
 tions of America for which she has not the faculty, 
 but those that peculiarly arrest her, those that de- 
 pend on being of the feminine gender among well- 
 off people in a given time and sphere extract from 
 her the sort of appreciation that amounts to genius. 
 The fate that she has most absorbingly contemplated 
 and most handsomely represented is perhaps that of 
 persons whose lot is enhanced by money or family 
 or taste, and whose impulses pay reluctant toll to 
 an order in whose establishment their happiness and 
 their honor are involved. It is, if you like, worldly 
 wisdom that here occupies Mrs. Wharton; it hap- 
 pens however, to be wisdom. Congruous as she is 
 with Scribner's Magazine, incongruous with the 
 Walt Whitmans, she is still the intent observer of 
 nature adaptive and assertive, of pliancies and sub- 
 jections, desertions and rebellions. In some re- 
 spects she is a pharmacist in her handling of vital 
 forces. She deals in essences and double distilla- 
 tions. She uses a delicate measure to weigh out 
 what is precious or deadly. She dispenses little 
 that she regards as lethal or valuable outside of what 
 would fit in an apothecary scales. She is grave, 
 minute, scrupulous, analytic. She is dramatic hypo- 
 dermically. But to such fine uses does she put the 
 sympathies and perceptions with which she is en- 
 dowed, that a reader would be strangely callous who 
 was not lost in admiration among the merits of her 
 art. 
 
 [32]
 
 Take as perhaps the best example in this volume 
 the tale called The Long Run. It is a favorite 
 theme of Mrs. Wharton's, the drama of a love that 
 is not coincident with marriage. In this case, as 
 indeed in most of the stories in Xingu, Mrs. Whar- 
 ton is seeing these things in retrospect, not as mat- 
 ters of palpitation so much as matters of eventual 
 chemistry. The man in this instance harks back to 
 his hour of decision, the hour when everything de- 
 pended on the driving force of his impulse as against 
 her husband's preemption. She is willing to go out 
 with her lover, she has no sense of having been pre- 
 empted. She knows that to her husband she is 
 furniture, that there are no " reasons honest 
 reasons for staying there." This woman at the 
 lift of the flashing sunny wave can invite her lover 
 to it. " The first great anatomist was the man who 
 stuck his knife in a heart that was beating; and 
 the only way to find out what doing a thing will be 
 like is to do it! " The male in the man, orthodox 
 in possessiveness, refuses. She cannot swim, he 
 sees it, except in the lifebelt of matrimony. And 
 what that decision came to, in the perspective of his 
 own resignation and her later re-marriage, is the 
 story Mrs. Wharton beautifully and sympathetically 
 contrives. They are not people seen in the various 
 successive attitudes of a morality, registering this 
 and that. They are people whose morality is in 
 solution, never labeled for that particular brand of 
 interest by Mrs. Wharton herself. She has no in- 
 tention for them save to reveal them, to give them 
 in their own " flood of joy that comes of heightened 
 emotion," their own persuasions as to life, and the 
 price it cost them to have had him incapable of cross- 
 
 C 33 ]
 
 ing a stream that had no bridge. A story like this is 
 the flower of a career. 
 
 Permeated with equal sympathy, rather a dejected 
 and vengeful sympathy, is Bunner Sisters, a fasci- 
 nating novelette of two middle-aged tradeswomen 
 in old New York. The odor of condescension does 
 not, for me, cling to this example of Mrs. Whar- 
 ton's studies in a sphere not excitingly fashionable. 
 There are inflections she catches with sharp exact- 
 ness. There is no attempt to make Ann Eliza and 
 Evelina seem less like morons than they really were. 
 But the story has an almost affectionate complete- 
 ness of detail and a totally affectionate occupation 
 with both Ann Eliza and Evelina in the bitter-sweet 
 of their intimacy with the fated Mr. Ramy. The 
 Bunners do not come off very well, defenseless in a 
 fight so manifold and so complicated as life; but 
 they are not exceptional. In not one of Mrs. Whar- 
 ton's eight stories does any one come off particu- 
 larly well, except of course the potential murderer in 
 Triumph of Night and the brute-husband in The 
 Choice. 
 
 Xingu is perhaps the cleverest of these stories. 
 It is also the least valuably perceptive. A satire on 
 the excessive seriousness, the pretentiousness, the 
 false zealotry of a small American " culture " club, 
 it goes rather too far in an acrimonious caricature of 
 the women as human beings. Mrs. Wharton's acid 
 bites fairly into their idiocy as the pursuers of cul- 
 ture, it scarifies them too deeply in their social 
 character. The Laura Clyde and Mrs. Plinth and 
 Mrs. Leveret of real life would be equally insuf- 
 ferable about books, but Mrs. Wharton's cold dis- 
 like for their nature is quite unjustified. It is in 
 
 [34J
 
 dealing with such women as these, women who if 
 anything would err on the side of amiability and 
 whose main mistake is to take too seriously the obli- 
 gations imposed on them by a culture not native, that 
 Mrs. Wharton becomes frigidly conventional. Her 
 Mrs. Plinths and Mrs. Leverets are misjudged from 
 the vantage point of Lenox or Tuxedo, or wherever 
 it is that women do not allow even their illiteracy to 
 detract from their self-confidence. 
 
 Despite Bunner Sisters, it would be egregious 
 loyalty to Mrs. Wharton as an artist not to admit 
 that she is primarily a person interested in a re- 
 stricted world. She has an ear for the clash and 
 chime of life outside Lenox and those other places 
 where ministers of grace draw your bath and steal 
 about, exaggerating your wardrobe, while you pre- 
 tend to be asleep. Her story of wartime in the 
 Vosges and the German intrusion on a chateau there 
 indicates that. But it is not too much to say that she 
 tends to start with men of means and women who 
 use their means to their ends. One has only to 
 glance at her personae Horace Pursh, Halston 
 Merrick, Susy Suffern, Harriet Fresbie, Wilbour 
 Barkley, Austin Wrayford, Cobham Stilling, Philip 
 Trant, Mrs. Lidcote, Mrs. Lorin Boulger, H. Macy 
 Greer, Franklin Ide, Jim Cumnor. These are not 
 the kind of people with whom you share cracker- 
 jack in a day-coach. These are not the lads and 
 lassies who put skids under William H. Taft in 
 1912, abandoned themselves to Onward Christian 
 Soldiers, at Chicago, and helped Mr. Roosevelt to 
 be a traitor to his class. Rather the contrary. But 
 on the Atlantic sea-board, using the Alleghenies as 
 a sort of privet hedge, Mrs. Wharton holds these 
 
 [ 35 ]
 
 persons in preference out of proportion to their 
 constituency in society as a whole though not by any 
 means out of proportion to their interest. For their 
 interest, as Mrs. Wharton considers them, is not a 
 fatuous fashionableness. It is the chance they offer 
 for intensive human relations, those relations that in- 
 clude love, but also so often preclude it, and always 
 pivoting on marriage. Marriage and love are the 
 great factors in the drama Mrs. Wharton concen- 
 trates upon. Of these the greater, in the frankly 
 middle-aged stories in Xingu, is neither one nor the 
 other automatically; she is cool enough to say that 
 the cost of love may be too heavy, and warm enough 
 to have its balance sheet her main preoccupation. 
 It is this absorption in the delicate processes, the 
 feminized processes, which decide where the be- 
 medaled warriors shall dine, and whom sit next to, 
 and whom take to wife and whom to bed, that has 
 kept her up-town and socially excited. The quality 
 of that excitement is the principal charm of Xingu, 
 an achievement that no other American is emulat- 
 ing. 
 
 February 10, 1917. 
 
 [ 36]
 
 MRS. WHARTON'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 novelist so accomplished as Mrs. Wharton 
 could fail to write a personable story, but there is 
 air of falsity about this new invention of hers that 
 arouses a good deal of interest. The idiom, so far 
 as an outsider may guess, is quite true to New Eng- 
 land. At the proper moment the girl, Charity says, 
 " I want you should leave me," and one hears a 
 human voice. The background is intimately ob- 
 served, so that one sees the clean structure of New 
 England houses of many types, and is constantly 
 aware of the dominant Mountain from whose law- 
 lessness Charity was redeemed into North Dormer, 
 to look forward to that sexual limbo which rewards 
 New England virtue. The sweet airs of New Eng- 
 land summer fields and woods give a crispness and 
 charm to those pages over which Mrs. Wharton 
 lingers most affectionately, and the contrast of a hot 
 holiday throng in a fair-sized neighboring town is 
 prosecuted with all of her lynx-like sharpness. It 
 is certainly not in these respects that the story can 
 be said to be false. 
 
 The theme to which Mrs. Wharton gives such 
 circumstantialities is no more alien to her, so far as 
 intelligent comprehension goes, than the idiom and 
 the background themselves. It is one of those 
 stories of the inexorable that seem perfectly to lend 
 themselves to Mrs. Wharton's icy restraint. If you 
 
 Summer, by Edith Wharton. Scribners, New York. 
 [37]
 
 want to get a region in which inexorability of the 
 moral order has a whacking good time, you do not 
 have to go to New England. George Eliot, as I 
 seem to remember from terrified perusal at the age 
 of fourteen, made the mills of the gods grind with 
 the usual insufficiency of car-grease in the Italy of 
 Romola and Tito. When it came to the inexorable 
 in the classics, Greece was its favorite locale. Be- 
 fore that time the land of Job was its eminent home 
 and, if one is going to be open-handed in this re- 
 spect, what's the matter with Wessex as the scene of 
 cursed spite? But while New England has no ex- 
 clusive proprietorship in the grim-inexorable, there 
 is no doubt that the specific gravity of human con- 
 duct is deemed higher in that estimable region than 
 in any other region habitable by the serious story- 
 teller. Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould goes one 
 better than Mrs. Wharton when she wants inexora- 
 bility. She also resorts to New Englanders but she 
 transplants them to Mocha or Java or Guatemala 
 and serves them up with a little Golden Bough-wow. 
 This mixture of strange and familiar gods jags one's 
 nerves in a delightful manner, but there is a certain 
 incontrovertible safety and sanity about harsh moral 
 laws as they operate in New England, and Mrs. 
 Wharton's instinct is perfectly sound when she pro- 
 ceeds to exhibit the inexorable doing business at the 
 same old stand. 
 
 The trouble with Summer, however, is that Mrs. 
 Wharton rather forces her note. It is not that se- 
 duction as a scheme for literary bouleversement is 
 a little out of date. There is no such thing as a 
 catastrophe too trite to be worth reciting. It is only 
 that Mrs. Wharton, always inclined to be sub-hu- 
 
 [ 38]
 
 man, is much too callous in the uses to which she 
 has put this seduction. She has seen with that 
 frigid eye of hers what an excellent chance there 
 would be, against the background of an outlaw 
 Mountain, to show a child adopted into the prim 
 village violating the code of the village, being ut- 
 terly incapable of enduring the squalor of the out- 
 lawry from which she sprang, and being ruthlessly 
 mangled between the stark cliff that rejects her and 
 the waves that fling her blindly against it. This 
 scene of the pitiless, the inevitable, the inexorable, 
 has special attractions for Mrs. Wharton's peculiar 
 temperament. It is not that she is so full of pity, 
 like Thomas Hardy, that she cannot remove her eyes 
 from the spectacle of hapless shipwreck. It is not 
 that she is so full of lifebuoy morality, like George 
 Eliot, that she cannot help taking a coastguard in- 
 terest in these perilous situations. It is more that 
 she cannot help realizing the grisly effectiveness of 
 seeing a fair skiff riding in on the waves of those 
 forces that dominate life, and wrecked for one's fas- 
 cinated eyes. The wreck may be merely to a dream, 
 the insubstantial fabric of a vision, but the authen- 
 ticity of that wreck, the bedevilment of the vision, 
 give a glow to the specialist in frustration that occu- 
 pies a part of Mrs. Wharton's soul. 
 
 A good shipwreck, moral or physical, is by no 
 means the least satisfactory of fictional themes, but 
 no author has a right to run up and down the shore 
 line waving a harmless heroine to destruction. 
 What one dislikes in Summer is the undoubted pur- 
 pose of the author to dish the heroine for the sake 
 of the sensation of dishing her. One really suffers 
 on account of the pace at which Mrs. Wharton hur- 
 
 [39 ]
 
 ries over the poignancy of a human record to arrive 
 at a cruel predicament. The feeling is certainly es- 
 tablished before the end that as a human being Char- 
 ity Royall is nothing to her author, is merely a crea- 
 ture to be substantiated in detail in order that a dra- 
 matic sensation can be properly pulled off, and the 
 curtain rung down before a breathless audience. 
 The scene itself is not just an ingredient in Mrs. 
 Wharton's contrivance, and the youth, Lucius Har- 
 ney, is not dislocated for the purposes of the story. 
 But the primitive mountaineers, Charity's guardian 
 lawyer, Royall, who wants to marry her, the fierce 
 pride of Charity, the vague " other girl " in the 
 offing to whom the seducer is engaged, are all factors 
 in an arrangement, a scheme, which has none of that 
 generous human preoccupation about it which is 
 needed to win the credence of the reader. Mrs. 
 Wharton wants the credence of the reader, but she 
 proposes to earn it by authoritative manner, not by 
 any simple method of humane contagion. The re- 
 sult is a falsity that is scarcely accountable in an 
 artisf so acute. 
 
 Where this is most evident is in the perfunctory 
 treatment of those situations in the life of Charity 
 Royall that most ask one to put oneself in her place. 
 There is, for example, the occasion on which this 
 girl, in love with the young architect who has come 
 for the summer to North Dormer, overhears her 
 guardian disclose to him the secret she has never 
 gassed of her disgraceful parentage. 
 
 " My God, how ghastly," Harney murmured ; and Char- 
 '"y, choking with humiliation, sprang to her feet and ran 
 pstairs. She knew at last: knew that she was the child of 
 
 [40]
 
 a drunken convict and of a woman who wasn't " half- 
 human," and was glad to have her go; and she had heard 
 this history of her origin related to the one being in whose 
 eyes she longed to appear superior to the people about 
 her! ... It was too bitter to picture him as the detached 
 impartial listener to such a story. " I wish he'd go away : 
 I wish he'd go to-morrow, and never come back ! " she 
 moaned to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there, 
 in the disordered dress she had forgotten to take off, her 
 whole soul a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams 
 spun about like drowning straws. 
 
 This is a curiously superficial and mechanical ac- 
 count of a heroine's crisis. Girls do moan to their 
 pillows, of course, and lie disordered far into the 
 night. But assassination of a hope would create a 
 more bitter fever than this. Imagine Mr. Howells, 
 restrained as he really is, offering these few hack- 
 neyed and jejune phrases as part of a spiritual his- 
 tory. The fact is, Mrs. Wharton needed Chanty 
 Royal's unfortunate ancestry in her business as a 
 story-teller, but the effect of disclosing what in real- 
 ity was nothing more than a literary convenance, she 
 could not take too seriously. 
 
 Because of this and other failures in sympathy and 
 plausibility, Summer cannot be set to the right side 
 of Mrs. Wharton's account. The predicament of 
 the girl who loves more than she is loved is intensely 
 valid, the social situation of a girl whose child is to 
 be born out of marriage is the most crucial and diffi- 
 cult in the world. But Mrs. Wharton has arranged 
 for Charity's misfortune too deliberately, deprived 
 her of aid too sweepingly, afforded her marriage with 
 her guardian too simply, to be known as an artist 
 in handling this great theme. It is true that Mrs.
 
 Wharton has made the shadows of the Mountain 
 funeral quite terrible, and has brought lawyer Royall 
 to the fore as a welcome relief to an unremitting 
 strain. This kind of skill, however, is the only real 
 gift that Summer illustrates. It is not a repellent 
 story, but is essentially an empty one, and suggests 
 too often the failings of a person who is capable of 
 going slumming among souls. 
 July 14, 1917. 
 
 [4*]
 
 THE GENTEEL TRADITION 
 
 r EW things in America are so disreputable as the 
 I. W. W. To have Mr. Churchill, the most repu- 
 table of national novelists, plunge into the thick of 
 their polluted stream amounts to an intellectual chal- 
 lenge. Has it been unfair to consider Mr. Churchill 
 definitely fixable by the aid of that brilliant diagnosis 
 of Mr. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in 
 American Philosophy? Or has it been unfair to 
 regard the I. W. W. as lacking in claims on gentility? 
 On the surface, the collocation of Winston Churchill 
 and the I. W. W. upsets one's previous notion of 
 both institutions. It demands investigation, asking 
 either for a new understanding of the labor radicals 
 or a closer definition of the novelist's possibilities. 
 
 Grim industrialism in the throes of an I. W. W. 
 strike is surely a theme uncongenial to Mr. Churchill, 
 and, if the supercilious view of him were correct, he 
 would no more attempt to tackle such a subject than 
 Mr. Theodore Dreiser would write a Methodist 
 novel. But where the supercilious fail in their esti- 
 mate of Mr. Churchill is in supposing that he repre- 
 sents a dead tradition. He is not, it is true, Di- 
 onysiac. His is the cautious progressivism of a 
 public trustee. But the singular fact about him, the 
 main element in his success, is the tenacity of his 
 Americanistic vitality. Traditions are viscous and 
 
 The Dwelling-Place of Light, by Winston Churchill. Macrail- 
 lan, New York. 
 
 [43 ]
 
 their flexibility is hard to credit, but every novel that 
 Mr. Churchill writes shows his skill at adaptation, 
 his power of accommodating himself and his tra- 
 dition to new and awkward facts. And it is not 
 merely that he accommodates himself. By virtue of 
 his conscientious nature, he chews hard, he swallows, 
 he assimilates. It is not that his temperament 
 prompts him to seek novelty. He is not adventur- 
 ous. It is simply that he heroically accepts the fare 
 set before his country and his tradition and invariably 
 manages to survive. 
 
 The fare, in this instance, is the Lawrence strike. 
 How can fiction assimilate this strike so that it can 
 give an understandable story to the children of the 
 genteel tradition? There is something big and gen- 
 erous about Mr. Churchill's undertaking such a task. 
 His absence of humor is, of course, a sure sign of his 
 fixity in the tradition out of which, and for which, he 
 is interpreting the new America, but even though he 
 is solemn and responsible in regard to his audience 
 he does not flinch under the stiff requirements of his 
 theme. He starts, quite naturally, with an Ameri- 
 can rather than an immigrant family, but it is a 
 family that in spite of branching New England an- 
 cestry has sunk to ignoble immigrant level and is 
 barely able to keep its chin above water. The head 
 of the house is an amiable incompetent man of fifty- 
 five, Edward Bumpus, who is gate-keeper of the 
 huge Chippering Mill. Finding refuge from reality 
 in genealogical retrospections of the Bumpus family, 
 he does nothing to ameliorate the lives of his driven 
 wife and his two wage-earning daughters. One of 
 these, Lise, is dedicated by Mr. Churchill to the 
 Juggernaut of the imprudent. She is pleasure-lov- 
 
 [44]
 
 ing and vulgar and slangy and cheap. She wants a 
 " good time " and takes it, and is seduced and be- 
 comes a prostitute. Mr. Churchill is sorry for her 
 but the symmetry of his novel demands a weak sister. 
 It is the other girl, Janet Bumpus, whose personality 
 is his real concern and whose fate is the gist of his 
 story. It is through her, recognizably a high-spir- 
 ited and well bred American girl whose lot is cast 
 with the proletaire, that Mr. Churchill strives to 
 realize a condition which is still rather ungrateful to 
 good Americans. 
 
 " Where is the way to the dwelling-place of 
 light? " That is the question asked by Janet's very 
 nature. The great mill town gives her no answer. 
 Its voice is the sharp siren in the gray morning, whip- 
 ping the sleeper with scorpions. Out of the crowded 
 streets, the miserable tenements, the myriad polyglot 
 operatives, Janet gets no response to her own sub- 
 merged desires. She is not aware of a class strug- 
 gle. She has no social consciousness. She is just a 
 valuable human being, according to any conventional 
 reckoning of value, who is compelled to fight for her- 
 self in a hideous industrial milieu. What chance is 
 there, provided she is incapable of baseness, of hard- 
 ness, of acquiescence? Where, for a fine American 
 girl working as stenographer on low wages in a mill 
 town, " where is the way to the dwelling-place of 
 light?" 
 
 The agent of the great mill in which Janet works 
 is a red-blood New England business man named 
 Claude Ditmar. 
 
 At five and forty he was a vital, dominating, dust-colored 
 man, six feet and half an inch in height, weighing a hun- 
 
 [45 ]
 
 dred and ninety pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When 
 relaxed, and in congenial company, he looked rather boyish, 
 an aspect characteristic of many American business men of 
 to-day. 
 
 In this man's office Janet Bumpus (a dreadful 
 name) goes to work. Something about her attracts 
 him. Intent and preoccupied as he is, one brief en- 
 counter outside the office decides his interest. She 
 is made his private stenographer; and then, as Mr. 
 Churchill observes, 
 
 Our stage is set. A young woman, conscious of ability, 
 owes her promotion primarily to certain dynamic feminine 
 qualities with which she is endowed. And though she may 
 make an elaborate pretense of ignoring the fact, in her heart 
 she knows and resents it, while at the same time, paradoxi- 
 cally, she gets a thrill from it a sustaining and inspiring 
 thrill of power! On its face it is a business arrangement; 
 secretly attempt to repudiate this as one may it is 
 tinged with the colors of high adventure. 
 
 The possessive Mr. Ditmar finds Janet inflexibly 
 independent. The business of the mill begins to 
 fascinate her, and his power to impress her, but his 
 unimaginative greed for her makes surrender impos- 
 sible. Her spirited denial of him has, however, the 
 effect of completing his love for her. She wishes to 
 withstand this love, but before she completely com- 
 prehends her own motives she yields to him, only to 
 become convinced immediately after, by the simul- 
 taneous " ruin " of her sister and outbreak of the 
 strike, that she has been sacrificed to a capitalist- 
 exploiter's greed. The violence of her rebound, 
 under the circumstances, lands her into the ranks of 
 the I. W. W. ; stenographer to a red-lipped agitator 
 
 [ 46 ]
 
 who proves quite as possessive as the man against 
 whom she takes up arms. 
 
 Considering the route by which Mr. Churchill 
 arrives at the I. W. W., a certain frightened gen- 
 tility might reasonably be looked for. The one 
 character he sees interiorly, Janet, comes to the 
 I. W. W. on the basis of a private grievance, with- 
 out any pronounced conviction beforehand as to the 
 wrongness of the employers' attitude and without any 
 convincing proof when she gives up Ditmar that her 
 own plight is the same as her sister's. Though he 
 insists that he wants to marry her, she regards her- 
 self as outraged. Her pregnancy drives her mad. 
 She even wants to kill him. And the chaos of her 
 feelings is telescoped with her radicalism, mere re- 
 action as it is. But the I. W. W. leaders with whom 
 she associates are seriously reported. Mr. Churchill 
 copes with them in the sense that he models them 
 on actual leaders, and represents their movement as 
 comprehensible and definable " a decrepit social 
 system in a moment of lowered vitality becomes an 
 easy prey to certain diseases which respectable com- 
 munities are not supposed to have." " Loose morals 
 and loose ties! " Mr. Churchill is not intimidated 
 by these symbols of syndicalism. Even the prattle 
 of his red-lipped agitator is not a perversion. The 
 fundamental limitation is the focussing of the crisis 
 through Janet, an unconvinced American who is 
 I. W. W. by misfortune, not by " fault." 
 
 The end of the book sends one back to Mr. 
 Santayana's diagnosis. 
 
 America [he said] is not simply a young country with an 
 old mentality: it is a country with two mentalities, one a 
 survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other 
 
 [ 47 ]
 
 an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of 
 the younger generations. In all the higher things of the 
 mind in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions 
 it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years 
 behind the times. The truth is that one-half of the Ameri- 
 can mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, 
 has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly be- 
 calmed ; it has floated gently in the back water, while, along- 
 side, in invention and industry and social organization, the 
 other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara 
 Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in Ameri- 
 can architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial man- 
 sion with some modern comforts introduced surrep- 
 titiously stands beside the sky-scraper. The American 
 Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect in- 
 herits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the 
 American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the 
 American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise ; the 
 other is all genteel tradition. 
 
 It is to the genteel tradition, at any rate, that 
 Janet escapes. Mr. Churchill intimates that she is 
 broken by her tragic experiences, and out of his 
 goodwill he commiserates those experiences. But it 
 is to the genteel tradition that she flies. In it she 
 finds herself and is at home. 
 
 If The Dwelling-Place of Light were insincere, 
 this adherence to tradition would destroy its sub- 
 stantiality. As it is, faithful though it is to the 
 antiquated, the largeness of the considerations that 
 it attempts to master gives it an eminence of its own. 
 At times unspeakably clumsy, seldom or never 
 comedic, it has the strength that always goes with 
 straightforwardness, and it is too often mellow and 
 tender in spirit not to be deemed fine as well as large. 
 
 [48]
 
 Mr. Churchill will never escape from gentility. He 
 has achieved his position as its favorite interpreter. 
 But the vitality shown in The Dwelling-Place of 
 Light proves how persistent is his faith in its tenets. 
 He can make a place for the I. W. W. in his tradi- 
 tion rather than give up an American mill or an 
 American girl. 
 
 October 13, 1917. 
 
 [49]
 
 A NEW NOVELIST 
 
 WINDY MCPHERSON has a Scottish sound. 
 
 It suggests a revival of those quaint Hoot Man 
 novels that once enabled Ian MacLaren and J. M. 
 Barrie and the author of The Lilac Sunbonnet to 
 make hay. To pump up enthusiasm for such a 
 novel at this date would be perverse rather than 
 heroic, and the honest reader might well shrink from 
 being asked to admire another variation in plaid 
 styles. But there is no need for aversion in this in- 
 stance. It is only Mr. Sherwood Anderson's title 
 that implies gnarled dialect and thorn-tree humor. 
 Windy McPherson's Son has nothing whatever to 
 do with the bonnie blue bell or the bonnie brier bush, 
 it was not written out of love for the bonnie bonnie 
 banks of Loch Lomond, or the still more bonnie 
 bonnie Bank of Scotland. 
 
 A Chicago man born in a small middle-western 
 town, Mr. Anderson has written a novel of the life 
 he himself knows. He begins with Caxton, Iowa. 
 Sam McPherson, the son of that " Windy " who 
 indulged in G. A. R. bally-hoo, is the newsboy of his 
 little town on the railway line between Omaha and 
 Chicago. Sam is reticent and keen and efficient in 
 inverse ratio to the drunkenness and wind and waste 
 of his father. After his mother's death the boy 
 makes Chicago. In the commission business on 
 South Water Street he founds his fortune. He steps 
 
 Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson. John Lane, 
 tf ew York. 
 
 [50]
 
 up into the management of an arms corporation, gets 
 to the top, marries the daughter of the president, 
 and faces life on a spiritual plane where keenness 
 and efficiency alone are not enough. After a few 
 years of life on the terms that his wife predicates, 
 McPherson sees a chance to have himself count in a 
 consolidation that will require him to eliminate his 
 wife's bombastic father if he is to go through. He 
 does go through and his wife leaves him. The rest 
 of the story is fabulous success followed by degen- 
 eration, then by a revolutionary attempt to reach hap- 
 piness and significance, and finally by an acceptance 
 of a common lot. 
 
 One hardly needs to be told that this is the work 
 of a new novelist. Although it embodies a wisdom 
 of experience not often traceable in a beginner's fic- 
 tion, it has a freshness that belongs to the spring- 
 time of creation. It is not merely a novel of per- 
 sonal fortunes. It is a novel of the meaning of life. 
 Where a more practiced novelist might have been 
 content to tell a story, Mr. Anderson has sought to 
 give expression to those long thoughts which so 
 enamor the young novelist, which so often break in 
 the weaving like a gossamer too thin to be spun. 
 In his failure as well as in his success Mr. Anderson 
 has gone far beyond most of his contemporaries. 
 Where he has failed, that is to say, he has proved 
 a larger genuineness than most of his contemporaries 
 prove by their success. This failure is not, of 
 course, a warranty that Mr. Anderson is now a 
 Great Novelist, and so on. But it is part of that 
 bravery of the spirit without which no novel can be 
 incorporated by its reader. 
 
 If Windy McPherson's Son is not successfully 
 [ 5i 1
 
 genuine all through, it is perhaps because of Mr. 
 Anderson's zealousness to project all of a destiny. 
 Knowing quite thoroughly the man who is out to 
 win, self-made, combative, daring, shrewd, self-re- 
 liant, strong, Mr. Anderson appears to have wanted 
 to give him his climax at any cost, for the sake of the 
 downfall afterward. With that in mind, Mr. An- 
 derson was satisfied to represent rather thinly and 
 poorly the relations between Sue Rainey and Sam 
 i McPherson. Sue Rainey is excellently described in 
 the exacerbation of her first tragic pregnancy, and 
 its effect on her husband's ideal of her is well imag- 
 ined. But what one most wants, Sue's version of 
 herself in her relation to this mailed warrior, is not 
 completely realized. Of course, we have at the 
 start the formula of their relations. She says : 
 
 " I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of 
 undying energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and 
 your ability to children our children. That will not be 
 easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of power. 
 Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three 
 have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have 
 to make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. 
 You will have to be a new kind of father with something 
 maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious 
 and kind. You will have to think of these things at night 
 instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will 
 have to live wholly for me because I am to be their mother, 
 giving me your strength and courage and your good sane 
 outlook on things. And then when they come you will 
 have to give all these things to them day after day in a 
 thousand little ways." 
 
 Waiving the question of Sanrs ability to give his 
 ability to his children, there is much difficulty about 
 
 [ 52 ]
 
 believing that any Sue could say this to any Sam. 
 Granted that it is an accurate formula, that it ex- 
 presses what every woman is supposed to feel, it 
 reads much more like an author's reasoned memo- 
 randum than like a girl's actual announcement. 
 
 This speech is a fair example of a common kind of 
 novelistic speech that does not seem to have the tex- 
 ture of life. Even if the critic is wrong in thinking 
 that a woman seldom has so conscious a programme 
 for the selection and direction of her confederate in 
 the solemn responsibilities of procreation, there is 
 still the question whether she would disclose her pur- 
 pose, or purposes, to the person she is about to nomi- 
 nate. In these matters human beings vary mon- 
 strously, but they are more than likely to proceed by 
 indirection, especially in bourgeois Chicago in the 
 early stages of a love affair between a boy from Iowa 
 and a girl in the fashionable society of 1890 or there- 
 abouts. And if the reader has at all the conviction 
 that indirectness is the human process in these matters 
 of sensibility and amenity, he gets less than nothing 
 of personal character and temperament and intona- 
 tion from a novelist who hurries his plot by putting 
 in such a quickener. There is no special point in the 
 directness of such speeches. Mr. Anderson proffers 
 them as if they had the pure accent of ordinary man- 
 kind. But if a woman could say a thing like this 
 to her lover, from herself and not out of a book, she 
 would be entitled to a novel all by her lonesome 
 or entitled to another Man and Superman. The 
 attentive ear does not often record these utterances; 
 and between them and the utterances to which a 
 novelist like Arnold Bennett gives sanction there is 
 a difference not merely of attention. There is that 
 
 [53 ]
 
 infinitesimal yet marvelous difference that lifts the 
 inorganic to the organic. To be said to live, a fic- 
 tional personality must not only come from a gener- 
 ative artist, it must be integrated out of the mate- 
 rials of a world actually possessed. And where 
 there is any failure of knowing and caring, as here 
 suggested, there is only a bluff at creation. It is a 
 bluff, curiously enough, which Americans rather 
 despise Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians for 
 taking such enormous pains to avoid, pains that are 
 against all the philosophy of being in business for 
 profit. Living in a day of business enterprise when 
 real rewards may be gained by goods that are just 
 made to market, Americans see no great reason for 
 severe integrity in the art of fiction. And yet with- 
 out such integrity, the kind that makes the Five 
 Towns true to the experience of two continents, there 
 is no more vitality in a novel than there was in those 
 deceptive blue birds described by Maeterlinck. 
 
 The point about Windy McPherson's Son, how- 
 ever, is its liberal suggestion of a new integrity in 
 the American novel. Eloquent as the characters are 
 in Caxton the verbal dandy, the mad Irishman, 
 the schoolteacher nipped by scandal, the revivalist, 
 the woman burdened by a veteran yearning over a 
 thousand battles never fought they are only part 
 of the suggestive wealth of the story. Symbolic as 
 Sam's wanderings are, and meagre and personal as 
 his Research is, there is a continual flood of human- 
 ity, American humanity, through sincere and exciting 
 pages. And for all the traces of the beginner's art, 
 there is the virtue of unexpectedness in the story, the 
 supreme quality of the organism which a story should 
 have. 
 
 [54]
 
 The final impression of Windy McPherson's Son 
 is one of poetic power. Although Mr. Anderson 
 has a clean veracity about sex his version of the re- 
 lations between men and women is rather cramped. 
 He records the estrangement between the sexes with 
 some bitterness. But his novel as a whole has less 
 bitterness than one might expect from a man who 
 has become a novelist in the artistic orphanage of 
 the industrial Middle West. To have refused all 
 fostering from the English and French masters, to 
 have seen Iowa and Chicago for himself, exhibits in 
 high degree that courage in isolation which is the 
 heavy price of breaking new ground. That price 
 Mr. Anderson has paid. In his succinct and quick- 
 moving novel he has made the America of the small 
 town his own, its stridencies and heart-hungers and 
 thin spiral fires. He has traced the small town's 
 tribute to Chicago and other confluences of native 
 hope and greed and desire. The modern business 
 enterprise that is, from the spiritual side, so often 
 warfare without a programme or a principle, Mr. 
 Anderson has not accepted conventionally. If there 
 is a sign of conventionality, it is more in the attempts 
 McPherson later makes to join in a social move- 
 ment that will give meaning to his life. 
 
 Mr. Sherwood Anderson's name is likely to be- 
 come familiar to readers of American fiction. Out 
 of the slag-heap, as the romancers see it, he has ex- 
 tracted a veracious novel. He has shown how the 
 will-to-power works in the American, how American 
 enterprise can satiate its Hindenburgs and Kitcheners 
 and greater war-lords of civil life. He has also 
 shown the limitations of this will-to-power, as the 
 romancer must refrain from showing it. By such 
 
 [ 55 ]
 
 verity and by the breath of the spirit that flows 
 through it Windy McPherson's Son is romantic, as 
 all life is romantic, even the one-eyed Cyclopean life 
 of monied success. 
 
 January 20, 
 
 [56]
 
 TO AMERICAN WORKINGMEN 
 
 IT is Mr. Sherwood Anderson's distinction in 
 Marching Men that he summons the rawest Ameri- 
 can people, brutal in their callous acceptance of their 
 own ugly and shoddy material condition, flaccid in 
 their personal tastes and futile in their spurts to 
 escape from banality, barbarous in their solemnity 
 about trivial things and their levity about serious 
 ones, cruel in their enforcement of submissiveness 
 and their drunken explosions against it, anarchic in 
 their relation to any sustained purpose outside the 
 immediacies of their food and shelter, their women 
 and their progeny. 
 
 Having possessed himself of the vast part of the 
 life of the vast proportion of the American people, 
 Mr. Anderson wanted to do something besides rep- 
 resent its disorder and brutality and ineffectiveness. 
 He wanted to show how it could be led. It is the 
 failure of his book, as I see it, that he has made his 
 hero a primordial figure about whom he is clearly 
 infatuated. The sensational and spectacular scheme 
 by which this Pennsylvania miner aspires to evoke the 
 solidarity of labor hardly succeeds in escaping the 
 ludicrous. But Marching Men is not a literal novel. 
 It has, indeed, its large element of the caveman 
 piffle that played such a part in the romanticizations 
 of Jack London, but outside this puerility, this day- 
 dream of the male egoist, there is a great deal of in- 
 Marching Men, by Sherwood Anderson. John Lane, New Yorfc. 
 [57]
 
 spiring symbolism in Marching Men, and it is jus- 
 tifiably dedicated to American workingmen. Per- 
 haps, as the success of Jack London intimates, it is 
 necessary in the novel of the proletarian to repro- 
 duce for modern hero-worship the simple Herculean 
 giant who invariably downs his enemy. It is not 
 the prowess of McGregor that makes Marching Men 
 a living presence, however, so much as the freshness 
 of feeling about workingmen and women, the vividly 
 frank and abrupt opinions, the flashes of energetic 
 description, the perverse notions concerning women, 
 the details of mining town and apple-warehouse and 
 night restaurant and Chicago pulchritude, the remi- 
 niscence of 1893 and of First Ward infamies, the 
 swiftness of incident. Mr. Anderson's subjects are 
 handled with a verve so different from the tired 
 matrimonialism of the professional novelist that an 
 occasional naivete is unimportant. Without naivete 
 he would probably not have had the courage to write 
 so graphic a proletarian novel. 
 
 " Huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind, un- 
 trained, uneducated, hating the world," McGregor 
 is the young American whom time converts from a 
 savage disgust with workingmen to a leadership that 
 is ruthless love of order. 
 
 " I hate you because you are disorganized and weak like 
 cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power 
 of force. I would like to slay you one by one, not with 
 weapons but with my naked fists. If they have made you 
 work like rats buried in a hole they are right. It is man's 
 right to do what he can. Get up and fight." 
 
 This is the spirit that dominates McGregor when 
 he is the joke of Coal Creek, " Beaut " McGregor, 
 
 [ 58 ]
 
 son of " Cracked " McGregor. But besides the 
 quest of power that occupies his first years in Chi- 
 cago, an ambition that regulates his sympathies and 
 his passions, there is a self-identification with tfye 
 working class by which his hatred is merely the ob- 
 verse of his love. His success as a lawyer gives him 
 a chance to leave his class, but his sense of solidarity 
 prevails, and the rest of his struggle is a struggle to 
 make an army out of labor by progress from the 
 mere rhythm of marching to a rhythm of like- 
 mindedness in society. 
 
 There are hints of the Peter of War and Peace 
 in the figure of Mr. Anderson's McGregor, but it 
 is only necessary to mention a Tolstoyan hero to 
 mark the rudimentary portraiture of the American. 
 He is not, primarily, an independent will. He is a 
 purposeful creation of the author. We are intro- 
 duced inside him, but only to discover that he is all 
 of a piece, as simple as a sun-dial, and the mecha- 
 nism by which he works requires a light from out- 
 side. His treatment in Coal Creek does supply 
 some real motivation, and there are symptoms of 
 spontaneous human nature in his relations with the 
 undertaker's daughter, the milliner, the fashionable 
 Chicagoan. But there is something about his devo- 
 tion to a love of order, his recurrence to his simple 
 sententiousness, that suggests a cuckoo-clock. The 
 only way to overcome the difficulty of establishing 
 an idea in a novel is to humanize every expression of 
 its sponsor. This is not Mr. Anderson's way. His 
 McGregor uniformly knocks men down, uniformly 
 hates, uniformly suppresses women, uniformly 
 spouts. He is fervid but rigid, a romancer's man. 
 
 The chief fact about Marching Men is not, how- 
 [59]
 
 ever, its rhetoric, its grandiloquence. It is its ap- 
 prehension of the great fictional theme of our gener- 
 ation, industrial America. Because the subject is 
 barbarous, anarchic and brutal it is not easy for its 
 story to be told. But the restless vitality of the 
 thing itself is beginning to be felt, through layers 
 of professorial censorship. Harsh voices, wild 
 tongues of fire, ominous multitudinous mutterings, 
 are at last striving up our horizon. 
 
 One is induced in reading Marching Men to 
 theorize on the enormous gap between literate and 
 unliterate America. The novel's weakness in throw- 
 ing a rainbow across the gulf is a sign of the sun- 
 dered realities. The explanation lies, perhaps, in, 
 man's faculty for ignoring the obvious, his great gift 
 for evading glaring fact. It is not obtuseness that 
 makes the chauffeur ignore hitching-posts or makes 
 the admirer of Elihu Root fail to see the importance 
 of Bill Haywood. It is a difference of purpose. It 
 seems to be the necessity and the penalty of jealous 
 purpose to compel the evasion of glaring fact, to 
 delete unacceptable fact from consideration. The 
 youth who lives in a boarding-house can walk his city 
 for ever without seeing carpenters' shops or plumb- 
 ers', groceries or meats, and his blindness is not that 
 he cannot see these agencies of life but that he has 
 no sufficient motive for seeing. We cannot observe, 
 apparently, unless we expand our purposes to make 
 a place for attendant fact. If fact is stubborn and 
 we are not ready for it, there is every category of 
 morals and taste to be enlisted to side-track it. The 
 imagination is much more connected with will, much 
 more the servant of habit and circumstance, than 
 we are accustomed to admit. The first step in edu- 
 
 [ 60 ]
 
 eating the imagination, indeed, is to remind our- 
 selves that the shutter remains on the camera so 
 long as we do not will to perceive. 
 
 By reason of these restrictions, it seems to me, the 
 proletarian has had small place in American fiction. 
 Under the ban of negligible ugliness, as the eminent 
 novelists see it, comes the great majority of the peo- 
 ple. They, the eminent ones, have principally been 
 the children of circumspect parents, Presbyterians or 
 Baptists, middle class in social and moral habits and 
 unlikely to be hospitable to the primordial. Outside 
 their view lies the life of the proletarian except as it 
 impinges on the middle class, and these rawnesses of 
 American existence, so conceived, have as little part 
 in a polite literacy as have peanuts in the poetry of 
 Oscar Wilde. It is not that the facts are seen and 
 rejected. The facts are simply not open to the emi- 
 nent novelists any more than to social-sentiment 
 workers or bright reporters or class-hyphenates of 
 the sweetest disposition. The proletarians are in a 
 different universe of discourse, and one so unthink- 
 able to eminent novelists that is promptly ruled out, 
 the way we humane people rule out the superheated 
 hell. 
 
 Where Marching Men succeeds is in thrusting the 
 greater American realities before us, seen as by a 
 workingman himself. It is a fragmentary novel, 
 rhetorical in the atmosphere that surrounds Mc- 
 Gregor and uncritical of its own notion of solidarity, 
 but a narrative that suggests the presence in our fic- 
 tion of a man who knows our largest theme. 
 
 September 29, 1917. 
 
 [61 ]
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 2
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 THERE is not the slightest chance that the last 
 of George Meredith's writings will be popular. As 
 it stands, a block from which the figures have 
 scarcely begun to emerge, Celt and Saxon is not even 
 certain to attract loyal Meredithians. To unfin- 
 ished novels most of us are honestly averse, and this 
 one is definitely unfinished. Yet it would be dull 
 not to ask for it the greatest possible prominence. 
 It is characteristic and worthy of Meredith; it de- 
 serves the consideration of every one who knows 
 what " Meredith " means. 
 
 The unfinished novel is discouraging because it 
 loses the virtue of plot, but this is a minor loss in the 
 case of the most engaging of psychologists. As a 
 maker of plots Meredith was a limping hero. It is 
 notorious that he was deficient in the craft of story- 
 telling, and Celt and Saxon will cause no one to ap- 
 peal this verdict. 
 
 If Meredith's mind were not of such startling and 
 delightful quality, it would be affectation to recom- 
 mend Celt and Saxon. There is no use pretending 
 that his limitations as a story-teller were not serious. 
 They are one of the causes of an unpopularity which 
 is never likely to be overcome. A plot, after all, is 
 a design to which everything else must be subordi- 
 nated if the reader's attention is to be enticed and 
 enthralled. Rude life may not conform to this de- 
 Celt and Saxon, by George Meredith. Scribners, New York. 
 [6 5 ]
 
 sign, and the psychologist may despise it, yet there 
 is no such thing as a good novel that has not a good 
 plot. The difficulty in Meredith seems to be a diffi- 
 culty of sheer intellectual exuberance. Time after 
 time he starts honestly spinning his yarn, but as he 
 warms to his task he becomes intoxicated by his own 
 cerebration, and as he yields to his passion for vital 
 comment on life his plot goes hang. If events 
 march forward in his stories, they also halt for hours 
 at a time, to suit the author's convenience. For the 
 distracted reader he has no bowels of mercy. Like 
 many brilliant men, he will be enjoyed on his own 
 terms or not at all. 
 
 In the patriotic Irish view, Celt and Saxon is not 
 entirely satisfactory. To a man who loved Eng- 
 land as Meredith loved it there was something gro- 
 tesque in the extremist Irish view. To him the dif- 
 ferences between England and Ireland were differ- 
 ences not as to union itself, but as to the terms of 
 union. He could not, as a man of common sense, 
 conceive the passionate individualism of Ireland, its 
 passionate desire to be divorced from the empire, to 
 be "a nation once again." In a beautiful woman 
 Meredith would have understood this shrugging har- 
 ness: he would have been the first to unbuckle the 
 harness and give the creature her way. But for a 
 feeble people, beaten in the international fight for 
 survival, he had no such radical sympathy. He 
 wrote, in short, not as a Celt, but as a Celt-and- 
 Saxon. He wrote in the great faith of Imperialism, 
 his conning tower planted at Boxhill. For this rea- 
 son his political rendering of the Irish situation is 
 not to the taste of the Irish. Meredith did not know 
 the Beauchamps of modern Ireland, and his igno- 
 
 [66]
 
 ranee is astonishingly Saxon. But the patriotic Irish 
 make a great mistake if they decry this book on po- 
 litical grounds. It is, after all, for its insight into 
 the spiritual constitution of the Irish that it is valu- 
 able. And here, as always, Meredith is supreme. 
 
 It is characteristic that the Irish gentlemen of this 
 novel should be unrealistically conceived. His Pat- 
 rick O'Donnell is an Irish gentleman educated by 
 the Jesuits in France, and he talks like no Irishman 
 that ever breathed. He talks like Meredith! And 
 yet, under this curious lingo of Meredith masquerad- 
 ing in a brogue, the spirit of an Irishman is flaming. 
 The same applies to Con and Philip. In each case 
 the lamp is Meredithian, but the fire is Irish. It is 
 precisely as if the novelist were an actor unable to 
 mimic but able to convey and inspire the emotion. 
 
 To John Bull the Irishman is a mercurial creature, 
 as unstable as he is impressionable. It is balsam to 
 an Irishman to find that Meredith understands this 
 temperament, and does not judge it with Marcus 
 Aurelius for text. To Marcus Aurelius the highest 
 English ideal conforms the ideal that Meredith 
 himself maintained in Redworth and the protagonist 
 of Sir Willoughby. But Meredith was not so stoic 
 as to admire only those Irishmen who approximate 
 Englishmen. He conceived, as few English do, the 
 difference between character and stolidity. He con- 
 ceived the difference between admirable self-posses- 
 sion and English imperturbable self-will. Knowing 
 the Irish chameleon as well as the British bull, he 
 was yet quick to recognize in the finer Celt a quality 
 of imagination and prehension in which the Saxon is 
 lacking. The charm of this quality Meredith not 
 only observes : he represents it. His Patrick O'Don- 
 
 [ 6? J
 
 nell incarnates this social genius. He has the wit, 
 the tenderness, the naivete and the cajolery which 
 make an Irishman as different from an Englishman 
 as water is different from earth. And one is allured 
 by Meredith's double reflection of his characters 
 his mirror of Ireland in the English mind and of 
 England in the Irish. In his chapter on John Bull, 
 on that grunter and guzzler whom he so loathed, 
 there is sharp criticism of his own people to balance 
 his satire of the bamboozling Captain Con. This 
 chapter and a similar one on journalism have his 
 true magnetic touch. 
 
 Celt and Saxon has some delicious phrases. " He 
 was tall, and had clear Greek outlines: the lips were 
 locked metal, thin as edges of steel." In the house 
 of this frigid gentleman, there was among the heir- 
 looms " a shirt of coarse linen with a pale brown spot 
 on the breast, like a fallen beech leaf." To Wells, I 
 am afraid, that would have been something sharp 
 and journalistic an A. B. C. shop tea stain. 
 *' Bull's perusal of the Horatian ' carpe diem ' is 
 acute as that of the cattle in fat meads." And what 
 of John Bull's attitude toward Meredith himself, the 
 " simple starveling piper " ? It is Bull, 
 
 your all for animal pleasure in the holiday he devours 
 and cannot enjoy, whose example teaches you to shun the 
 plaguey tale that carries fright; and so you find him sour 
 at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he 
 harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the 
 smallest admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp 
 a little over his work, and allow his pleasures to inspire a 
 dose of thoughtf ulness, he would be happier, and who 
 knows become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from 
 the pole-ax. 
 
 [68 ]
 
 Having quoted such typical phrases as these, it 
 seems strange to admit the unpopularity of Mere- 
 dith. And yet he is admired and loved, by but a 
 few. With gifts prodigious and an excess of that 
 rare genius called temperament, he is thrown away 
 by most readers as a nut not worth cracking. His 
 writing is felt to be strained and unnatural, and by 
 some table thumpers is denounced as effeminate. 
 He cannot be called degenerate, because the prankt 
 flowers he displays are not poisonous, yet had Mere- 
 dith discussed the blacker arts of life he would un- 
 doubtedly be known as a degenerate writer, a deca- 
 dent. As it is, people who do not look inward do 
 not like him. And even his admirers are sometimes 
 at a loss to explain why, in spite of his patent limita- 
 tions, they discern in him one of the few great spirits, 
 a spirit in whose light the petty dwindles and the 
 shameful shrinks away, one whose art was but the 
 faulty medium of a soul that itself had triumphed in 
 exceeding trial, and came out a sharp comedian, one 
 who staunchly accepted his burden, knowing it would 
 always be as light as the heart that bore it. 
 
 It was not by virtue of animal spirits that Mere- 
 dith was a comedian. His is comedy of the intel- 
 lect, the only comedy possible to a creature so sensi- 
 tized. Men are born either with red blood in their 
 veins or blue blood. They are born either with the 
 flesh and genial emotions predominating or the spirit 
 and brains predominating. To my mind Meredith 
 was essentially blue-blooded, but he was too great a 
 man, too much of a genius to become a type. Genius 
 miraculously transfuses the bloods genial and criti- 
 cal. It embraces the world, and understands all 
 things. In Meredith there was no urging of an 
 
 [ 69 ]
 
 Aristocratic code. He was as truly a natural man 
 as the reddest teamster. But in him so many ele- 
 ments were raging, there was so much " wind and 
 fire," there was such complexity of nerve and sym- 
 pathy and egoism and morality and passion, that it 
 took a million-handed style to perform the perfectly 
 honest and representative expression that he desired. 
 Where many ideas are candidates for expression, 
 there will sometimes be an uproar which no chairman 
 can dominate. Meredith's brain was so fertile that 
 its activity was almost inflammatory, and he did not 
 always observe parliamentary rules. As a result his 
 novels are dazzlingly intellectual, but likely to addle 
 our brains unless we learn his method. That he 
 had a method, that he understood life and art deeply, 
 that he included within himself ten thousand men and 
 women, seems to me invincibly true. Celt and Saxon . 
 itself shows an understanding of character not to be 
 paralleled in the writings of Englishmen or Irishmen. 
 Read Trollope's mutton-headed writings about the 
 Irish and compare them with this. See what Lever 
 wrote with a pen dipped in Irish whisky, and con- 
 trast it with Meredith's reading of the Celt, a read- 
 ing that sees in rollicking Con something more than 
 human vaudeville. Vaudeville there is in Mere- 
 dith's Con, but a vaudeville in which all of us sits 
 in audience, not a vaudeville in which your common 
 sense has been deposited in the cloakroom and your 
 sense of decency been thrust under the seat. It is 
 because Meredith never bromides his brain that so 
 many people resent him they whose brains are 
 still in the condition of winter pears. And in resent- 
 ing his brilliance they foolishly deny him depth and 
 fundamental feeling. 
 
 [ 70]
 
 Perhaps the greatest reason why Meredith can- 
 not be popular is deficiency in commonplace. This is 
 at once his supreme virtue and his most serious de- 
 fect. There is nothing commonplace about him, 
 neither his way of saying things, nor the things he 
 says, nor the people he conceives, nor the surround- 
 ings he conceives them in. He abhors the literal, he 
 ignores it. His whole manner of regarding com- 
 monplace fact is oblique. He can reveal the life ef- 
 fect of a moment's shiftiness in one lightning phrase, 
 yet he will write about an aristocrat's leg in language 
 so symbolic and circumlocutory that you pine to own 
 the leg yourself, with a boot on it. Meredith writes 
 about commonplace people as he might write about 
 cows and sheep. To him they are a race apart, in- 
 teresting no doubt and reasoning as well as instinc- 
 tive (so professors say) but not of his ilk. The 
 novelist was, of course, a democrat. But he did not 
 love the masses the way Whitman loved them. He 
 could not have flung open his spiritual house and let 
 the crowds trample through him, after the fashion 
 of Balzac and Tolstoy. He could not have vul- 
 garized himself for the sake of those very people 
 whom he beheld as the object of all government and 
 civilizing. Inclusive in his philosophy and inclusive 
 in his understanding, he was exclusive in his wit and 
 in his taste. His mind, indeed, was peopled with a 
 nobility infinitely better bred and accomplished than 
 any that exists in England. His sublimation of 
 Queen Victoria was typical he had to sublimate, 
 and the best media for his uncommonplace concep- 
 tion of life were the ladies and gentlemen of old 
 England. Such ladies and gentlemen ! Had a man 
 of less genius tried to sublimate them he would have
 
 been culpably sentimental and snobbish. Meredith 
 was neither his brain happened to be a eugenic 
 brain, that is all, and the creatures that emanated 
 therefrom were eugenically delivered. 
 
 The absence of commonplace in Meredith is not 
 wholly a virtue. No novelist can hope to reach 
 many people who does not include and dwell upon 
 the familiar affairs of men, the common drudgeries 
 as well as the high emotions. In Meredith we live 
 with our superiors, people in whom there is dross, 
 but not our dross, people whose mental and spiritual 
 pace is swift, and whose motives are rarefied. Such 
 people exist, worthy of such a master. But to live 
 with one's superiors is trying no wonder people 
 shrink from Meredith's galaxy. The mere splendor 
 of such life repels one, as one would be repelled by 
 ten hours of continuous Beethoven. Our nerves 
 wince at such strumming, exquisite though it be. 
 We long for rye bread and beer and the reassurance 
 of dull companions. We long for earth under our 
 feet, after soaring. We want leave to relax and 
 even dissipate. Meredith expects too much of us 
 and of himself. His will is ever-present. Never 
 pathological, he is still incessantly introspective and 
 critical. He has little in common with happy ro- 
 mantics like Barrie, who has the heart of a child. 
 Meredith is least of all simple and sensational. If 
 he climbs physical Alps it is a spiritual excitement 
 and adventure. Skeptical in all matters of religion, 
 he employs his intellect on everything, and retains 
 sanity only because it is so stupid to be insane. 
 
 In all of the novels one is struck again and again 
 by the purity of Meredith's interests, his extraordi- 
 nary sublimation in a world that so shrinks from the 
 
 [ 72 ]
 
 sublime. But however difficult it may be to breathe 
 in these altitudes of Meredith, however difficult to 
 fraternize with his women and men, however hard 
 to accept his recondite wit, let us at least not be so 
 stupid as to assume that his sublimation has in it any 
 fear of life. Meredith holds himself superior to 
 nothing natural, but he makes strict terms with life, 
 and he keeps his side of the bargain. Aware of the 
 thousand disguises in which we entertain the bestial 
 man, he detects him and keeps him in control. That 
 is a great part of his secret, of his magnificent hard- 
 ness, of his keenness and his intellectual zest. 
 
 September 9, JQIO.
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 VERY slight has been the notice bestowed, up to 
 the present, on Mr. Henry James's new stories. 
 They are accepted by the reviewers just as " more 
 James," without much reference to what the 
 "James " part of the statement stands for. A 
 newer talent of equal piquancy might arouse more 
 excitement. But this particular talent, just because 
 it is guaranteed, is slighted even as might be slighted 
 the unassertive devotion of a valuable friend. Mr. 
 James does not startle, as inspired genius startles. 
 He merely goes on being his peculiar and immensely 
 clever self; and for the savoring of this self few re- 
 viewers seem to have kept keen. 
 
 Why so few people were, in the first place, keen 
 about Mr. James is too easy to see. A younger 
 novelist, but one of more powerful literary character, 
 came out the other day with a downright and crush- 
 ing summary of the obvious limitations of Mr. 
 James. " He is tremendously lacking in emotional 
 power." That was the first item, slapped down with 
 a journalistic "tremendous." " Also his sense of 
 beauty is over sophisticated and wants originality. 
 Also his attitude toward the spectacle of life is at 
 bottom conventional, timid and undecided. Also he 
 seldom chooses themes of first-class importance, and 
 when he does choose such a theme he never fairly 
 bites it and makes it bleed. Also his curiosity is 
 
 The Finer Grain, by Henry J?es. Scribners, New York. 
 L 74 ]
 
 limited." It is because many, many readers besides 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett feel exactly these deficiencies 
 that the event of Mr. James is, to most eyes, no more 
 stimulating than a chill and watery dawn. 
 
 One admits that for every item in this emphatic 
 dictum by Mr. Bennett there is, from the standpoint 
 of Mr. Bennett's personal requirements in fiction, a 
 sufficient warrant. Tested on The Finer Grain, 
 every one of these judgments is found to be valid, 
 entirely valid. Emotionally Mr. James is feeble. 
 He is, in a certain sense, inadequate. That is, he 
 fails to get from life the generous, unpremeditated 
 thrill, which is the splendor of life or if he gets 
 it, he does not yield to it, he does not magnanimously 
 and whole-heartedly communicate it. Here Mr. 
 James is distinguished even from the run of authors, 
 in his unwillingness to let his emotions carry him to 
 sea, in his intense and jealous containment of self. 
 He is incapable either of relishing or of practicing 
 that precise kind of personal mauling which Arnold 
 Bennett here illustrates. In Mr. James there are 
 many traits of the sedate, the urbane, the playful, 
 the fastidious, the secretive, the luxurious, the epi- 
 curean many traits, in fine, of the cat. It is a 
 cat equally without civic pride and republican spirit 
 and without the anarchist's divine discontent. It is, 
 as it were, a detached bachelor if not a celibate cat. 
 It is a cat occupied with cream, with cushions, with 
 dry and pretty peregrinations, with the art of pleas- 
 ing, and the art of being pleased. It is a superior 
 animal, choice in its friendships, appreciative but 
 undemonstrative, and preserving always the de- 
 meanor of spiritual chastity. 
 
 Such an animal is of necessity " conventional, 
 [ 75 ]
 
 timid and undecided." By a series of exquisite 
 maneuvres, of gentle, deft unravelings, of patient 
 persistences, it may reach the heart of a mystery, and 
 satisfy a curiosity which, if limited, is sleepless. 
 That, in the end, is the nature of the creature. To 
 ask of such a creature the canine virtues is to ask 
 that a diplomat proceed as an army with banners. 
 It is legitimate expression of preference, but it is not 
 criticism. 
 
 It is possible, of course, for cats to be disap- 
 pointing qua cats. But what Mr. Bennett sets on 
 the debit side of Mr. James seems to me to be the 
 very essential qualities of Mr. James. He is blam- 
 ing the cat for being a cat. He is saying: " Ob- 
 serve that animal. He does not bark. He does 
 not leap on you, friendly and vociferous. He does 
 not wag his tail. He does not bite. He does not 
 attack the burglar. He is lamentably timid. As 
 I live, it ii a strange dog ! I swear I do not see why 
 he wears a blue ribbon." 
 
 Criticising Mr. James as he does, it is evident 
 that Mr. Bennett is not predisposed, in any event, to 
 the feline. But not every one is so limited. And 
 granting that Mr. James is feline, it remains also to 
 be said that he is a prince among felines. He is, 
 after all, an artist. The more of an artist he is, the 
 more he develops his own peculiar attitude toward 
 life. One may intensely dislike that attitude. One 
 may regard it as pitifully circumspect and drearily 
 personal. One may despise it for its apparent ab- 
 sence of poetry, of public spirit, of adventure, of 
 heroism. But it is an honest, a sincere, a wonder- 
 fully " true " attitude. The point is, that whether 
 one happens to like or dislike Mr. James's self, 
 
 [7.6]
 
 one must marvel at the way he has asserted his 
 right to himself. Whatever the timidity, the con- 
 vention, the indecision of his " type," there is no 
 timidity in his acceptance, his marvelous transcrip- 
 tion of the type. No ideology has prevented Mr. 
 James from being true to his nature. And so, if one 
 be as oddly unedified as Mr. Bennett himself by that 
 nature, one must still wonder at the stupidity which 
 calls an artist moral names simply for giving life as 
 he sees it. To blame the artist, not as he should be 
 blamed, for failing in his art of presenting life, but 
 for presenting a view of life that does not edify 
 that is the essence of British philistinism. I do not, 
 for my part, hold that edification is not worth dis- 
 cussing. I do not hold that Mr. James's values 
 should not be transvalued. But that is not the first 
 business of literary criticism. The first business, in 
 this case, is to ask whether Mr. James does really 
 possess a view of life. Arid that he does possess 
 such a view, of the most charming if feline integrity 
 (and, after all, a cat has his own difficult kind of in- 
 tegrity), is the point one, in this particularly rude 
 and personal way, would emphasize. 
 
 We are so used, in our fiction, to having the nove- 
 list assert that conduct is three-fourths of life that 
 we are scarcely prepared for Mr. James's unashamed 
 following of predilection. Mr. James's themes may 
 not be of first-rate importance to many people, but 
 they are, all of them, in their modest way, of impor- 
 tance to Mr. James. He has shown in his prefaces 
 how many of these themes came to him, in his casual 
 existence as a man of his quite sufficient world. 
 Without going outside that world, clinging to its 
 coziness, its familiarity, its practised and ever modu- 
 
 [ 77 ]
 
 lated habit of intercourse, he yet found in it a full 
 employment, and in order to know " life " never re- 
 garded it necessary to obey Mrs. Gertrude Ather- 
 ton's injunction and spend years in a newspaper of- 
 fice, living " instead of dreaming and scribbling." 
 Mr. James has dreamed and scribbled to suit his own 
 admirable fancy. According to Mrs. Atherton he 
 would be much improved had a ruthless city editor 
 " pruned " his style into one " direct, incisive and 
 compelling." But there again is the preconception 
 of what style should be, and what the man should be. 
 
 Anglo-Saxons are given to presuming that if a man 
 does exactly what he wants to do, it is wrong. The 
 presumption has a great deal in it. But when it 
 comes to judging fiction, it is much safer to presume 
 that the real artist knows what he is about; that there 
 is method in his madness; that in fact the only way 
 to judge him is to stand in his shoes. This of course 
 applies only to a person who is true to himself, who 
 knows what he is about. It does not apply for one 
 second to people who want style to be dictated by the 
 ruthless city editor. Such people do not yet know 
 what they exist for. They still imagine that style 
 is something not to be elicited but to be prescribed. 
 
 The great trouble with Henry James, of course, is 
 that he takes the time to indulge in his own fantasy. 
 Men of the practical world have not time for such 
 savoring of sensation, such apparently unremunera- 
 tive living. Take for instance the aforesaid ruthless 
 city editor. How can the city editor consult his own 
 fancies, obey his own impulses, when he has to occupy 
 himself with dishing up news seven times a day? 
 The city editor is not a student of life, or an expert 
 as to life. He is too busy to do anything except 
 
 [ 78 ]
 
 work frantically at his job. If he knows what he 
 likes or dislikes, if he is conscious of personal sen- 
 sations, it is impossible for him to savor them. The 
 vastly important thing is to dish up seven editions a 
 day, or 2,100 a year, or 21,000 every ten years, as his 
 contribution to that impressive and for the most part 
 appalling spectacle, the Day's Work. 
 
 What is true for the city editor is true for in- 
 numerable business men, busy-ness being their busi- 
 ness. Such men have no time for Mr. James's 
 meticulous consultation of personal taste. In per- 
 emptory phrases they dismiss all the things that it in- 
 terests Mr. James to put into long-hand, and they 
 find their real life in making two coathangers hang 
 where one hung before, in having two neckties worn 
 out where one was worn out before. To judge be- 
 tween them is like judging between cat and dog. 
 Personally, I like commonplaces. I prefer the artist 
 who sees that common life, and common people, and 
 common affections are just as precious in their possi- 
 bilities as the life of the virtuoso, sophisticated, cal- 
 culating and discreet. But while the very best dog 
 may be preferable to the very best cat, I do not think 
 of preferring the ordinary yapping and yowling cur, 
 the demos dog, to this rare and always amusing speci- 
 men in Mr. James. 
 
 In the present volume Mr. James's essential pre- 
 occupation in the aesthetics of private relations is 
 proved by his choice of persons. The standpoint is 
 that of a writer in The Velvet Glove. It is that of 
 a middle-aged painter in Nora Montravers. In A 
 Round of Visits it is that of a middle-aged Ameri- 
 can, with a private though an imperiled income, and 
 of a not dissimilar person in Crapy Cornelia. I dp 
 
 [ 79 ]
 
 not know whose shoes Mr. James wears in The 
 Bench of Desolation. I did not, and certainly not 
 perfunctorily, read the The Bench of Desolation. 
 
 To overpraise The Velvet Glove is as difficult as 
 to suggest the social manner of a fascinating foreign 
 stranger. But the anecdote is simple. In a 
 crowded Paris salon, John Berridge, a prepossessing 
 and most esteemed young author, is complimented 
 by a dazzling young English Lord who, warmly and 
 shyly, asks Berridge for his verdict on the book of a 
 Friend. Presently the friend appears, a radiant 
 lomplement of the Lord, who instantly singles out 
 Berridge and envelopes him in attention. Berridge 
 is breathless in the lady's sudden and sunny wave, 
 and is gasping at the bountiful rollers he sees coming. 
 The book he glances at, a fearful composition written, 
 by the young Olympian in a " lit'ry " aberration, but 
 while he waits in the corner of the salon, never com- 
 pletely lost to her sight, he is suddenly flooded by her 
 return, and borne happily but dumbly to the privacy 
 of her motor, her escort " home." And, then, in 
 the motor, it is broken to him ! She wants an Ameri- 
 can preface to her velvet novel, The Velvet Glove. 
 She is seducing him, who already was leaping Olym- 
 pus, and imagining himself deified, the occupant of 
 her young Lord's throne, and by ravishment. In 
 her beaming disclosure the young goddess " dear 
 man's " him, puts him back on his native earth, dis- 
 mantles him of everything but self-possession. 
 Berridge refuses to capitulate, refuses to give up his 
 dream of her golden favor to the invading banality. 
 She, in the last persuasiveness, kisses the Master's 
 hand, the hand that is going to write her Preface. 
 Not a little alarmed at possible prostrations, he 
 
 [ 80 J
 
 firmly transfers the same kiss back to her glove, and 
 prepares to eliminate himself from the motor. But 
 home is reached in a trice, in the language of The 
 Velvet Glove, and on the step Berridge's effusion of 
 the salon is in one swift twist justified, the coronal 
 act is accomplished. It is in the invention at the 
 end that Mr. James is so cunning. 
 
 The elaboration of Nora Montravers is the only 
 thing in its disfavor. Mr. James extracts a good 
 deal of humor out of the transference of the 
 " cocky " family position from a likable man to his 
 too straw-colored wife, a lady in a " white in- 
 validical shawl." 
 
 Out of Mr. James's two New York stories it is 
 possible to have a thoroughly good time. One of 
 them ends with a suicide. But there is an absence of 
 common emotion, of that quite undiscriminating 
 welling of human sympathy, in Mr. James's de- 
 scription of violent death, which makes his climax 
 spill red ink rather than blood. Here he does ac- 
 tually fail. He is, worse luck, not " direct, incisive, 
 compelling " enough. Still meticulous when required 
 to advance relations energetically, he pitches with all 
 his forces, but the ball has a feminine feebleness. 
 Mr. James is not fitted for this violence. He is too 
 urban, too urbane. He reminds one too much of a 
 passive, dignified, rather portly Oriental, called upon 
 to sprint after a street car. We turn our backs and 
 wait for the incident to close. 
 
 In speaking of his little man in Wimbledon, Mr. 
 James refers to his imagination. " Didn't it let 
 him into more deep holes than it pulled him out of? 
 Didn't it make for him more tight places than it saw 
 him through? Or didn't it at the same time, not 
 
 [81 ]
 
 less, give him all to himself a life, exquisite, occult, 
 dangerous and sacred, to which everything minis- 
 tered, and which nothing could take away? " Was 
 not Mr. James thinking of his own imagination when 
 he said this, his " exquisite, occult, dangerous and 
 sacred" faculty? Only the life it gives him is not 
 kept all to himself, but beautifully shared with us 
 with those of us who, for want of an equally ex- 
 quisite and occult faculty, repay our master by call- 
 ing him a cat I 
 
 December 2, IQIO. 
 
 I ** 1
 
 THE WAY OF ALL FLESH 
 
 1 HERE are two Samuel Butlers in English letters. 
 One of them died 220 years ago, and he gets several 
 sticks of type in our encyclopedia. Of the other, 
 who died in 1902, there is no mention at all. You 
 can ascribe this lapse in the encyclopedia to the ig- 
 norance of the editors, Messrs. Gilman, Peck and 
 Colby. But the encyclopedia comes very near being 
 a consensus of popular knowledge. If its makers 
 had never harkened to the more recent Samuel But- 
 ler, it is ample indication that he is still in the ante- 
 chamber of fame. 
 
 How long Samuel Butler must stay in the waiting- 
 room when Mr. Peck has put Mr. Colby in the en- 
 cyclopedia, and Mr. Colby has put Mr. Peck there, 
 is an interesting question. Perhaps the answer may 
 be given that already men are hammering on the 
 door and demanding that Butler be admitted. Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw has delivered peremptory summons, 
 and many readers have already been sent to Butler 
 by Shaw's fine declaration that he owes much him- 
 self to that writer's " extraordinarily fresh, free and 
 future-piercing suggestions." But Shaw is not alone 
 in proclaiming Butler. Two years ago a British 
 weekly ventured to assert that " all in all, he is, per- 
 haps, the keenest, broadest and most fearless mind of 
 our age." This effusive verdict would have made 
 Butler smile. It is likely he would himself have pre- 
 ferred that other encomium by an English paper 
 
 The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler. Button, New York. 
 [ 83 ]
 
 which he often ridiculed. " It may be felt that 
 truth had best assert itself in other ways than by 
 revolt," said the London Times in October, 1908, 
 " But whatever may be thought of the moral, But- 
 ler's steel-pointed wit remains a pure delight. The 
 most stimulating quality a book can possess is the 
 sense that behind it there is a critical intelligence 
 which is always on the watch, piercing through and 
 through its material, never taking things for granted, 
 never allowing itself to be drugged by picturesque 
 phrases or unreal sentiment. There are not so many 
 such that Samuel Butler's high integrity, his hatred 
 of insincerity and mystification, his fearlessness, his 
 splendid power of satire, can be overlooked or lightly 
 valued." 
 
 Eulogies like this are apt to scare off the honest 
 American publisher. He knows that when a man 
 is praised for high integrity, hatred of insincerity 
 and sentimentalism, and satirical power, the chances 
 of selling 5000 copies of his masterpiece are pretty 
 slim. The Way of All Flesh, Butler's sole novel, 
 was finished in 1884, but it did not appear till 1903. 
 For seven years, then, the shrewd American pub- 
 lishers have approached Butler in the way Mere- 
 dith's young person approached the gay lady 
 sniffing but not daring to snap. But the temptation 
 of so much integrity, fearlessness, humor and genius 
 has at last proved too much for E. P. Button and 
 Co. They have given Butler's masterpiece an 
 American imprint, and even if they huddled his work 
 into type that might be called the Oculist's Friend, 
 they deserve well of the small literary clique in 
 America on whom sporting publishers are occasion- 
 ally willing to venture a stake correspondingly small. 
 
 [ 84]
 
 Had we the sesame to the door of fame, we should 
 at once lay a long red line of what is known as strip 
 carpet and invite Samuel Butler to pick his steps up 
 to the beckoning entrance. But so often do critics 
 use their sesame only to find their heroes snubbed 
 and pooh-poohed and yawned over, that we shall be 
 careful about recommending Samuel Butler at large. 
 He pokes some fun himself at Impulsia Gushington, 
 or whoever it is that reviews novels in our contem- 
 poraries under the legend: "There is no Evil." 
 And certainly there is edge to his criticism of the 
 weekly that once a month or so " always found some 
 picture which was the finest that had been done since 
 the old masters, or some satire that was the finest 
 that had appeared since Swift or some something 
 which was incomparably the finest that had appeared 
 since something else." Yet it would be unfair to 
 adopt his own cool words and say of this book that 
 it was merely " an able one and abounded with 
 humor, ju'Jt satire, and good sense." That much is 
 said every week of books as full of waste as Winston 
 Churchill's. To convey the extraordinary character 
 of The Way of All Flesh one must do more even 
 than rally authorities like Shaw, and the Nation and 
 the Times. One must assert one's own humble 
 satisfaction and in no unmistakable terms. 
 
 Any one who has got this far in the present review 
 is more than likely to understand that in Samuel 
 Butler there is little of the conventional rococo which 
 endears Winston Churchill, poor man, to his enor- 
 mous and quite uncritical audience. But the aston- 
 ishing and delightful thing about Samuel Butler is 
 that he does not write The Way of All Flesh to sat- 
 isfy the lovers of pure and plain principle and clap 
 
 [ 85 ]
 
 them on the back. He does not seek to justify the 
 select few to their estimable selves, at the expense 
 of the purveyors of conventional fodder. No, in- 
 deed. Samuel Butler's sword is not only Castilian 
 but double-edged. With one edge he undoubtedly 
 attacks the uncritical, but with the other, and the 
 keener, he cuts into the supercilious prig. It would 
 be a mistake to say that his novel shows indifference 
 to idealism. It is limited in its appeal precisely be- 
 cause it can interest only those who have endured in- 
 trospection and the tortures of conscience and the 
 agonies of self-criticism. But the small company 
 that has an intellectual sense (usually a proud intel- 
 lectual sense) of affinity with Hamlet need not sup- 
 pose that Samuel Butler is going to do for them what 
 the Russian novelists have done. On the contrary, 
 the whole burden of his novel is the follies of Ham- 
 letry. If his book is merciless to the ordinary re- 
 ligious father and mother in England, it is equally 
 relentless toward their mollycoddle son. But there 
 is this difference: Samuel Butler understands the 
 mollycoddle to the core and loves him : and he ex- 
 hibits his evolution because he knows that the follies 
 which he detects could not exist except in a soul that 
 is to be valued. 
 
 Ernest Pontifex, Samuel Butler's hero, suffers hor- 
 ribly from idealism. When at last he begins to see 
 the idiocy of trying to be absolutely perfect, it is 
 only to discover that the huge majority of the men 
 have never been troubled by any such idiocy, but have 
 quite naturally adopted the Eleventh Command- 
 ment, " Thou Shalt Not Be Found Out." It stands 
 to reason that those who have never worried mor- 
 bidly about their imperfection will take a thoroughly 
 
 [ 86 ]
 
 Rooseveltian attitude toward Ernest, call him a 
 mollycoddle, and have done with it. The curious 
 thing is that Butler himself seems to agree with 
 Roosevelt. He singles out one Towneley as the 
 graceful, lovable, well bred, " red-blooded " type . 
 an empiric man who would generally echo John 
 Mitchel's dictum that a certain nation of molly- 
 coddles " would have been saved long ago if it wasn't 
 for their damned souls." Ernest Pontifex adores 
 Towneley and he sums up the difference between that 
 eupeptic gentleman and his confused self in these 
 words : " I see it all now. The people like Towne- 
 ley are the only ones who know anything that is 
 worth knowing, and like that of course I can never 
 be. But to make Towneleys possible there must be 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water men, in 
 fact, through whom conscious knowledge must pass 
 before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully 
 and instinctively as the Towneleys can. I am a 
 hewer of wood, but if I accept the position frankly 
 and do not set up to be a Towneley, it does not mat- 
 ter." 
 
 This attitude of Butler's is summed up in the 
 phrase, " The result depends upon the thing done 
 and the motive goes for nothing." But there is a 
 difference, after all, between this scorn for fine-spun 
 and high-flown theories that don't work out in prac- 
 tice and the ordinary scorn of the rationalist. Ulti- 
 mately Butler is not a red-blood. Ultimately he has 
 " confidence that it is righter and better to believe 
 what is true than what is untrue, even though belief 
 in the untruth may seem at first most expedient." 
 But he is sick of the writers who do nothing except 
 prate about idealism. He is sick of the idealistic 
 
 [87]
 
 pimple that is priggishness. He is sick of the peo- 
 ple, unconventional or conventional, whose ideals 
 are heard but not seen. 
 
 The hatred of rules is no small part of Samuel 
 Butler's nature, especially the rules of parents and 
 schoolmasters. The only rules he regards as worth 
 knowing are not the fixed rules of institutions, but 
 the rules of thumb by which human beings are living. 
 Over and over again he parallels that philosophy 
 which says that an actress who remains chaste is a 
 prig. " Extremes are alone logical, and they are 
 always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it 
 is always illogical. . . . Sensible people will get 
 through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret 
 it most conveniently without asking too many ques- 
 tions for consciences's sake." This lesson, of course, 
 would be wasted on the Average Man, who is sel- 
 dom even aware of his illogicality. It would be 
 wasted on the ordinary American, who would be 
 bored even at hearing it discussed. But it will not 
 be wasted on those who, like Samuel Butler himself, 
 want primarily to live a life as honest as is compati- 
 ble with happiness, and who are feeling like Judge 
 Grosscup, the deplorable " need for honesty " in 
 others. The Way of All Flesh is, in the clever 
 phrase of H. G. Wells, a Dreadnaught. It is of 
 about the same length as Tono-Bungay and little 
 shorter than The Old Wives' Tale, or It Never Can 
 Happen Again. To my mind it is a wiser book than 
 any of these, which is saying a good deal. It has 
 less brilliance than Tono-Bungay and less suggestive- 
 ness. It has less background and less social idiom 
 than Bennett's great book. It is less whimsical and 
 less ingratiating than De Morgan's. But it knows 
 
 [88]
 
 more about the old Adam than any of the three, and 
 can give them fifty yards in a hundred for critical 
 intelligence. Occasionally in novels you read of a 
 Great Writer whose work is so stupendous that the 
 novelist doesn't dare to quote from it (unless he be 
 as foolhardy as May Sinclair). Well, Samuel But- 
 ler would be an ideal figure for that Great Writer. 
 In The Way of All Flesh there is not (me judice) 
 one meretricious line. The same might be said of 
 The Old Wives' Tale, but the difference between a 
 successful novel of ideas and successful novel of man- 
 ners is like the difference between exploding dyna- 
 mite and discharging a rifle. 
 
 Butler admits you into an easy and humorous free- 
 masonry, if you happen to be his sort. Not with a 
 wink, but quietly and serenely. He tells you what 
 you've always privately known, but never admitted, 
 and he also clears up many things you thought yo" 
 knew, but didn't. He is not above a certain perver- 
 sity about the idealist, but he makes no easy jokes 
 and works off nobody else's wisdom or sentiment. 
 What he has is his own, and it is very astonishing 
 and shrewd of its kind. 
 
 People who were born sensible may not enjoy this 
 book. For them I cannot venture to speak. But 
 for those who have worked hard for whatever un- 
 derstanding they have got, God help them, the book 
 will be intimate, diverting and reassuring. It will 
 not excite people who know how to be happy. But 
 there are many people who don't know whether they 
 are as happy as they might expect, and there are 
 others who, having failed to be happy by doing what 
 they were told, have at last caught on to the fact that 
 very few people are doing as they were told, the most 
 
 [ 89 ]
 
 successful perhaps least of all. For such people, in 
 whom there has been less sense than sensibility, the 
 plot of the novel will be no less exciting than plots 
 far easier advertised. For, while Butler only draws 
 full-length portraits of his hero up to the infant age 
 of 28, he sees him through the most serious and 
 threatening vicissitudes, and though the youth " gets 
 religion " when he is still in Cambridge and loses it 
 in London, he has to go clean through bankruptcy, 
 imprisonment and matrimony before he learns the 
 first things about himself or human nature. 
 
 The plot is so alluring throughout that one might 
 easily wonder how Butler manages to get in so much 
 sheer comment. It is done, for the most part, by 
 interluded essays digressions of a page or less. 
 Thus one may find Advice to Parents, Hints on Hap- 
 piness, essays on Genius, on Clergymen's Sons, on 
 Sex Education, on Luck, on Literary Instinct, on 
 Speculation and the Stock Market, on Ideas, on 
 Spiritual Wild Oats, on Truth, on Loss of Money as 
 the greatest of all mishaps, on False Idealism, on 
 Useless Metaphysics, on the Art of Mental Healing, 
 on Good Intentions, and on Book Reviewers. Such 
 passages are improved by observations like these: 
 ' The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself 
 is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the 
 right places." " The best liar is he who makes the 
 smallest amount of lying go the longest way." 
 
 Clever males are best judged in their attitude to- 
 ward women. I should prefer to leave Samuel But- 
 ler not dwelling on his extraordinary exposition of 
 the cruelty in childhood that comes through the ig- 
 norance and stupidity of parents, nor on his serene 
 examination of the things that can happen to one 
 
 [ 90]
 
 who is " Quixotic, impulsive, altruistic, guileless." 
 Here he is rare, but the best people in his book are 
 Mrs. Jupp and Althea. Miss Althea Pontifex, an 
 aunt not yet fifty when she dies, never gave her 
 nephew a syllable of good advice, but she cared 
 enough for him to leave him her fortune in trust till 
 he was 28. " It is an unusually foolish will," she 
 said. " but he is an unusually foolish boy." And 
 perhaps the " last coherent words " she uttered to 
 her faithful friend who tells this story of her nephew 
 in the first person are fullest of the peculiar and 
 precious flavor that was their author's. Let those 
 who enjoy these words know that they do not belie 
 the book: "She talked principally about her 
 nephew. ' Don't scold him,' she said, ' if he is vola- 
 tile and continually takes things up only to throw 
 them down again. How can he find out his strength 
 or weakness otherwise? A man's profession,' she 
 said and here she gave one of her wicked little 
 laughs ' is not like his wife, which he must take 
 once for all, for better, for worse, without proof 
 beforehand. . . . 
 
 " ' Above all,' she continued, ' do not let him work 
 up to his full strength, except once or twice in his 
 life time; nothing is well done nor worth doing un- 
 less, take it all around, it has come pretty easily. 
 Theobald and Christina (his parents) would give 
 him a pinch of salt and tell him to put it on the tail 
 of the seven deadly virtues ' ; here she laughed 
 again in her old manner at once so mocking and so 
 sweet 'I think if he likes pancakes he had per- 
 haps better eat them on Shrove Tuesday, but this is 
 enough.' ' 
 
 June 10, 70/0.
 
 BUTLER'S NOTE-BOOKS 
 
 IN The Doctor's Dilemma there is a saucy refer- 
 ence to an unprofessional heretic who has views on 
 art, science, morals and religion. Old Sir Patrick 
 Cullen shocks the heretic's disciple by not even recog- 
 nizing the name. " Bernard Shaw?" he ponders, 
 " I never heard of him. He's a Methodist preacher, 
 I suppose." Louis is horrified. " No, no. He's 
 the most advanced man now living: he isn't any- 
 thing." The old doctor is not set back an inch. 
 These " advanced " men who impress the young by 
 employing the accumulations of genius he knows 
 them. " I assure you, young man," he informs 
 Louis, " my father learnt the doctrine of deliverance 
 from sin from John Wesley's own lips before you 
 or Mr. Shaw were born." 
 
 It is a pleasant thing to claim that the man you 
 admire is " advanced " and to believe serenely that 
 you are progressive along with him. It is also a 
 convenient thing to employ such question-begging 
 phrases as heterodox, radical, free-thinker, anarchist. 
 The trouble with such phrases, indicative and ex- 
 citing as they are, is their plain relativity to some- 
 thing reprehensible that only you yourself have in 
 mind. The world is full of moss-grown places 
 called Newtown and Newburg and Nykobing and 
 Neuville. It is also full of moss-grown writers who 
 once were advanced and revolutionary. If a writer 
 is to be paraded as heterodox it has to be shown 
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Button, New York. 
 [ 92 ]
 
 that he does something more than take up an agree- 
 able position. It has to be shown that he has a 
 manner, a method, of dealing with things that really 
 deserve to be considered advanced. 
 
 This is Samuel Butler's claim on posterity. The 
 urgently intelligent son of a dull English clergyman, 
 he certainly did not lack incentives to heterodoxy. 
 Besides that he was born in 1835 and was one of the 
 first of Darwin's admirers, as later he was one of 
 the first of his critics. But there was more than 
 reflex action in Samuel Butler's heterodoxy. He 
 was never anything so regular as an anarchist. He 
 distrusted authority in religion and art and science 
 without discarding religious, artistic or scientific 
 values. He thought freely without being a free- 
 thinker, and radically without being a radical. To 
 say he was lawless would entirely misrepresent him, 
 he was not nearly so much a revolutionary as a 
 conscientious objector on the loose. Here again he 
 fell into none of the ordinary classifications. He 
 was not a missionary. He had as little ambition to 
 form a new orthodoxy as to attach himself to an old 
 one. He had a marked propensity, that of thinking 
 for himself one of those perplexing propensities 
 that nothing seems to determine, that may occur in 
 an emperor or his slave and no one know how or 
 why. And that propensity, the capital distinction 
 of his many-sided life, gave him emancipation in a 
 way that no one could have predicted and that was 
 long quite difficult to label. 
 
 It was difficult to label mainly because Samuel But- 
 ler's intellectual adventure had come to an end before 
 the label was invented. Samuel Butler was above 
 everything a pragmatist, one of those forerunners 
 
 [ 93 ]
 
 of pragmatism who did not become conscious of its 
 " universal mission " or its " conquering destiny," 
 who nevertheless employed the method intuitively 
 and u made momentous contributions to truth by its 
 means." It is tragic, in many ways, that Butler had 
 not the benefit of the formulation of pragmatism. 
 Had he possessed it, however, he could not have 
 been more closely, more consistently, its exponent. 
 " Pragmatism," said William James in 1907, " rep- 
 resents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, 
 the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems 
 to me, both in a more radical and in a less objection- 
 able form than it has ever yet assumed. A prag- 
 matist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon 
 a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philos- 
 ophers. He turns away from abstraction and in- 
 sufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori 
 reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and 
 pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards 
 concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards 
 action and towards power. That means the em- 
 piricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper 
 sincerely given up. It means the open air and pos- 
 sibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, 
 and the pretense of the finality of truth." This 
 was the attitude Samuel Butler achieved for himself 
 and the one which these Note-Books so fully and 
 singularly exemplify. 
 
 There is a kind of man whose sensations come at 
 the double, who must take them down as they fly by 
 or lose them eternally. Butler's Note-Books were 
 not kept for such a purpose. It was not his senses 
 that were imperious for a scribe: it was his rumina- 
 tions, his ideas. He was painter and musician as 
 
 [ 94]
 
 well as writer, and he was writer in the most general 
 interpretation, but his chief characteristic was not, 
 so to speak, sensuous impressionability. It was an 
 incessant intellectual activity. He had " the prin- 
 ciple of stopping everywhere and anywhere to put 
 down his notes, as the true painter will stop any- 
 where and everywhere to sketch," but the notes were 
 not wild or woodland, they were memoranda in his 
 endless discovery of wisdom. Occasionally the spec- 
 tacle of the world urged him to record emotion, and 
 he observes that from the age of twelve the music 
 of his well-beloved Handel was never a day out of 
 his head. But it was the opinions and ideas he 
 derived from experience that stirred him to write in 
 his Note-Books. Experience did not so much 
 enamor him as stimulate his mind. 
 
 The vivacity of Samuel Butler's mind is astonish- 
 ing. He was not brilliant in the sense that his ex- 
 pression was dazzling. Dazzling writers like 
 George Meredith were distasteful to him, and he felt 
 little of their need to give acuity to the words that 
 were to convey poignant experiences. Neither did 
 he wish to incite passion or ecstasy. He held every- 
 thing, even his God, at arm's length, and the light 
 by which he examined his world was daylight. Be- 
 cause of his sharp curiosity, however, his inde- 
 pendence and audacity and humorous skepticism, he 
 achieved that kind of penetrativeness which is often 
 called brilliant. Penetrative he was to an extraor- 
 dinary degree and over an area that few men of his 
 time even dreamed of encompassing. He was dry 
 on occasion and on occasion captious, but he never 
 said a heartless thing or a foolish. And from the 
 first line he wrote to the last there is not a single 
 
 [95 ]
 
 dishonest utterance. Almost every one who writes 
 is tempted now and then to say something which is 
 not quite authentic, to use a hackneyed phrase if not 
 a hackneyed thought. Samuel Butler authenticated 
 everything he uttered. During his growing years 
 and indeed all through his life he found himself 
 brushed aside by the pundits. From pretentious- 
 ness he suffered as only a modest man can suffer, and 
 he abhorred it. One result of it was to accentuate 
 his own priestlessness and simplicity. He could 
 easily have got himself up as an authority. It is a 
 thing that almost any busybody with a plodding sec- 
 retary can accomplish. Butler leaned over back- 
 wards to avoid doing it. He even went so far as to 
 suspect everything that had the air of being profes- 
 sional, and to take a perverse pleasure in offering 
 to machine-made scholars his own hand-made hetero- 
 dox views. And not only were his views prag- 
 matically decided, so were the bases on which he 
 formed them. It is significant that though he was 
 born in 1835 an d lived to 1902 he got more out of 
 Handel in music and Bellini in painting than out of 
 any other masters. Homer and Shakespeare hap- 
 pened to interest him, but he paid no attention what- 
 ever to those " imaginary obligations " of an aca- 
 demic or journalistic order which keep most people 
 from discovering what they really value. Tolstoy 
 and Ibsen, Morris and Karl Marx, were Butler's 
 contemporaries. They might as well have lived in 
 Kamchatka for any chance they had of crossing the 
 threshold of his hospitable but resolutely unfashion- 
 able mind. 
 
 Between the cravings of gregariousness and the 
 exactions of his critical intelligence, then, Butler was 
 
 [96]
 
 never at a loss to decide. But this severance from 
 the crowd was not without an emotional result. 
 [There can be no doubt that he suffered some of the 
 penalties of being an intellectual anchorite. From 
 the egoistic rigidity that may so easily be the out- 
 come of isolation if not its promoter he was 
 preserved by common sense. Though he embraced 
 the most difficult of experiments, the experiment of 
 true independence, he kept on the right side of the 
 thin partition mainly through avoiding the mistakes 
 of that early ancestor who imagined God as solemn 
 because " he was impressed with an undue sense of 
 his own importance, and, as a natural consequence, 
 he had no sense of humor." In spite of extreme 
 common sense and humor, the price of being hetero- 
 dox told on Butler. He was much too spirited to 
 lament his exile, but sometimes he was cross-grained 
 and spiritually dyspeptic. His dislike of Beethoven, 
 Leonardo and Goethe was not mere buoyant uncon- 
 ventionality or admirable aesthetic sabotage. It had 
 a slightly diseased contrariness. He was wonder- 
 fully outspoken about his own neglect and compara- 
 tive failure, and exceedingly candid about his aspira- 
 tions for fame, but all this would not prevent his 
 being estranged from certain great men by very 
 reason of their general acceptance. Those who are 
 themselves frustrated cannot help the impulse to 
 frustrate others, and the fact that his unaffected 
 opinions were not fairly received sometimes gave 
 Butler an animus in challenging opinions that were. 
 Unsparing pragmatism, however, kept him from 
 being a crank and made him a priceless critic of 
 what the sage has called " first and last things." 
 And the freshest of his discriminations, the most un- 
 
 [ 97 ]
 
 expected and the most unqualified, are to be found in 
 his Note-Books. It is a common thing in life to 
 hear some one bemoaning a talker whose music died 
 in him. Here is a wise and humorous and varied 
 man who preserved his observations as they sprang 
 from him. It is monologue, it is true, rather de- 
 liberate and reasoned monologue editorially cut-and- 
 dried. The fact remains that it is the essential 
 Samuel Butler in his normal habit of mind. Under 
 compulsion to think for himself, his Note-Books 
 detect him in the process, and so represent the range 
 and depth of his genius. That it was genius, though 
 often blue in the cold of his era, there is no ques- 
 tioning. And it is peculiarly precious because it is 
 liberating. It cannot but open the doors for those 
 who have felt orthodoxies stifle them in their own 
 attempt to think for themselves. 
 
 [98]
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 3
 
 THE MODERN: 
 
 TONO-BUNGAY 
 
 LITERALLY Tono-Bungay is not the book of the 
 week, but so astounding a novel must not be sacrificed 
 to the calendar. Among the novels of the season it 
 is preeminent, more than that, it is epochal. By 
 epochal it is not intended to imply that Mr. Wells is 
 already strutting among the ruins of the Athenaeum. 
 These epochs that book reviewers appoint are often 
 very subtle, very sedate. They conform to Profes- 
 sor James's arrangement that the most violent revo- 
 lutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old 
 order standing. But they take place. And if an 
 epoch can be marked by a single novel, one is marked 
 by this astounding production. 
 
 Not to obtain the reader under false pretences, it 
 may be intimated that Tono-Bungay teems with ideas, 
 seethes with opinions, writhes with self-conscious- 
 ness. Because it suggests the three-ring Thack- 
 erayan plot, and is crammed with philosophy, it has 
 been set down as a mid- Victorian effusion. It is no 
 more mid-Victorian than the Flatiron. To get a 
 congruous idea of Mr. Wells one must take him for 
 what he is, and not mutilate him by impossible com- 
 parisons. 
 
 Judging chiefly by the person revealed in Tono- 
 Bungay, Mr. Wells is conspicuously and essentially 
 
 Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells. Duffield, New York.
 
 not a gentleman. Conspicuously and essentially, 
 Thackeray, Henry James, George Meredith are 
 gentlemen. Their tradition is that of good breed- 
 ing, fine feeling, the humanities and the arts. In 
 their main effect they conform with the aristocratic 
 code, as it exists in a freemasonry of class. Mr. 
 Wells, on the contrary, does not accept this code or 
 belong to this class. He has erupted into art over 
 a drug counter, but not as a conscious and swagger- 
 ing iconoclast. He is the new type, cultured poly- 
 technically. He knows his Charles Lamb and his 
 Richardson. He derives from them, too, but he was 
 not spoon-fed on them. And what marks him as dif- 
 ferent from his gentlemanly compeers is his dogged 
 determination to reveal himself, whether his feeling 
 be fine feeling or coarse, his breeding high or low. 
 
 This self-revelation would be no great perform- 
 ance if Mr. Wells were simply candid. When literal 
 candor registers nothing but sharp egoistic reaction 
 its application, as in the case of Marie Bashkirtseff, 
 is exceedingly narrow. But Mr. Wells, while oc- 
 cupied intensely with his own sensations, reactions 
 and conclusions, is immensely busy with his prehensile 
 intelligence. On that intelligence he tries every- 
 thing; and he is vastly superior to the gentleman in 
 so far as he is not confined to a coign of social van- 
 tage, but can stride into those closed chambers of the 
 soul where the terrible operations of life are com- 
 mitted, but where the gentleman is not serious artist 
 enough to enter. 
 
 It is not suggested that Mr. Wells, in being true to 
 nature, is selecting to be true to the beast in nature. 
 Mr. George Moore is enough of an artist to have no 
 gentlemanly code, but he thinks that the inadequacies 
 
 [ 102 ]
 
 of the gentleman can be supplied by the adequacies 
 of the cad. For this Mr. Wells is too austere and 
 serious a spirit. It has a silly enough sound, but let 
 me say that he could be a gentleman if he would. 
 He has, however, taken the problem of Life on his 
 shoulders, and that problem he cannot solve with the 
 limited gentlemanly code. It is a pity that he stops 
 to jeer at the ritual of a cult which, after all, has its 
 virtues. But at least we feel that Mr. Wells has 
 broken out of the English convention with whatever 
 wounds to himself, mainly because that convention 
 had ceased to be decent enough and philosophical 
 enough to hold him. 
 
 Mr. Wells attempts a racking derangement of all 
 our standards when he takes away this gentlemanly 
 standard, with its established directions to us upon 
 all questions, directions as to how we should feel, 
 how we should fall in love, how we should aspire, 
 how we should believe, how we should know our- 
 selves and declare ourselves. If we are not given 
 the cue, how can most of us know what we are to 
 think 1 And here is this creature, H. G. Wells, ex- 
 hibiting in Tono-Bungay a man let loose in modern 
 life who finds romance unromantic, religion irre- 
 ligious and so on. And this too, without laying him- 
 self open in a single paragraph to the stock accusa- 
 tions that if he does not see life as the gentleman sees 
 it, he must be a cad, a sneak, a pervert, a sensualist, 
 etc. 
 
 Tono-Bungay has been acutely described as the 
 history of the collision of the soul of George Pon- 
 derevo (narrator and nephew of the medicine-man) 
 with his epoch: the arraignment of a whole epoch 
 at the bar of the conscience of a man who is intellec- 
 
 [ 103 ]
 
 tually honest and powerfully intellectual. But I pre- 
 fer George's own words, which leave out the idea 
 of " arraignment " : "I suppose what I'm really 
 trying to render is nothing more nor less than life 
 as one man has found it." 
 
 This word Life intimidates many novel readers, 
 who are convinced that they get their bellyful of 
 experience during the day, and want the novelist to 
 soothe them like a masseur. To want to be soothed 
 shows a pleasant instinct for entertainment, but I 
 submit that we have no right to lie down, inert and 
 devitalized, and expect Mr. Wells to pat us and 
 to pet us. The challenge is a plain one. Tono- 
 Bungay is occupied with the quests of the modern 
 man, their fatuity as well as their complexity. If 
 you really desire to understand this modern man you 
 must, without complaining of the deponent, encoun- 
 ter Tono-Bungay. 
 
 There is nothing prurient, nothing finikin about 
 Tono-Bungay. Nor in all its irresistible narrative is 
 there subservience to the conventional. When 
 Henry James first went to London, one won an ex- 
 quisite literary disquisition, his imagination giving 
 him release from reality. But when George Pon- 
 derevo goes up to London you get something pre- 
 ciously commonplace and common sense. " Yes, 
 that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly 
 depression of January had an immense effect upon 
 me. It was for me an epoch-making disappoint- 
 ment. I had thought of London as a large, free, 
 welcoming, adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly 
 and harsh and irresponsive." 
 
 It is these epoch-making disappointments, these 
 beams of intelligence through mists of " art " and 
 
 [ 104 ]
 
 sentiment, that make Tono-Bungay an epoch-making 
 novel. For, be it noted, there is a mould for all 
 these raids upon London, ready-made and artistic. 
 But Mr. Wells has smashed the mould and patiently, 
 heroically, painfully cast his own. And we, whose 
 impressions had been strained and dislocated in the 
 old moulds, adapt ourselves gratefully to this new 
 one. As to the manner of man whom Mr. Wells 
 dispatches to London : 
 
 London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, 
 rather priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very 
 open-eyed, and with something it is, I think, the common 
 gift of imaginative youth, and I claim it unblushingly 
 fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine responses. 
 I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily and 
 well; I wanted to serve and do and make with some no- 
 bility. It was in me. It is in half the youth of the world. 
 
 " With some nobility." Very soon George, hav* 
 ing elected to live, is helping his fussy promoter 
 uncle, a Peruna uncle, to sell Tono-Bungay. George 
 goes into it for seven years, against all his beliefs, 
 for practical reasons. 
 
 So I made peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this 
 bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one- 
 and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the 
 government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It 
 brought us wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of end- 
 less people. All that my uncle promised me proved truth 
 and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me to freedoms 
 and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionate 
 service of humanity could ever have given me. . . . 
 
 In sketching this typical " bright enterprise " Mr. 
 Wells has not done anything so simple as to expose 
 
 [ 105 ]
 
 the promoter and the present business system. He 
 does caricature the plutocrat and ridicule to the point 
 of anguish all the hero-worshippers and apologists 
 and retainers who justify the speculator, either as in- 
 evitable or desirable. But in doing this, he is not an 
 aesthete cavilling and whimpering at realities. Mr. 
 Wells struggles steadily to understand, correlate and 
 focus his epoch. In the country house, the gentle- 
 man's feudal estate now often occupied by mimetic 
 Jews, he has the clue to England, which accounts, 
 physically, for innumerable disconnected and distract- 
 ing phenomena. 
 
 It is perhaps the philosophy that is newest and 
 welcomest in Tono-Bungay. As a novel, it is far 
 too exuberant, too unsifted. Mr. Wells has tried 
 to cram everything, a whole epoch, into a single tale. 
 For not only is there the country house in it, and the 
 company promoter, and George as aerial navigator 
 and builder of destroyers but there is the entire 
 delightful humor of the middle class in Ponderevo's 
 aunt, and in George's private life there are three 
 love experiences the first with Marion, shallow, 
 evasive, pathetic; the second a passion episode with 
 a warmhearted, " magnificently eupeptic " typist; the 
 third the romantic love with an aristocrat, spoiled 
 aristocrat. And there is the Romance of the Sea 
 in a sailing ship, a floating fragment of slum, and 
 the romance of the tropics in a section where Mr. 
 Wells is deliberately impish. But, whatever hap- 
 pens, it is the narrator, wielding commonplace and 
 common sense, that reveals ourselves to ourselves. 
 
 As to the faults of Tono-Bungay, many exist. 
 Perhaps the most serious is the lack of comedy. 
 11 There's no humor in my blood," George truly 
 106 J
 
 says. " I'm earnest in warp and woof. I stumble 
 and flounder, but I know that over all these merry 
 immediate things, there are other things that are 
 great and serene, very high, beautiful things the 
 reality. I haven't got it, but it is there nevertheless. 
 I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable 
 goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever 
 shall but it takes all the fun out of the mud 
 and at times I fear it takes all the kindliness too." 
 
 There is the modernist; hard on himself and 
 others, dark with doubt, shot with aspiration, beauty 
 and hope. But the action is depressed where it 
 might consistently be sprightly now and then. Not 
 that Mr. Wells has to begin a chapter: "It was 
 the day I was promoted to a tooth-brush." But he 
 might at least remember that philosophically one is 
 often completely miserable while factually one is ex- 
 ceedingly comfortable. Schopenhauer undoubtedly 
 enjoyed both beefsteaks and sunsets. And this, or 
 its aesthetic equivalent, the reasonable reader can ex- 
 pect, even if he is aware that amiability, gayety and 
 chivalry are special arts of those who have sunk their 
 moral principal in the prosy annuity of a code. 
 
 There is another point about Mr. Wells to dis- 
 relish, he is fond of hideous metaphors, metaphors 
 from the refuse can and the scrap heap. " I re- 
 solved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact grow- 
 ing up in my soul, I would tear it out by the roots, 
 throw it forth and stamp on it." This is stamping 
 on tact with a vengeance, and unworthy of the man 
 who can accomplish such clevernesses as " these Ox- 
 ford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire." 
 There were two lank sons " dressed in conscien- 
 tiously untidy tweeds." " It's the pettiest thing to 
 
 [ 107 ]
 
 record, I know, but she could wear curl papers in my 
 presence." Or the girl in the library: "but really, 
 as I found out afterward, she never read. She used 
 to come there to eat a bun in quiet." Or the vicar 
 on socialism : " * They have some intelligent peo- 
 ple in their ranks, I am told,' said the vicar, ' writers 
 and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, my 
 eldest daughter was telling me, I forget his name. 
 Milly, dear! Oh! she's not here. Painters, too, 
 they have. This socialism, it seems to me, is part 
 of the Unrest of the Age.' ' It takes a fine devotion 
 to lend one's ears to such tattle and recall it and set 
 it down. 
 
 Such is Tono-Bungay, with its inability to com- 
 promise ideals or extenuate curl papers. Such it is, 
 with its observance of the great and golden rule that 
 " the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary 
 line, the more perfect the work of art." It is a book 
 that the conservatives may not enjoy, but it extends 
 the frontiers of the novel and sheds sanitary light on 
 many dark places of the soul. 
 
 March 26, 1909. 
 
 I 108 ]
 
 THE POLITICAL COMET: 
 
 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 IN Tono-Bungay H. G. Wells criticised the tragic 
 farce of modern business with a cleverness incom- 
 parable. Where other men had scratched the sur- 
 face, Mr. Wells ripped down with a clean surgical 
 blade. The vulgarity of plutocrats, the fatuity of 
 competition, the idiocy of modern Jew aggressive- 
 ness these he attacked in a satire as sound as it 
 was hard. Remarkable, too, was his version of 
 modern love, from the standpoint of adventure and 
 service. And apart from all its ideas Tono-Bungay 
 was a vivid, nervous, quick-moving, multicolored pic- 
 ture of the modern city and the modern man. 
 
 Again, in The New Machiavelli, Mr. Wells gives 
 us London and confused contemporary life. But 
 there is hardly a word of business, except of the 
 nouveaux riches in Staffordshire. The new Machi- 
 avelli is an Englishman of 42, whose political 
 career has just been ended by divorce : the story gives 
 that career autobiographically, in all its white pas- 
 sion of statecraft, and its " white passions struggling 
 against the red." 
 
 The New Machiavelli is no more like the ordi- 
 nary novel than a cup of blood is like a cup of milk. 
 Into every line of the story Mr. Wells has put his 
 wits, his imagination, his experience and his personal- 
 ity. Not only has he made his hero his own age 
 exactly, not only has he made him the living ex- 
 
 The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells. Duffield, New York. 
 
 E 109 ]
 
 c-iiplar of his own publicist ideas ; he has even utilized 
 such known experiences as his visit to Chicago (which 
 place he flips away as an " amazing lapse from civili- 
 zation "). 
 
 How far Mr. Wells has gone in utilizing his per- 
 sonal experiences is his own affair. But that he has 
 utilized both his known and his unknown experiences 
 is quite clear; and one's most vital criticism of The 
 New Machiavelli is that he has been " true to him- 
 self " in a literal sense at the expense of a wiser and 
 more sophisticated truth. For in this amazing 
 transcript of Mr. Wells's heart and mind, this 
 amazing, headlong confession, there is precipitation 
 of much which is irrelevant, fatuous and egotistic. 
 In an autobiography such things suggest the living 
 man. In a novel (which is intrinsically conven- 
 tional) they suggest an author bursting with his own 
 ego, and bursting not like a gas that turns into flame, 
 but like a gas escaping in a room ; and making a very 
 unpleasant odor. 
 
 This is a dangerous thing to do, if one is born 
 preacher oneself, and Mr. Wells is born preacher. 
 One harangue succeeds another in The New Machi- 
 avelli (fine harangues in most cases) and in his own 
 person H. G. Wells is continually speaking, con- 
 tinually inviting attention to his person. It destroys 
 one's faith in the actuality of The New Machiavelli. 
 It makes him a mask for God knows what personal 
 purposes, and certainly not for the best purposes of 
 art. 
 
 Yet as soon as one forgets the obtrusive, restlessly 
 self-centred Mr. Wells, one does get the virus of 
 his extraordinary excitement about life. Of this ex- 
 citement, this hectic interest in affairs, hectic arnbi- 
 
 [ nb]
 
 tion, hectic curiosity, hectic desire to know and to 
 be, to have others know and have others be, The 
 New Machiavelli is the contagium. I say hectic be- 
 cause I think Mr. Wells is in many ways unsafe and 
 insane. Produced in a metropolis and fed up on all 
 sorts of urban notions, theories and ideas, he mis- 
 takes nightmares for visions and witty theorizing for 
 important cerebration. Seeing more in a flash of 
 lightning brain than one out of ten thousand, he still 
 is subject to illucid intervals; and these intervals 
 occur, as they are apt to occur with clever people, in 
 dealing with people less clever. Mr. Wells's rapid 
 little brain keeps rapping out criticisms that are as- 
 tonishingly acute and astonishingly inhuman. 
 
 In psychology Richard Remington, the new Ma- 
 chiavelli, is very similar to the Mr. Wells of First 
 and Last Things. He is an idealist who dreams of 
 " a world of men better ordered, happier, finer, se- 
 cure, . . . the ending of muddle and diseases and 
 dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste 
 human possibilities." His catch phrase is " Love 
 and Fine Thinking." But although a social idealist 
 loyal to ideas, Remington is no saint. The symbol 
 of his state-making dream; Machiavelli is also the 
 symbol of " his animal humor, his queer indecent 
 side," his meanness, his selfishness, and his squalor. 
 
 Few careers could be more interesting than that 
 of Remington, once he starts to mount politically, 
 and Mr. Wells is unfailingly clear in showing the 
 man's evolution: First he is intellectual, a young 
 liberal, socialistically inclined. He is pushed by the 
 Baileys, two self-appointed guardians of reform's 
 Thermopylean Pass. Altiora Bailey is described by 
 Mr. Wells with some sharpness, " Altiora thought 
 
 [ in ]
 
 trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great mis- 
 take." Bailey is characterized with a pointed and 
 almost personal malignance : " A nasty, oily, effi- 
 cient little machine." Despite odious characteristics, 
 however, these are profitable allies of Remington's, 
 and he stays by them, breathing hard in their " tre- 
 mendously scientific air " until long after Altiora has 
 promoted his marriage. 
 
 Courtship is not romantic in Mr. Wells. The sex 
 side of Remington is very frankly represented long 
 before, perhaps more frankly than the sex side of 
 any man in English fiction. From his first pre- 
 cocious glance, down through his " stark fact " 
 period at Cambridge, and his celibate experience in 
 London, there is nothing glossed over or concealed. 
 Something may be misunderstood. If so, the mis- 
 conception, the lack of beauty, is inherent in Mr. 
 Wells. But what candor can give, he gives. And 
 that is admirable. It is admirable not because it 
 is beautifully done, but because it is done so honestly. 
 Where all, even the best, have been evasive, it is 
 magnificent that one should be true and explicit. 
 The Anthony Comstocks may lie about it. They 
 may say that Mr. Wells is salacious, indecent, indeli- 
 cate and so on. As a matter of fact, Mr. Wells is 
 coldly if eagerly clever. He is much less salacious 
 than many medical textbooks. He tells part of the 
 truth as it is known by adults; that is all. And only 
 dirty-minded people like Anthony Comstock will ob- 
 ject to it. 
 
 Being an English middle-class boy, Remington is 
 brought up under the assumption that ignorance 
 fosters idealism. The result is, as usual, inglorious. 
 " I had had my experiences and secrets and adven- 
 
 [ 112]
 
 tures," he says, " among that fringe of ill-mated or 
 erratic or discredited women the London world pos- 
 sesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a mat- 
 ter of magic or mystery, and had become a question 
 of appetites and excitement, and among other things 
 the excitement of not being found out." That sex 
 should have become " a question of appetites and ex- 
 citement " is an indication of what ignorance leads 
 to, in a Remington. And no lovable woman saved 
 Remington. " I had never yet even peeped at the 
 sweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart 
 and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality of 
 reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among 
 womanhood." 
 
 Margaret, a tepid character, is unfortunate to 
 marry Remington. She is a good woman, depicted 
 without prejudice; cultivated, moral and conven- 
 tional. She would willingly die for her husband, 
 but she must make an issue of his saying " damn." 
 The estrangement is fated. From the start " trifling 
 things began to matter enormously, that she had a 
 weak and easily fatigued back for example, or that 
 when she knitted her brows and stammered a little 
 in talking, it really didn't mean that an exquisite sig- 
 nificance was struggling for utterance." What Rem- 
 ington could not turn to delight made him bitter. 
 He could not indulge without loving, and he did not 
 love. 
 
 When a man who needs so much as Remington 
 marries a woman so patently and pitifully inade- 
 quate as Margaret, what is he to do? Remington 
 goes on as a " careerist," more and more occupied 
 with political ideals, and now shifting, for Machi- 
 avellian reasons, from the Liberal to the Conserva-
 
 five machine. His ideas of party are amazingly 
 vivid and significant. They exhibit at once the fluid- 
 ity and the accessibility of his character. They do 
 not for a moment sound like an executive's ideas, and 
 they are full of wind, full of Zeitgeist. But they 
 serve both Remington and Mr. Wells in the exposi- 
 tion of statecraft: they give excuse for as brilliant a 
 chapter on the party system as one could hope to 
 find anywhere. 
 
 One's fundamental criticism, however, is that 
 Remington, esteeming himself tough-minded, is, as 
 a fact, utterly and unhealthily critical of human na- 
 ture, impatient of limitations in others, and in him- 
 self, that are " limitations " only from the stand- 
 point of a " nasty, oily, efficient little machine." It 
 is this prejudgment of human nature, this impatience 
 of " chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted efforts, spas- 
 modic aims," that makes Wells so querulous and so 
 childish. He is too hard on himself, on this score, 
 and much too hard on others. Were he strong 
 enough, were we strong enough, to achieve his ideal, 
 all would be well; the ideal is logical, spick-and-span. 
 But not being strong enough as yet, nagging each 
 other does no good. And one gets so tired of Mr. 
 Wells's intrinsically stupid nagging, especially as the 
 muddlement, the disorder, the indiscipline, the ill- 
 adjustment, the spasmodic behavior, of his own hero 
 are more and more confessed. 
 
 But while Remington's career preoccupies him, so 
 long as no woman attracts him, he is in a peculiarly 
 susceptible position when he meets Isabel Rivers. 
 She is a person of the clearest charm, a delightful, 
 lovable and admirable woman : and so much too good 
 for Remington that one does not believe he would in 
 
 [ 114]
 
 reality run away with her. For that is Wells's solu- 
 tion, his answer given without moral defense. He 
 sends Isabel and Remington off together, the 
 choosers of an evil. Whether the lesser or the 
 greater, he does not dare to say. 
 
 After all the moil, all the contradiction, all the con- 
 fusion, all the neurosis of Remington's life till he 
 meets Isabel, it is a great relief to experience their 
 big and heartfelt harmonies. The passages between 
 them are beautiful, and wonderfully actual. The 
 woman loves without stint, is clear-headed, unafraid 
 and passionate. It is only when Remington tells his 
 wife about it, tells her he " knew it was stupid, but 
 thought it was a thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't 
 be anything but itself, wouldn't unfold conse- 
 quences," that one is utterly disgusted. In the same 
 tone is the whine that " this business has brought 
 me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever ex- 
 pected to bear." In the same tone is the feeble 
 protestation that there is " a sort of wild right- 
 ness about any love that is fraught with beauty." 
 Would a man capable of such doubts, such maunder- 
 ings about expediency, such reproaches and hand- 
 wringing, be capable also of the final drastic step? 
 One feels dubious. Remington wears fine feathers, 
 but it is hard to believe they are his own. And 
 when he hands Isabel over to a good, conventional 
 man who wants to marry her, without one reflection 
 as to what such prostitution means, the action con- 
 sists much more with going back to his wife than 
 with his final flaming resolution to take exile and 
 love. 
 
 With so much to urge against the philosophy of 
 this remarkable novel, it may seem captious to go
 
 further and criticise its construction. But indeed it 
 is badly put together and badly managed. Mr. 
 Wells is a real stylist, a master of actuality, and the 
 vignettes of London in The New Machiavelli are un- 
 matched in contemporary fiction. Yet there is an 
 excess of cleverness and a tiresome triteness of 
 epithet. Over and over again Mr. Wells uses such 
 words as " vast," " splendid," " enormous," " stu- 
 pendous," "passionate," " irresistible," " extraordi- 
 i nary," " immense." These words are not exactly 
 leprous, and several of them are applicable to the 
 book itself; but in Mr. Wells they are extravagantly 
 and flippantly used. And they give an effect of 
 puerile sensationalism which a radical cannot afford. 
 
 But the bad construction is not a matter of heaped 
 up epithets and ejaculatory statement. It is a mat- 
 ter of impeded and disconcerted narrative. The 
 narrative is forever being halted for the sake of a 
 sermon. No reminiscence seems to be complete 
 without a debate, and no description without a moral. 
 When one thinks of a masterly story like Jean- 
 Christophe, this seems flimsy and ill conceived. It 
 is held together by pins, strings, needles, tags, clips, 
 everything but the conventional buttons and threads. 
 " I'll tell you a little later," " It is very hard to tell," 
 " I must go back a little way " how distracting and 
 inefficient. 
 
 It is this parvenu in Mr. Wells that leads him to 
 take nothing for granted, that leads him to put the 
 universe on trial. And, incidentally, it is this par- 
 venu in him which makes him attempt to win dis- 
 tinction by shunning familiar names for most of his 
 characters, and call them Blupp, Willersley, Mot- 
 tisham, Clynes, Esmeer, Bunting Harblow, Clading-
 
 bowl, Tumpany, Bulch, Pipes, Toomer, Waulsort, 
 Rumbold, Minns, Tohrns, Kindling, Crupp, Flack, 
 Wrassleton, Forthundred, Paddockshurst, Plutus, 
 Fester, Panmure and Quackett. I resent all these 
 odd names especially Quackett. 
 
 More serious is his effort to clear out weeds by 
 slashing thistles with a vicious cane. More serious 
 is his willingness to believe of the poor that " mean 
 fears enslave them, and satisfactions decoy them." 
 Such half truths are disheartening from Mr. Wells. 
 
 Perhaps the megalomania of Remington, of which 
 these are symptoms, is deliberate. If so, I have 
 read the book in the wrong spirit. And at any rate 
 the book is a stimulant not to be refused. It is easy 
 to understand people being apathetic to Mr. Wells. 
 But while absence of desire sometimes indicates re- 
 finement, it more often indicates anaemia; and Mr. 
 Wells challenges the anaemic. He is not a scrupu- 
 lous artist. He writes in a riot of the blood. He 
 undervalues the poised and the equable. His mind 
 at present is restless, perplexed, feverish and unprin- 
 cipled. And he favors change for its own sake, 
 captiously. It is easy to repudiate many things in 
 Mr. Wells. But he is better to assimilate than to 
 reject. To assimilate him is to assimilate him as a 
 man in whom there is much that is provocative (as 
 where he criticizes Liberals) much that is suggestive 
 (as where he criticizes the old ideals of education), 
 much that is fine. He has the yeast of life in him, 
 the microbe of adventure. And to exclude him is 
 to cut off an influence which, if not wholly reasoned 
 or successfully sublimated, still has vitality irresisti* 
 ble and staunch sincerities. 
 
 January 20, ign. 
 
 [ "7]
 
 RESHAPING THE WORLD: 
 
 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 
 
 SlNCE The New Machiavelli something essential 
 of H. G. Wells has been in a state of suspension. 
 The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon, The World Set 
 Free, The Passionate Friends, Marriage what- 
 ever their aim and success, they left a promise un- 
 fulfilled. But The Research Magnificent fulfills this 
 promise. It is, to put it roughly, another epochal 
 tale. It carries on the enterprise of the earlier con- 
 fidential novels, carries on the immense task of 
 focussing inclusively the epoch as Mr. Wells sees it, 
 and his own spiritual relations to the epoch. 
 
 What this means is readily imaginable by the ad- 
 mirers of Mr. Wells. It is far more than the con- 
 tribution of an orthodox novel. Orthodox novelists 
 aim at the moving world from a fixed platform at 
 best; mainly they take targets pinned on trees or 
 pot at clay pigeons. They certainly do not attempt 
 to dramatize their current philosophy in their ver- 
 sion of the moving world. But this is precisely 
 Mr. Wells's distinction. Not content, as he might 
 be, to dramatize an epoch in an Old Wives' Tale, 
 nor yet to give his philosophy the vivid but unhis- 
 toric epitome of a Sartor Resartus, he strives for 
 the sake of reality to secure for his generalizations 
 
 The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells. Macmillan, New 
 York,
 
 the supremely telling corroboration of fiction. He 
 seems determined in these revelatory novels to ad- 
 here very closely to his own spiritual experiences. 
 But he aims also to fling his imagination hard enough 
 out of autobiography to embody that experience in 
 an authentic plot. It is a stupendous effort to make 
 available all the torrents of his vitality. 
 
 So far as technique is concerned, he has never done 
 better than here. The Research Magnificent is ex- 
 tremely eloquent. It has maturity, gravity, ardor. 
 It has diversity of action and dazzling variety of 
 scene. It has richness and sustainment of intention. 
 Mr. Wells is not depending on old inspirations. As 
 life goes on, fresh streams replenish him. The 
 momentum of his genius cuts deep enough to release 
 gorging waters from levels untapped before. To 
 select, to compress, to order, to dominate this stream 
 of visions, suggestions, moods, passions, inquisitions, 
 resolutions, tendernesses, irritabilities; to keep out 
 of irrelevancies and impostures that is his modest 
 task, and he has superbly performed it. The little 
 Cockney bestrides the movement and imagery of the 
 world. 
 
 But while Mr. Wells has invented the medium 
 which could rightly accommodate his teeming mind, 
 the bent of that mind is not necessarily to be so joy- 
 ously acclaimed. 
 
 The career which Mr. Wells compacts in The Re- 
 search Magnificent is a man's career, English and 
 modern. Benham was born, one estimates, about 
 1882. The son of an estranged marriage, the fa- 
 ther a fusty schoolmaster, the mother a bright and 
 wealthy presence in London, he gravitated to his 
 mother during his development as an intellectual in
 
 Cambridge. He left Cambridge in 1903, brilliant 
 but " unbalanced," coming into his unheralded for- 
 tune of $30,000 a year. He spent the next year in 
 London at loose ends, much in the hands of a valet, 
 postponing his Career, and having his affair with 
 Mrs. Skelmersdale. Then, after a revulsion, he 
 met Amanda " a sunlit young woman with a leap- 
 ing stride in her paces " and married her out of 
 hand in 1904, Amanda being nineteen. The " spir- 
 ited honeymoon " took them to Italy, the Adriatic, 
 Albania. The sunlit young woman, however, 
 thirsted for London, an " enormous juicy fruit wait- 
 ing for her pretty white teeth." They returned, 
 Benham grimly at odds. He broke away in 1905, 
 going to Russia after the murder of Sergius. He re- 
 turned in November to find her demurely pre-mater- 
 nal, destined to have his child. Christmas he spent 
 in Moscow, went on to Rostov, Astrakhan, Herat. 
 At Karachi he learned he was a father, the child a 
 son. He hurried home. His son was " very red 
 and ugly " better than blue and ugly and very 
 soon he again departed. Amanda had meanwhile 
 adventured for herself. Her letters became inani- 
 mate. Off Madras her certain unfaithfulness 
 dawned on him. At Colombo his mother's flaming 
 letter confirmed it. More carfare he started 
 home. His emotion evanesced at Amanda's ready 
 submissiveness, her willingness to play double with 
 the lover-slave. After the break he careered to 
 Odessa, Bessarabia, Kieff; hurried on to the Swa- 
 deshi outbreak in India, continued to China, " that 
 great teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow hu- 
 manity." Germany he visited in 1910, America and 
 Hayti. In 1913 he was in the midst of labor trou- 
 
 [ 120 ]
 
 bles in Johannesburg, and there in a strike riot he 
 was killed. His age would be about 31 or there- 
 abouts, two years older than the woman he left, but 
 did not suspend communication with, in 1906. 
 
 From this skeleton of dates and places no one 
 could infer anything, and yet it is the skeleton which 
 is clothed by the magnificent research. For this 
 youngster's travels were not the pouncings of a rest- 
 less plutocratic insect. They were deliberate and 
 consecrated excursions into the " collective mind." 
 When he left Cambridge thirsting for nobility, the 
 only services that invited him were science, philoso- 
 phy, politics. Accepting the latter, he rejected jour- 
 nalism and party, " plebeian's submission to the cur- 
 rents of life about him." To live nobly, to live thor- 
 oughly and dangerously, was his passion. And so, 
 with travel as his means of education, he gave him- 
 self up to " the idea of working out for himself, thor- 
 oughly and completely, a political scheme, a theory 
 of his work and duty in the world, a plan of the 
 world's future that should give a rule for his life." 
 His death, quite incidental, was in no way intended. 
 It came out of a spurt of temperament, part of u the 
 general humor of life." 
 
 Where Benham is most real to me is in his strug- 
 gles to transcend fear and pain, his bravery in the 
 jungle, his enforced courage in the mountains and 
 his bravery in the ghetto of Kieff. Tiresome as are 
 some of his problems " should an aristocrat be 
 deterred by the fear of smashing people up? " he 
 is unqualifiedly splendid in his account of the baser 
 limitations; and there is rich humor in his self-willed 
 behavior with the lickerish innkeeper in the Alps. 
 All this is glorious. There is also something warm 
 
 [ 121 ]
 
 about his intimacy with Prothero, the man without 
 pride. But throughout the story there is something 
 not glorious, some taint which is not remitted for all 
 the continued apologia of Mr. Wells. 
 
 One sympathizes with Mr. Wells in his warranted 
 hatred of confusion and muddle, his high impatience 
 with triviality and futility, his rage against " mis- 
 management, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, 
 stupidity," all the baseness that beguile the divinity 
 in man. One is stirred profoundly by his vision of 
 fine purpose and self-anointed zeal, by his sense that 
 " we are working out a new way of living for man- 
 kind, a new rule, a new conscience." Nothing could 
 be more inspiring than his conviction that men have 
 only to resolve to be " lordly free, filled and sus- 
 tained by pride." But the surprise of this novel is 
 its conviction that everything muddled is popular 
 and everything popular is muddled. The only peo- 
 ple " worth consideration " are intellectuals, and of 
 these only one seems to survive. Everything base 
 is identified with democracy and the interchange of 
 wills. There is almost shrieking emphasis that the 
 greatest need in life is a predisposition to nobility 
 and rule. Economic determinism is deposed. In 
 its place, " richesse oblige." Mr. Wells talks like a 
 neophyte of the governing class. His mind cracks 
 with new-found responsibilities of nobility, and he 
 cries from cover to cover for lordliness, kingliness, 
 princeliness, knighthood, like an advance agent for 
 some mystic shrine. 
 
 ' This age of confusion is Democracy; it is all 
 that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, if 
 it means anything, means the rule of the planless 
 man, the rule of the unkempt mind. It means as a 
 
 [ 122 ]
 
 consequence this vast boiling up of collectively mean- 
 ingless things." 
 
 The Balkan states give him a further text. There 
 isn't one element in that imbroglio " that deserves a 
 moment's respect from a sane man." 
 
 You see this is what men are where there is no power, no 
 discipline, no ruler, no responsibility. This is a masterless 
 world. This is pure democracy. This is the natural state 
 of men. This is the world of the bully and the brigand and 
 assassin, the world of the mud-pelter and the brawler, the 
 world of the bent woman, the world of the flea and fly, the 
 open drain and the baying dog. This is what the British 
 sentimentalist thinks a noble state for man. 
 
 How is one to account for this dreary nonsense? 
 I confess I can only do so by suggesting a scrutiny 
 of the conflict between Benham and Amanda. Mr. 
 Wells convinces himself that the relation is under- 
 standably wrecked on the rock of the research mag- 
 nificent. 
 
 Amanda loved wild and picturesque things, and Benham 
 strong and clear things; the vines and brushwood amidst the 
 ruins of Salona that had delighted her had filled him with 
 a sense of tragic retrogression. Salona had revived again in 
 the acutest form a dispute that had been smoldering between 
 them throughout a fitful and lengthy exploration of north 
 and central Italy. She could not understand his disgust 
 with the mediaeval color and confusion that had swamped 
 the pride and state of the Roman Empire, and he could not 
 make her feel the ambition of the ruler, the essential disci- 
 pline and responsibilities of his aristocratic idea. While his 
 adventurousness was conquest, hers, it was only too mani- 
 fest, was brigandage. His thoughts ran now into the form 
 of an imaginary discourse, that he would never deliver to 
 her, on the decay of states, on the triumph of barbarians over 
 
 [ 123 1
 
 rulers who will not rule, on the relaxation of patrician 
 orders and the return of the robber and assassin as lordship 
 decays. 
 
 This account of male and female may convince 
 some people, especially with the later apologia. 
 " I'm an overstrung man. I go harshly and con- 
 tinuously for one idea. I live as I ride. I blunder 
 through my fences. I take off too soon. I've no 
 natural ease of mind or conduct of body." It is 
 very touching. But if the natural predisposition to 
 rule gave us many Amandas I should be all for put- 
 ting chipped ice on the head of the ruler. It seems 
 to me a quite ordinary case of muddled and deso- 
 lating egoism, with the Research as a convenient 
 afterthought. As for the conclusion that there are 
 as yet " no feminine aristocrats, rulers and mates 
 of rulers," it is the kind of repudiation which re- 
 bcunds on the man by whom it is made. 
 
 One of the extraordinary facts about this extraor- 
 dinary novel is that the child born to Benham is ab- 
 solutely never mentioned subsequent to his birth. 
 Sir Philip Easton " Pip " apparently fathers it. 
 Benham, at any rate, the real father, literally never 
 gives it a second thought. It is a coldness not easy 
 to explain. 
 
 Mr. Wells wants perfection, but he seeks to ar- 
 rive by aviation. He wishes to soar over " the naive 
 passions and self-interest of the common life." It 
 is a high ambition and it has produced a wonderful 
 book in The Research Magnificent. Yet the book 
 does not seem to me to possess fundamental truth- 
 fulness. Genius, nobility and sick egoism combine 
 in it, to the additional muddle of mankind. 
 
 September 2$, 1915. 
 
 [124]
 
 MR. WELLS DISCOVERS GOD: 
 
 MR. BRITLING 
 
 write a novel on the heels of direct experience 
 is one of Mr. Wells's greatest gifts. It is as simple 
 for him to tell a story embodying the moods of the 
 minute as for a camera to catch a diver in mid air. 
 Most men take years to bring their own relations 
 into focus. It is the convention for men to wait 
 until their own story is finished before they write 
 their autobiography with a palsied hand. Mr. 
 Wells has for a long time vigorously disregarded 
 this convention. He no more needs the stability of 
 historical consensus for his guidance than a lightning 
 calculator needs a pencil and pad. Mr. Wells does 
 not simply take the background of his own time into 
 consideration. He takes the shifting ideas, the ka- 
 leidoscopic mind. This is irregular. It is " jour- 
 nalistic." It is the introduction of spit-ball methods 
 into fiction. It is speeding up the profession of 
 novel-writing in an anti-union way. In spite of its 
 parvenu aspect, however, it is Mr. Wells's greatest 
 triumph, and it now enables him to write a genuine 
 novel of the war. 
 
 Mr. Britling may seem autobiographical. It is 
 a happy circumstance of authorship that those ex- 
 periences which Mr. Wells recently suffered as a 
 middle-aged Englishman in the Zeppelin area should 
 
 Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells. Macraillan, New 
 York. 
 
 C 125 ]
 
 be resumed so substantially by Mr. Britling. Mr. 
 Britling is not, however, Mr. Wells. No good 
 novel could be strictly autobiographical. To sup- 
 pose that a novel is autobiographical is to accuse a 
 painter of using actual grass on his canvas. It is 
 to put imaginative integrity out of the question. 
 Mr. Britling is not Mr. Wells. He is merely a sym- 
 pathetic twin caught by Mr. Wells in the astonishing 
 act of duplicating Mr. Wells's experiences. Be- 
 tween them there is a decent severance. Mr. Wells 
 can hold Mr. Britling in his eye. But because Mr. 
 Wells is himself a prosperous Englishman between 
 40 and 50, a writer on world affairs, a married man 
 with children, a person of the same courageous, hope- 
 ful, gusty, amorous disposition, a person writing a 
 very similar handwriting and with almost the same 
 intonations, we can congratulate ourselves on the 
 facility with which Mr. Britling can be affixed. It 
 is not sound to identify Mr. Wells completely with 
 his own Mr. Britling. That would be subtly yet 
 infinitely misleading. But it is important immensely 
 that Mr. Wells has conceived a gentleman standing 
 pretty much in the same shoes. Mr. Wells can on 
 that account afford to say, " I know my Britling." 
 We in turn, haply interested in the author, can after 
 due allowance observe, " So much the better do we 
 know our Wells." 
 
 We not only know him better, we know him as 
 never before. There is no intimation of class or 
 quality in saying " Wells's new book." He is as 
 variable as he is varied. He is so much a genius 
 that nothing about him can be predicted beforehand, 
 not even his genius. He has a mind like a Klondike 
 and as many surprises as the gold-rush territory it- 
 
 [ 126 ]
 
 self. But this novel of the war, serialized to its 
 own detriment as it was, can be defined as a glorious 
 success. It is so much a novel of genius as to end 
 oscillation as to Mr. Wells's perceptions. It cannot 
 fail for some readers to mean a permanent resump- 
 tion of belief in the spiritual intelligibility of Mr. 
 Wells. 
 
 It is a little worse than useless, so far as such 
 reassurance is concerned, to say that Mr. Britling 
 is a novel of the war. There are things that Mr. 
 Wells has said about the war which had not, so to 
 speak, spiritual intelligibility. One of them was 
 that little spurt of cold fury which was shot at Amer- 
 ica in the Everybody's symposium a sort of 
 venomed transatlantic spit. Because he loved Eng- 
 land Mr. Wells looked on America in the way the 
 wife of a hero who is being walloped might look on 
 a cautious, legally righteous, non-interfering friend 
 next door. And when Mr. Wells is moved under 
 such circumstances he employs the cool style of the 
 publicist to carry the spleen of Seven Dials. But 
 it is not that kind of novel which Mr. Wells has writ- 
 ten in Mr. Britling Sees It Through. There is in 
 H. G. Wells a great deal of passionateness which 
 leads him to lash out at everything which crosses 
 him, to speak with bristling contemptuousness of one 
 order of beings after another. In that he is like the 
 sanguine, generous Mr. Britling. But the value of 
 Mr. Britling is its revelation of this apparently feral 
 nature under the supreme test of a highly national- 
 istic war. Then the wildness is found to be noth- 
 ing worse than the violence of sensitiveness, a sensi- 
 tiveness that in another mood is the magic carpet to 
 all that is alien. Goaded at first by the war, Mr. 
 
 [ 127 ]
 
 B rifling ends by interpreting even bereavement. 
 He ends by " seeing it through." And in the proc- 
 esses of searching his soul he does not rest on his 
 first impulse, to maintain merely the assailed good- 
 ness of England, " the deep and long unspoken de- 
 sire for kindliness and fairness." He faces " the 
 deeper riddles of essential evil and of conceivable 
 changes in the heart of man." He avoids the allure- 
 ments of " ineffective gentleness." He goes through 
 the " pessimistic pit." He comes to admit that the 
 issues of the war lack the simple greatness that 
 would make the stern happiness of stoicism possible. 
 He accepts the existence of " the truer Germany 
 that is thought and system " and acknowledges its 
 conflict with an England not all ways great. In 
 the account of these mutations there is a candor so 
 passionate and thorough, a humor so large and lov- 
 able, a self-knowledge so humble, that one can 
 hardly restrain admiration. It is a change from the 
 contentiousness of Mr. Wells, as if trip-hammers 
 made music and dentists employed wooden needles. 
 ' The reversional trend given by warlike experi- 
 ence and warlike preoccupation," says Thorstein 
 Veblen, makes " for a reversion to the Grace of 
 God." Perhaps it is that that helps Mr. Britling to 
 seem mellow. But the best of the book appears to 
 me to come before this note is struck. I can un- 
 derstand Mr. Britling discovering God, his God of 
 limited liability. 
 
 Hitherto God had been for him a thing of the intelligence, 
 a theory, a report, something told about but not realized. 
 ... Mr. Britling's thinking about God hitherto had been 
 like some one who has found an empty house, very beautiful 
 and pleasant, full of the promise of a fine personality. And 
 
 [ 128]
 
 then as the discoverer makes his lonely, curious explorations, 
 he hears downstairs, dear and friendly, the voice of the 
 Master coming in. ... There was no need to despair be- 
 cause he himself was one of the feeble folk. God was with 
 him indeed, and he was with God. The King was coming 
 to his own. Amidst the darknesses and confusions, the 
 nightmare stupidities and the hideous cruelties of the great 
 war, God, the Captain of the World Republic, fought his 
 way to empire. So long as one did one's best and utmost 
 in a cause so mighty, did it matter though the thing one 
 did was little and poor. 
 
 One can understand it, this God as companion of 
 the urgent soul, this generous adjustment of so pas- 
 sionate a nature to the necessities of a world in 
 change. 
 
 To Mr. Britling in his hours of nocturnal imagi- 
 nation, hours when the molehills throw mountainous 
 shadows on the mind, the world readily became an 
 egg, and " he had the subconscious delusion that he 
 had laid it." Instead of encouraging this delusion, 
 as Mr. Wells seemed to do in The Research Mag- 
 nificent, he gives it deeply humorous interpretation. 
 There are adventures asking for courage and great- 
 ness in Mr. Britling, although he is only " a writer, 
 a footnote to reality." But there is no urgent feel- 
 ing that the world must advert to him or blow up. 
 
 Perhaps because Mr. Wells has these proportions 
 for Mr. Britling, the book seems unusually witty. 
 " Britain was not a state it was an unincorporated 
 people." " What is the good of all this clamoring 
 for a change of government. We haven't a change 
 of government. It's like telling a tramp to get a 
 change of linen." Mr. Britling " pointed all too 
 plainly at America." " There's two sorts of liberal- 
 
 [ 129 ]
 
 ism there's the liberalism of great aims and the 
 liberalism of defective moral energy." 
 
 Mr. Wells's American, Mr. Direck, is not en- 
 tirely successful. He accords with the British con- 
 vention by which Americans are all rather like 
 Gerald Stanley Lee, and is full of points about 
 America points that don't tickle one's gizzard as 
 hard as such hard points ought to. But there is 
 delicious sympathetic chronicle of Mr. Direck in 
 love. " Mr. Direck's mood was an immense so- 
 lemnity, like a dark ocean beneath the vast dome of 
 the sky, and something quivered in every fibre of his 
 being, like moonlit ripples on the sea." 
 
 It is convenient to believe you love just once. It 
 is attractive to sentimentalize about youth, once it is 
 over. It is natural to put down harassing " cosmic 
 solicitudes " as " the last penalties of irreligion." 
 These are possible weaknesses in the philosophy 
 adumbrated in Mr. Britling. But a finer use has 
 never been made by Mr. Wells of his great faculty 
 for bringing his age into focus. Posterity alone can 
 judge whether Mr. Wells pickles experience so 
 quickly that it cannot be expected to remain pickled. 
 Certainly the process is to the advantage of the 
 present reader. And it is to the honor of an Eng- 
 land still engaged in war. 
 
 October T, 1916. 
 
 [ 130]
 
 MR. WELLS ESPOUSES GOD: 
 
 THE SOUL OF A BISHOP 
 
 JVlR. WELLS has made a supreme effort to trans- 
 late through this bishop of his a genuine religious 
 upheaval. As befits his own recent avowal of reli- 
 gious conviction, his bishop is not taken satirically 
 or egregiously. He is a regular English bishop 
 thought out and felt out, one with a ring and purple 
 episcopal pyjamas, with five daughters and Lady 
 Ella, a bishop who sneaks off with his neurasthenia 
 to the twilight garden to smoke a forbidden ciga- 
 rette true churchman thick with idiosyncrasy and! 
 rich with local color who is the very bull's eye of 
 that orthodoxy which Mr. Wells is out to hit. 
 
 It is a fascinating performance. Scrope is prob- 
 ably the most elaborate extra-personal characteriza- 
 tion in Mr. Wells's highly personal fiction. But 
 documented and authenticated as the man is, there 
 is a thinness about his spirit that is ghostly, and the 
 emphasis on God in him is like the ardent clasping 
 at a wraith. He is insubstantial in humanity, prin- 
 cipally because the substance of the novel the es- 
 cape from the torpor of the established church to a 
 personal non-institutional God is the product of a 
 mind that in critical vigor appears to be at ebb-tide. 
 
 In one aspect the agility of Mr. Wells is astound- 
 ing, his receptivity is a bewilderment. He has an 
 
 The Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells. Macmillan, New York.
 
 extensiveness of experience, and a nimbleness of 
 mind to accompany that extensiveness, that makes 
 the ordinary human being feel like a lump of clay. 
 Where you or I would hesitate out of that caution, 
 which is partly calculation, partly habit, partly con- 
 sistency, Mr. Wells plunges in with a whoop and a 
 flourish, and then, free in a new milieu, procures 
 whatever justification is to be had. Whether it is 
 God that his hero is embracing, or only a mistress, 
 there is the same precipitation, the same ratification 
 later on. For always Mr. Wells has the same mas- 
 terly opinionativeness. A born pamphleteer, he has 
 the most effective of all the persuasions that go to 
 make partisanship dangerous he is convinced that 
 beyond everything else he is intellectually honest and 
 hard and clear. On his lips there is the shibboleth 
 "modern," as if fashion were a clew to Tightness; 
 and, conceiving the larger part of sincerity to be 
 obedience to immediate conviction, Mr. Wells is 
 never at a loss for sincerity because convictions are 
 his stock in trade. 
 
 But in some matters, particularly in this matter 
 of religion, one questions the attitude of a writer 
 who develops strong convictions too readily. There 
 is too much about the architecture of Mr. Wells's 
 convictions that reminds one of the bright expediency 
 of a World's Fair. He produces his palaces over- 
 night. They cometh up as the flowers. They glis- 
 ten in fresh splendor in the face of a gratified sun. 
 But they have no sewerage. They are not rain- 
 proof. They stand wind and weather very badly. 
 And as soon as the particular show for which they 
 were erected is over, they have to be blown up with 
 dynamite and cleared away. A quickness in arriv- 
 
 [ 132]
 
 ing at convictions is an admirable thing. It is indis- 
 pensable to men of action. But the sense of respon- 
 sibility that keeps a man of thought from simulating 
 the effectiveness of a man of action is not all con- 
 servatism, not all academic pokiness. Part of it is 
 a realization that in the realm of ideas the premium 
 ought to be put on genuine sincerity not merely 
 the utterance of conviction but the testing of it, the 
 contract carried out as well as the contract rosily 
 signed. 
 
 In regard to sex we now know precisely how Mr. 
 Wells feels about untested relationships. " Only 
 after years can one be sure of it "; he says of quasi- 
 sacramental union, " it is not brought about by vows 
 and promises but by an essential kindred and cleav- 
 ing of body and spirit." And again, " It is difficult 
 to imagine how the association of lovers and friends 
 can be very fine and close and good unless the two 
 who love are each also linked to God, so that through 
 their moods and fluctuations and the changes of 
 years they can be held steadfast by his undying stead- 
 fastness." Yet this argument as to the validity of 
 conviction is the last one proposed or encountered in 
 the flop that Mr. Wells makes into religion. He 
 just flops, and no sooner does he attain religious be- 
 liefs than he declares them, and no sooner does he 
 declare them in a short treatise on God than he pro- 
 duces a novel dramatizing these beliefs in the history 
 of a personality. It is not a new process with him. 
 Every great experience of his life has induced a con- 
 vulsion in his ideas, and every convulsion a drama- 
 tization. This does not mean that he is slavishly 
 autobiographical. It simply means that, conven- 
 iently enough, Mr. Wells is a thinker in relation to 
 
 [ 133 ]
 
 his expericncings, and that it satisfies him to embody 
 in a story the immediate reality that has suddenly, 
 oh so suddenly, dawned on him. 
 
 The Soul of a Bishop should, of course, be read 
 first of all as a story for its development of a 
 distinctive character. The man who writes the novel 
 is still the Mr. Wells who reads newspapers omniv- 
 orously and whose swarming, inchoate, multi-na- 
 tional world is largely the world of jostling head- 
 lines and competitive news. But in spite of the 
 " vision " that serves to shake out these divers pep- 
 per-pot allusions, the story is much more concen- 
 trated and unified than usual, the theme being the 
 bishop's struggle through the debility of impossible 
 compromises to an understanding that " man's true 
 environment is God." Much of that struggle is an 
 adaptation of God the Invisible King. The religion 
 at which the ex-bishop arrives is the religion at which 
 Mr. Wells arrived a little previously, only the course 
 that the bishop takes is suggestive of every dubious 
 element in contemporary sacerdotalism. The theme 
 is handled by Mr. Wells like a virtuoso. It gives 
 him a chance to open out the heart of the episcopate, 
 to show the silliness that masquerades in perfumed 
 religiosity, the amusing and contemptible compro- 
 mises of a monarchical church. It also allows him 
 to dramatize conversion in a series of magnificent 
 visions induced by a strange medicine, in which there 
 is actually a touch of ecstasy. An angel appears, 
 " a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smil- 
 ing face and kindly eyes," and the bishop has the 
 courage to speak to him. 
 
 " I want," he said, " to know about God. 
 
 " I want," he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, 
 
 [ 134]
 
 " to know about God. Slowly through four years I have 
 been awakening to the need of God. Body and soul I am 
 sick for the want of God and the knowledge of God. I did 
 not know what was the matter with me, why my life had 
 become so disordered and confused that my very appetites 
 and habits are all astray. But I am perishing for God as a 
 waterless man upon a raft perishes for drink, and there is 
 nothing but madness if I touch the seas about me. Not 
 only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my 
 nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You 
 see I grew up in the delusion that I knew God. I did not 
 know that I was unprovisioned and unprovided against the 
 tests and strains and hardships of life. I thought that I 
 was secure and safe." 
 
 It is the church, the creed, that have estranged him 
 from his religion, made him throw out the Savior 
 with the orthodoxy. 
 
 "And the truth?" said the bishop in an eager whisper. 
 " You can tell me the truth." 
 
 The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust 
 his hand through the bishop's hair and ruffled it affection- 
 ately, and rested for a moment holding the bishop's cranium 
 in his great palm. 
 
 "But can this hold it?" he said. 
 
 " Not with this little box of brains," said the Angel. 
 " You could as soon make a meal of the stars and pack them 
 into your belly. You haven't the things to do it with inside 
 this" 
 
 He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it. 
 
 He began to argue as an elder brother might. 
 
 " Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God 
 that comes down to the human scale, who has been born on 
 your planet and arisen out of Man, who is Man and God, 
 your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind and 
 use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is 
 
 [ 135 ]
 
 adventure, he is the King, he fights for you and with you 
 against death." 
 
 " And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator? " asked 
 the bishop. 
 
 " So far as you are concerned, no," said the Angel. 
 
 " So far as I am concerned ? " 
 
 " What have you to do with creation? " 
 
 Which is quite a retort, but if " this little box of 
 brains " is incompetent, then why isn't God a Cre- 
 ator and why isn't the creed everything the bishops 
 say it is? If one is going to surrender one's intelli- 
 gence, why not to a Pope or to the dictator of a 
 creed? 
 
 " Our country is at war and half mankind is at war ; 
 death and destruction trample through the world; men rot 
 and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is a 
 wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumu- 
 lated well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect 
 yet of any end to this enormous and frightful conflict. Why 
 did it ever arise? What made it possible? It arose be- 
 cause men had forgotten God. It was possible because they 
 worshiped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and 
 empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot 
 princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from 
 God, who alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they 
 have passed from the glare and follies of those former years 
 into the darkness and anguish of the present day." 
 
 It is easy to imagine that thousands of people 
 will like the tenor of this sermon by the bishop. 
 With its ample answer to poignant questioning Mr. 
 Wells will reach the layer of readers that used to be 
 Harold Bell Wright's, Marie Corelli's, and perhaps 
 Hall Caine's. But it will be for the solace in his 
 words, not their exemplification of a bishop's intellL-
 
 r gence, that these passages will most be appreciated. 
 No one writing in English today compares with 
 H. G. Wells as a novelist of ideas. As a story- 
 teller he is extraordinarily vibrant and effective, and 
 he can no more get on without conclusive ideas in a 
 fresh situation than a man can get on without a skin. 
 But in this instance, for the proper enjoyment of 
 The Soul of a Bishop, it is necessary to differentiate 
 between the book's contribution to ideas and its con- 
 tribution to art. The bishop is a bleak creature, 
 largely because Mr. Wells invented him to fulfill a 
 fictional purpose. Characterized with amazing 
 cleverness, he is still essentially a bobbin on whom 
 the religious thread is wound. The cordiality, the 
 rushing sympathy and kindness and fellowship that 
 religious men in Russian novels express in every re- 
 lation, have no place in this egoist's religious escape 
 from neurasthenia. The bishop is sincere in seek- 
 ing an explanation of the universe, but it is an ex- 
 planation that is to give courage and youth and ad- 
 venture, the attributes of the self-concerned man. 
 Moving from this to the ideas that the book pre- 
 sents, there is a frank wonder on my own part that 
 Mr. Wells can take with such seriousness so mon- 
 archical and regimental a God. For a man who 
 has always had a goading ideal of self-discipline this 
 is a natural enough God to manufacture, eminently 
 a God of service and efficiency, but he is a curiously 
 local and immediate and personal evocation, heavily 
 mortgaged to the present kind of world. If one is 
 going to have a God, why not step outside the dio- 
 cesan habits of mankind? What led Mr. Wells to 
 suppose that contemporary religion has anything 
 whatever to say about the purposes or destinies of 
 
 [ 137 ]
 
 mankind? In his vertical ascent in English society 
 Mr. Wells has come unprepared on the establish- 
 ment of bishops. He has given the idea of them 
 too much significance. Whatever way the meaning 
 of life lies, it probably does not lie God-ward, and 
 it is difficult to be entirely respectful of Mr. Wells's 
 latest impetuous and incontinent adventure. 
 
 September 22, 1917.
 
 THE OLD WIVES' TALE 
 
 with simple expectancy does one come to The 
 Old Wives' Tale. Mr. Robertson Nicoll has pro- 
 nounced it a really great novel. Max Beerbohm, 
 whose taste is catholic but certainly not crass, has 
 called it a masterpiece. Such praise from the dis- 
 criminate stirs one's blood. A great novel I A 
 masterpiece I The writer who says " masterpiece " 
 has uttered the carissima of his profession. It is 
 the Almighty and Everlasting of criticism. He can 
 no more. And men like Max Beerbohm, who have 
 honor as critics, wind an inviting horn when they 
 proclaim a novel great. 
 
 Mr. Bennett's novel justifies its critics. On con- 
 ventional grounds the book is impressive. It has 
 dimension, size, solidity. Modern in temper, it is 
 neither flashy nor flimsy in material. But what are 
 the heavy battalions without their Napoleon? The 
 detail and circumstance of this novel would mean 
 nothing if it didn't move, honest and self-possessed, 
 on springs of wise invention. 
 
 The Old Wives' Tale is a novel of many parts, 
 many distinctions, of which the chief distinction is, 
 not its delightful length nor its originality of sub-. 
 ject, but its general spirit, its superb common sense, 
 In fiction it is usual for the writer to pretend to the 
 reader that life is a very wonderful, very extraordi- 
 nary affair, made up of the most surprising adven- 
 
 The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennett. Doran, New 
 [ 139 ]
 
 tures and the most punctual and terrific emotions. 
 It is easy to draw to this Brobdignagian scale which 
 no one can correct, and very hard to draw to the 
 scale of normal and familiar man, which any one 
 can correct. Hence common sense, " our gold 
 crushed out of joy and pain," is the rarest as it is 
 the most valuable quality in imaginative writing. 
 
 To achieve this beautiful realism, which is a vision 
 of life conditioned to actual needs, is not to produce 
 the crapulous or the banal. It is the sentimentalist 
 who is afraid that if one rings at truth's door one will 
 bring out a corrupt and leering monster. He alone 
 is certain of natural viciousness, and hides his own 
 nature in the darkness of night; his scampering heart 
 taking for the pitfall what in daylight is the neces- 
 sary drain. The realist, as seen in Mr. Bennett, is 
 one whom irony and sympathy alike remove from 
 the sentimentalist supposing sentimentalism to 
 imply the effemination of the soul, " the absence both 
 of clear reason, and also of the one other thing, be- 
 sides religion and country, that the comic spirit re- 
 spects, simple and healthy passion." 
 
 Adopting the old method, accepting the human 
 career as a complete drama in itself, a drama of 
 which the laws are inscrutable, Mr. Bennett has told 
 without digression the story of Constance and 
 Sophia, daughters of an English provincial draper. 
 With single purpose, he has kept to the bourgeoisie, 
 from the sixties to the nineties. The accidents of 
 life divert Sophia to Paris, but she stays in her class, 
 and in her era, and The Old Wives' Tale remains 
 a unified picture of the kin to which most of us be- 
 long, with limited romance of achievement, and un- 
 limited possibility of soul.
 
 It is because he perceives and values these oppor- 
 tunities of the soul that Mr. Bennett writes of 
 drapers and confectioners from no absurd distance. 
 Drapers also are made in the image of God. The 
 human comedy, with certain ludicrous interludes, and 
 a desperate cruelty to the pious and the sentimental, 
 goes on with no great peculiarities of mood among 
 the Baineses, the Poveys, the Scaleses, Aunt Har- 
 riet and Aunt Maria, Maggie and Maud. 
 
 It is through Sophia and Constance that this 
 drama, after a slow preliminary, is enacted in all 
 those abrupt and apparently haphazard chapters 
 dictated by the passions and the catastrophes of com- 
 mon life. 
 
 Constance is pliant, amiable, sensible, and her fate 
 inevitably leads her to " fall in love " with Samuel 
 Povey, the youngish man on whose shoulders fall 
 many of the duties relinquished by her bed-ridden 
 father. Sophia, in contrast, is vivacious, proud, 
 high-spirited, willful. She is a trial to her sagacious 
 mother, and family conflicts are many. The moth- 
 er's wisdom is an unfailing irritant. " She had 
 prophesied a cold for Sophia, the refuser of castor 
 oil, and it had come." 
 
 After some years of imperfect understanding at 
 home, Sophia captivates an attractive young " drum- 
 mer." She loses her heart. He proposes elope- 
 ment. She goes to London. The interview in 
 which he tries to evade the question of marriage is 
 marvelous sexual analysis, with mingled exaltation, 
 wile and sensuality. Gerald Scales marries Sophia. 
 With his supposedly vast fortune of 12,000 dollars, 
 they go to Paris. Sophia painfully learns, what she 
 " might have divined from that adorable half-femi-
 
 nine smile, that she could do anything with Gerald 
 except rely on him." When they come to hate each 
 other, she is too proud to write home. " She was 
 ready to pay the price of pride and of a moment's 
 imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression." 
 
 At last, after four spendthrift years, Gerald de- 
 serts her. She passes through poverty and disease. 
 Her will hardens to steel. Love knocks at the door 
 but her instinct rebels. 
 
 " She knew that she wanted love. Only she con- 
 ceived a different kind of love: placid, regular, 
 somewhat stern, somewhat above the plane of 
 whims, moods, caresses, and all mere fleshly con- 
 tacts. Not that she considered that she despised 
 these things (though she did) ! What she wanted 
 was a love too proud, too independent, to exhibit 
 frankly either its joy or its pain. She hated a dis- 
 play of sentiment. And even in the most intimate 
 abandonments she would have safe reserves, and 
 would have expected reserves, trusting to a lover's 
 powers of divination, and to her own ! The founda- 
 tion of her character was a haughty moral independ- 
 ence, and this quality was what she most admired 
 in others." 
 
 While Sophia is becoming the hard managerial 
 boarding-house keeper, Constance is experiencing in 
 her person the history of her kind. In The Old 
 Wives' Tale babies are never found under a goose- 
 berry bush. Constance's confinement is described as 
 befits so supreme and solemn an event. Cyril is the 
 fruit of her union. Cyril gives a tea party when he 
 is four and misbehaves dreadfully. Cyril goes to 
 school. Cyril steals a florin out of the till. Many 
 and brilliant are the adventures of Cyril. But they
 
 are all swallowed up, like a toyshop in an earth- 
 quake, when Cyril's middle-aged cousin kills his 
 drunkard wife by accident. 
 
 The law lays grim hand on Daniel. Samuel 
 Povey, who looks up to this cousin, makes his cause 
 his own. He engages the barrister, gets up a pe- 
 tition, excites the community, neglects his business, 
 his health. The law, with curious indifference to 
 the terrible emotions of Samuel, hangs Daniel Povey. 
 Samuel contracts pneumonia. " He survived the 
 crisis of the disease and then died of toxaemia, 
 caused by a heart which would not do its duty by the 
 blood." There is virtuosity for you ! " A casual 
 death, scarce noticed in the reaction after the great 
 febrile demonstration! Besides Samuel Povey 
 never could impose himself on the burgesses. He 
 lacked individuality. He was little. I have often 
 laughed at Samuel Povey. But I liked and respected 
 him. He was a very honest man. I have always 
 been glad to think that, at the end of his life, des- 
 tiny took hold of him and displayed, to the observant, 
 the vein of greatness which runs through every soul 
 without exception. He embraced a cause, lost it, 
 and died of it." 
 
 Constance, the widow, fails to hold Cyril, who 
 has hankerings after art. But her life takes on a 
 new complexion when a clew to the vanished Sophia 
 is discovered and when Sophia herself, pulled down 
 in health, eventually returns to Bursley. 
 
 The two sisters, after diverse experiences, find 
 themselves together at fifty. In Sophia the ferment 
 of life is still active. She has " outgrown " Bursley. 
 She tries in vain to induce Constance, who is com- 
 fortably off, to move. " It was scarcely conceivable 
 E H3 ]
 
 that they should be living in the very middle of a 
 dirty, ugly, industrial town because Constance 
 mulishly declined to move." But Constance is set 
 in her ways. Sophia inflicts changes, dismisses the 
 old servant, fights the dirt, yet on the whole is a 
 comfort, if not a spiritual companion to her sister. 
 Then when Sophia is sixty, Gerald Scales is an- 
 nounced to be in Manchester, dangerously ill. 
 Sophia goes, teeth set for the encounter, but there is 
 no occasion. Gerald is dead before she arrives. 
 She sees him. She had not pictured him old. She 
 beholds him dead, and it moves her to the core : 
 
 What affected her was that he had once been young, and 
 that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. 
 Youth and vigor had come to that. Youth and vigor al- 
 ways came to that. He had ill treated her; he had aban- 
 doned her; he had been a devious rascal; but how trivial 
 were such accusations against him! The whole of her huge 
 and bitter grievance against him fell to pieces and crumbled. 
 She saw him young, and proud, and strong, as for instance 
 when he had kissed her lying on the bed in that London 
 hotel she forgot the name in 1 866 ; and now he was 
 old, and worn, and horrible, and dead. 
 
 That is the end of Sophia. The strain of her 
 silent interview is too great. And after her death, 
 the tragedy of her career, passionate, eager, master- 
 ful and futile, fills with pity that placid woman Con- 
 stance, whose end comes tranquilly, after years of 
 sciatica, borne with much forbearance. 
 
 It is Mr. Bennett's triumph that he has given in 
 the most loving and delicious detail the plain story 
 of these plain lives, and sacrificed neither the ro- 
 mance implicit in every human story nor the implicit 
 philosophy which is the gist of such story repeated. 
 
 [ 144 ]
 
 Not that a novel should directly be " a light to 
 guide, a rod to check the erring and reprove." But 
 to give one a sensation is not enough. Literature 
 which treats of death and birth, passion and pain, 
 must confront these mysteries morally as well as 
 artistically. It is the moral atmosphere of The Old 
 Wives' Tale that makes it great. I am afraid that 
 Mr. Bennett is somewhat jovial about God. But 
 it is the God that is preceded by a cross breakfast 
 and followed by a Gargantuan Sunday dinner, the 
 Staffordshire Jehovah, that Mr. Bennett is pleasantly 
 jovial about. Concerning the instinct that puts some- 
 thing above pleasure, Mr. Bennett is serious. It is 
 not to the intoxication of ideas or to the " ruthless 
 egoism of happiness " that he yields himself finally. 
 He admires the Sr^rtan virtues, the severe Spartan 
 joys. 
 
 Yet however he may admire tenacity of ideal and 
 power of will, he is no dogmatist. And he laughs 
 at every one of his creatures in turn, at their silly 
 sense that their toothache, their ache of childbirth, 
 is the most important, most terrible ache in the 
 world at the mother who has the bitterness of 
 age against uncompromising youth which expects to 
 consummate its vague dreams and grudges to find 
 things " so obstinately, so incurably unsentimental." 
 
 It is this moral atmosphere that gives the novel 
 its advantage over a work of such meticulous real- 
 ism as Esther Waters. George Moore observed 
 Esther Waters. Arnold Bennett experienced So- 
 phia Baines. So he experienced Constance, and so 
 Samuel Povey. And for that reason he has forgot- 
 ten nothing, neither the ancestral bed nor the bad 
 Landseer copy, nor the dark kitchen alley, in the 
 
 [ 145 ]
 
 Bursley background. When Mr. Bennett gives yon 
 these things he is giving you the idiom of his life. 
 When George Moore gives you these things he is 
 giving you the idiom of Zola's life. 
 
 Mr. Bennett's style is clear and unaffected. It 
 has " a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation." 
 Sedate but vivacious in ordinary narrative, it is best 
 in the crucial scenes where simplicity and vigor are 
 effective. Mr. Bennett's knowledge of his charac- 
 ters is inexhaustible. Moreover, one is certain he 
 has come to see life for himself, though he never 
 sacrifices his story to the pleasure of orienting him- 
 self. 
 
 Most delightful are the engrossing fictional uses 
 he has found for workaday life and bourgeois vir- 
 tue. With all his realization of facts, known to the 
 angelic as sordid, he is at heart gay, not for an in- 
 stant acrid. If he is never rapt, never exalted, 
 never conscious of any but the moral divinity in man, 
 it is because Bursley is not Dionysiac. There is no 
 glamour in The Old Wives' Tale, no illusion. 
 
 Again Bursley is to blame. For Bursley is bour- 
 geois life, the life which bakes bread, and scrubs 
 floors, and backs bills, and bears children, and is not 
 vain enough, or mad enough, or brain enough to ask 
 for the answer to the riddle. 
 
 August 27, igog.
 
 CLAYHANGER 
 
 WHEN Mr. Bennett did The Old Wives' Tale 
 people sagely accepted it as his peak performance. 
 Hugo and The Statue and other novels written in 
 bland compromise encouraged this judgment. Every 
 man is supposed to contain " one great novel," and 
 it was easy to believe that Mr. Bennett had shot his 
 bolt. For evidence, one took his own words, his 
 easy deprecations, his glib manner in The Truth 
 About an Author. But one reckoned without one's 
 Englishman. In The Old Wives' Tale, Mr. Ben- 
 nett was cautiously feeling his way. He was ven- 
 turing his surplus knowledge of life before he would 
 let the public into his fastnesses. Now, in Clay- 
 hanger, this extraordinary man has firmly guided his 
 readers again through a wonderful series of events, 
 events to which every man is born heir, but of which 
 few are consciously and fully proprietorial. He has 
 brought us through the catastrophe of death, the 
 catastrophe of birth, the catastrophe of marriage. 
 He has taken glossed and threadbare facts, facts 
 which the youngest child knows by names, facts to 
 which time and usage have made us callous. In these 
 facts, exhibited in the life of a young Staffordshire 
 tradesman, Mr. Bennett has again discovered ro- 
 mance. Under the crust he has shown the hard and 
 precious metal of which real life is made. Not by a 
 device of emphasizing Motherhood and The Present 
 
 Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett. Dutton, New York. 
 [ 147 ]
 
 System, Little Babies and the Demon Rum has he 
 aroused us fundamentally. He does it by an ex- 
 position at once patient and playful. He does it by 
 a consideration in which nothing is shirked, by a 
 method studiously restrained and unexcited. He 
 wins by the sheer valuableness of his tale, by its in- 
 clusive understanding, by its integrity. 
 
 In The Old Wives' Tale, Mr. Bennett attempted 
 less than in Clayhanger, for in the former he re- 
 served judgment. The book was a triumph, but it 
 was a triumph in which there were still several 
 layers of humanity unmined. He went deep, but 
 not as deep as in Clayhanger. For here he is almost 
 totally occupied with the secret life of Edwin, with 
 that fearful and wonderful labor of personal adjust- 
 ment of which so little is usually suspected or under- 
 stood. 
 
 There are people who say that human nature is 
 the same the world over, etc. To my mind the great 
 interest in Arnold Bennett's novel Clayhanger is its 
 demonstration that Staffordshire nature has its own 
 rare peculiarities, peculiarities to which this novelist 
 is all the more true because he is proud of them and 
 invincibly sure that they are the best qualities in life. 
 The issues of Clayhanger are indeed issues the world 
 over. They are the issues of life and death. But 
 great novelists all take these issues in their own way, 
 and the way of Arnold Bennett is stubbornly original. 
 
 Arnold Bennett is preeminently sane. Sanity is 
 almost his fetish. He is possessed of a taut, intel- 
 lectual honesty, and a resolute will to reason. I 
 imagine that this is a Bursley specialty. It is not 
 so much a natural, cold-blooded affinity for science 
 as a hatred of nonsense and sentimentality. The
 
 English are almost invariably a people of prejudice : 
 a people of faith, sentiment and romance. But in 
 this son of Staffordshire there is combined with faith, 
 tenderness and romance a hatred of heroics, a hatred 
 of facile emotion, a hatred of insincerity in any 
 form in short, a love of stern virtue under any 
 other name. 
 
 Mr. Bennett knows that we usually lie because we 
 have not courage of our desires and of our pride. 
 We falsify rather than make good. Our laziness 
 and moral cowardice lead to shirking, and our pride 
 leads us into lying. Look how Mr. Roosevelt's fierce 
 pride leads him into constant lying. Mr. Bennett 
 knows this foible, and in Edwin he has selected the 
 usual sensitive man, the good-natured and rather ir- 
 resolute man of medium vitality, who is born with a 
 strong desire for perfection, and who does not under- 
 stand how to get forward. This is Edwin's specific 
 weakness, and practically everyone who has desires 
 unfulfilled and pride unratified is in a position to sym- 
 pathize with Edwin. 
 
 Whenever Edwin begins to falsify, Mr. Bennett is 
 present with lambent humor, and he is steadfast in 
 refusing to conventionalize. Certain facts almost 
 always slighted in novels he is ready to catch : he 
 gives due proportion to Edwin's " black and awful 
 agony " at Hilda's first inexplicable letter. And he 
 reaches a fine candor in his description of old Clay- 
 hanger's death when he says that: " Edwin's distress 
 was shot through and enlightened by his solemn sat- 
 isfaction at the fact that destiny had allotted to him, 
 Edwin, an experience of such profound and over- 
 whelming grandeur." It is probably true that an- 
 other kind of man would not have had so clear a
 
 consciousness of expanded ego. To a man less self- 
 conscious the thought would not occur so readily: 
 " I've had a solemnly satisfying experience." But 
 back of it all is the certain reality that the biggest 
 men want the most consciousness, the most stretch- 
 ing and vivifying experience. Whether the ego is 
 held in that remarkable Staffordshire pride, reserve 
 and protestantism, or merges in sympathies warmer 
 and humbler, the primary egoism of life is the same. 
 That law, known to every candid individualist, re- 
 ceives many exemplifications in this novel of secret, or 
 one might say secretive life. 
 
 But is there such a thing to Bennett, the reason- 
 able and apprehensive Bennett, as love? Certainly 
 his metaphysics of love make a rather grudging con- 
 cession to the poetry of life. " He had no notion 
 that he was in love," he says of Edwin, after Edwin 
 has been piqued by the forthright yet unaccountable 
 and passionate Lessways girl. " He did not know 
 what love was; he had not had sufficient opportunity 
 of learning. Nevertheless the processes of love 
 were at work within him. Silently and magically, 
 by the force of desire and of pride, the refracting 
 glass was being especially ground which would en- 
 able, which would compel him, to see an ideal 
 Hilda when he gazed at the real Hilda. He would 
 not see the real Hilda any more unless some cata- 
 clysm should shatter the glass." There is no non- 
 sense about affinities or such in this midland view 
 of love. But Mr. Bennett does not fail to see the 
 beauty of the real Hilda. And does he not know, 
 doesn't everyone know, that unless the real Hilda 
 could give Edwin the miracle of more and more life 
 there would be several " cataclysms " a day. WQ- 
 
 [ 150]
 
 men have many special and unpleasant jobs to per- 
 form, but that their lovers must see an " ideal" when 
 they gaze at the " real," at the risk of a cataclysm, 
 presupposes too elaborately sustained illusion. The 
 love that needs a magic refracting glass is not the 
 fine love of which Bennett speaks in Clayhanger. 
 
 And on this point of feeling it may be said that 
 Bennett occasionally has a staggering magnanimity. 
 He can see the eloquence of trite hymns as well as 
 the hideous vulgarity of blood-tub ones. He can see 
 the heroism of mediocre people, missed by Edwin 
 Clayhanger in his cruelty of youth, his blind fastidi- 
 ousness, his antagonism to natures less refined. He 
 can see, with a special kindling vision, the beauties 
 of a manufacturing town, the epic quality of such 
 vulgar things as a Sunday school centenary or as the 
 solemn moving of a middle-aged printer from the 
 " shop " into his new house. Mocking as he does 
 at all that is histrionic and self-pitying, Mr. Bennett 
 is quite simply and gayly earnest in his celebration 
 of these common happenings. He loves the solidity, 
 the consequence of it all. He feels that there is no 
 " fake " about a net profit of 339 a year in the busi- 
 ness of job printing. There may be " victimhood " 
 in Edwin's idealizing of Hilda. There is no vic- 
 timhood in Edwin's taking 50 from his pocket to 
 pay off the bailiff whom he finds in possession of 
 Hilda's house. 
 
 Bennett's refusal to ignore facts does not, how- 
 ever, make his prose prosaic. If you go all the 
 way with Clayhanger you will face many unpleasant 
 social realities. Not merely the cruelties of early 
 factory work in England, the chicane of men in poli- 
 tics and of women in domestic warfare; but also the
 
 rudeness, self-consciousness, irresolution of human 
 beings not skilled in the art of life. But there is 
 nothing dyspeptic or luxurious in Mr. Bennett's atti- 
 tude toward ugly fact. He is stoically blithe about 
 all these things not dancing on his Aurelian tight- 
 rope, but able to smile containedly. 
 
 Mr. Bennett understands everybody. It is rather 
 awe-inspiring to have everybody and everything so 
 explained. And yet he is much more entertaining in 
 manner than any equally serious novelist of my ac- 
 quaintance. To deal with him all at once is a little 
 like dealing with quite the most competent, decent, 
 understanding yet unsentimental dentist in the world. 
 We are ashamed to show him that we suffer. We 
 heartily approve of his method. If he is superior to 
 our pain, he who understands it so well and has him- 
 self been so " porcelained " and " filled " and " ex- 
 tracted," why should we too not be superior to it? 
 He is not a prig. His lack of sentimentality is tonic. 
 But at times there is a certain moral tension in read- 
 ing this novel. We would not have the tension re- 
 duced. We can stand it. But we are rather glad 
 when that excellent Big James comes on the scene, 
 one of the few characters whom Mr. Bennett ac- 
 cepts lovingly for his own sake. Then we realize 
 that Mr. Bennett has very little faculty for engaging 
 the reader's affections in his microcosm. One's deep- 
 est emotions, yes. And one's essential admiration. 
 But not the sentiment that in real life we bestow upon 
 people without debating their worthiness. There is 
 possibly more carelessness, more high spirits and ef- 
 fervescence in ordinary life than in this rather tense 
 life of provincial England. 
 
 [ 152]
 
 It is not enough, of course, for a novelist to be 
 merely honest, merely philosophic. Beneath his rea- 
 son there must be something else. Intelligence is 
 wanting unless there is intelligence of the heart. To 
 be merely sane is merely to be in tune with the finite. 
 It is not enough to observe, to enjoy observing, to 
 have marvelous tenacity of memory, lucidity of state- 
 ment, calm and good-natured catholicity, judicial 
 ease in a word, supreme sanity. One must also 
 do reverence, firmly and heroically, to the forces 
 within each of us, even the least, that impel us to 
 act without base calculation. In Mr. Bennett cal- 
 culativeness is fairly deep. There is always a sensi- 
 tive apprehension and forestallment of anti-climax. 
 He watches for anti-climax out of the corner of his 
 eye. He has no wish to release himself in emotion 
 that may make him ridiculous in the eyes of the criti- 
 cal, and he is scarcely capable of that overwhelming 
 sincerity, that unrestrained and miraculously certain 
 confession of self which marks Tolstoy as so great. 
 Yet it must be asserted that Arnold Bennett is not 
 ultimately pragmatic in the sense that Anthony 
 Trollope was pragmatic. In Bennett there is a sus- 
 pension of judgment on certain of his people which 
 permits the affections to have sway. There are oc- 
 casions when reason is transcended and a depth seen 
 in character and in personality which is as illimitable, 
 as satisfying, as the depths of the sky. Before the 
 immutable mysteries, whether of love, of intuition, 
 of sex, of growth and evolution, of decay and disso- 
 lution, this reasonable man is reasonable enough to 
 suspend reason. He stands uncovered and un- 
 ashamed, no longer the ringmaster of bourgeoisie 
 
 [ 153 ]
 
 easy to explain and to ridicule, but the artist who is 
 articulate in a reverence which has no sanction in the 
 ordinary traffic and intercourse of life. 
 
 In suggesting Mr. Bennett's " repercussion " from 
 Bursley, to use one of his own words, very little has 
 been said about his plot. But Clayhanger does not, 
 until Edwin adventures to Brighton in search of the 
 widowed Hilda, depend for much of its interest on 
 fortuitous drama. In Edwin's relations with his 
 father and his quiescent sister, Maggie, in his evo- 
 lution as the friend of the well bred, amusing Or- 
 greaves, there is no definite fictive machination. 
 This does not mean that imagination is lacking. 
 One might as well say that etching is less imagina- 
 tive than a water color. It means only that Mr. 
 Bennett has attempted the most difficult art of all. 
 
 Many readers of Clayhanger will take great 
 pleasure in the author's style. In the beginning 
 especially it is full of beauty, and those pages on the 
 wistful and innocent quality of Edwin as a boy of 
 sixteen are worth reading and re-reading. The 
 scenes between Hilda and Edwin are skillfully han- 
 dled. Hilda's first letter is a miracle. But the 
 touch in the book that struck me most occurs on 
 P a g e 574 in the talk between Edwin and Hilda. It 
 is one of the most wonderful touches I have ever 
 seen in a novel. It proves the man who did it not 
 only a master of craft but a sheer creator. By the 
 mere art of having a known child tell his full name, 
 he gives us all Hilda's pent-up exquisite passion, a 
 communication from the very soul of one of the most 
 inarticulate creatures in fiction. It is because Hilda 
 is so little explained that this touch, so consistent and 
 yet unexpected, has its rare essence as disclosure.
 
 That is the way life unfolds, but life is usually so 
 much more subtle than fiction. 
 
 " The publicans were jubilant and bars sloppy." 
 That kind of acute observation is common in Mr. 
 Bennett, and a delight. In sustained description he 
 is no less clever. He does not surpass anywhere in 
 Clayhanger the account of the execution in The Old 
 Wives' Tale, and occasionally he descends to the 
 Gallic catalogue. But how excellent and fascinating 
 is his description of the beach at Brighton on page 
 583 ! People who have not read the book may say: 
 " No doubt it is fascinating, but what good is it to 
 us to be told that there is a fine description on page 
 583 !" Ah, but that is part of a low design on the 
 reviewer's side to provoke the reader into procuring 
 Clayhanger. At all costs. Clayhanger should be 
 read, and by all kinds of readers. It may not be as 
 good as the novel of Hilda Lessways, which is to 
 follow, nor as good as the third novel of the prom- 
 ised trilogy. But it is the best novel Mr. Bennett 
 has yet written, not forgetting his great novel, The 
 Old Wives' Tale. 
 
 October 21, 1910. 
 
 [ 155]
 
 THESE TWAIN 
 
 Arnold Bennett achieves greatness in 
 his conscientious fiction is in his resolute fidelity to 
 common human beings as they are. In one Ameri- 
 can novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, there was a 
 full anticipation of his method and spirit, but it is 
 difficult to find anywhere else another complete exam- 
 ple. Greatnesses of a different order, greatnesses 
 which cannot be compared, are to be found in Mr. 
 Bennett's contemporaries, but he above the rest has 
 mastered the art of preserving in fiction the color, 
 the tone, the flavor, the odor, the surface, of pro- 
 vincial urban usualness. Such usualness has been 
 approached in varying moods by numerous English 
 and American novelists. Moore and Gissing have 
 attempted it. Frank Norris and Henry Fuller and 
 Edith Wharton have come at it. It has been part 
 of the problem of every modern bourgeois novel. 
 But no one has succeeded as well as Arnold Bennett 
 in giving it comprehension and proportion. What 
 it is, this routine bourgeois life, most of us know 
 only too well. It is immensely that familiarity 
 which breeds disregard. But so powerful and mi- 
 raculous is art that as soon as this life is presented 
 to us by one to whom it has appealed, presented with 
 acute and exquisite fidelity, it becomes poignant and 
 beautiful. No matter .how the thing in itself may 
 estrange us, no matter how we may despise and rage 
 
 These Twain, by Arnold Bennett. Doran, New York. 
 [ 156 ]
 
 at its conditions, we are enabled by the artist to 
 come into full understanding of it, and we are grate- 
 ful to the core of our being for the honesty that re- 
 tained every tedium, every banality, every inade- 
 quacy, for our understanding. To give the sanc- 
 tion of art to the nobility of human nature is pre- 
 cious, but it is no more precious than to bring into 
 the sanction of art the unremitted commonplace. 
 For it proves that there is no such thing as common- 
 place, that where there is truth there must be beauty. 
 And in his account of the married life of Edwin 
 Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways Mr. Bennett has 
 adhered to the veracity that implies beauty. No 
 one who read Clayhanger or Hilda Lessways could 
 suppose that the truth of their marriage would be 
 romantic. It is not romantic. It is, in the conven- 
 tional sense, desperately unromantic and disillusion- 
 ing. But it is full of an assuaging comprehension 
 and an illimitable tenderness. To be tender over 
 unusualness is possible to almost every imagination. 
 Women who tritely accept tuberculosis in negro tene- 
 ments can weep with Stevenson over the lepers. 
 Men who are bored to death by the hardships of 
 scrubwomen can blaze with sympathy for a prosti- 
 tute. Sedentary people of every description are ex- 
 alted at the thought of war. But it needs genuine 
 imagination to remain responsive in despite of repe- 
 tition and custom, and this imagination Mr. Bennett 
 possesses. The younger novelists strive as a rule 
 to present situations that are complicated by some 
 piquant irregularity an illicit lover or two, a bril- 
 liant youth horridly addicted to heroin, a million- 
 aire disciple of the I. W. W., and other exciting ex- 
 hibitions of the orchid in Kansas. But the material 
 
 [ 157 ]
 
 that Mr. Bennett takes is the material of disregarded 
 and unsensational lives, showing by the aid of his 
 devoted imagination the depths in the stuff of which 
 those apparently ordered lives are made. 
 
 To those who met Clayhanger and Hilda Less- 
 ways before, the task of depicting their union seemed 
 formidable. Hilda Lessways was an inexplicable 
 creature, and in marriage she was bound in some de- 
 gree to be explicated. The limitations of Edwin, 
 on the other hand, presaged an attitude as husband 
 which could hardly fail to impede that swinging 
 step. And then there was the child. Could Mr. 
 Bennett domesticate Hilda in the Five Towns with- 
 out losing her magic? Could he sustain without 
 wearying us the patient chronicle of confined and 
 dutiful lives? For some, perhaps, the answer will 
 not be favorable to Mr. Bennett. Admitting, as all 
 must admit, the incomparable resources of his inti- 
 macy, the triumphant fertility of his invention, there 
 will be readers to miss in Mrs. Edwin Clayhanger 
 the impetuosity and glamour of the girl whom Edwin 
 loved from afar. These readers will question 
 whether Hilda is the same Hilda. They will be- 
 lieve that somewhere, somehow, Mr. Bennett's divi- 
 nation has faltered. For my own part, I am not 
 sure. The flagrance which permitted Hilda to devi- 
 ate from Edwin without a word that flagrance 
 which he was once so falsely represented as accept- 
 ing entire seems to disappear into her character 
 unelucidated, and with it some of her salience. She 
 began as mountain torrent. The sweep of her per- 
 sonality in marriage is the sweep of a channeled 
 stream. That a woman of such brilliant and dash- 
 ing gesture should so subside, that she should attune 
 
 [ 158 ]
 
 herself so readily to a marriage so signally without 
 ultimate confidence, is a great deal to concede. 
 That there should be so few attempts at ultimate 
 confidence is, perhaps, too much to concede, espe- 
 cially as the marriage is rather unwittingly concen- 
 trated on the standpoint of the man. But the 
 change seems to me for the most part greatly credi- 
 ble. Hilda's taming, her acquiescence, seems to me 
 very much " like life." 
 
 The fact was that she had married him for the look in 
 his eyes. It was a sad look, and beyond that it could not 
 be described. Also, a little, she had married him for his 
 bright untidy hair, and for that short oblique shake of the 
 head which with him meant a greeting or an affirmative. 
 She had not married him for his sentiments nor for his good- 
 ness of heart. Some points in him she did not like. He 
 had a tendency to colds, and she hated him whenever he had 
 a cold. She often detested his terrible tidiness, though it 
 was a convenient failing. More and more she herself will- 
 fully enjoyed being untidy, as her mother had been untidy. 
 . . . And to think that her mother's untidiness used to annoy 
 her! On the other hand she found pleasure in humoring 
 Edwin's crotchetiness in regard to the details of a meal. 
 She did not like his way of walking, which was ungainly, 
 nor his way of standing, which was infirm. She preferred 
 him to be seated. She could not but regret his irresolution, 
 and his love of ease. However, the look in his eyes was 
 paramount, because she was in love with him. She knew 
 that he was more deeply and helplessly in love with her than 
 she with him, but even she was perhaps tightlier bound than 
 in her pride she thought. 
 
 So far from knowing Hilda's mind about himself, 
 Edwin goes through a long and harrowing process 
 of what is euphemistically known as " adjustment." 
 And the complementary process is necessitated for 
 
 [ 159]
 
 Hilda not so much on account of her ignorance of 
 Edwin's processes, though that is profound, as on 
 account of the exactions of her contrary will. Judged 
 hy some marriages, this conflict may seem unusual. 
 There are persons who inform you that never in 
 their married life have they heard a cross word. 
 But, outside such feastings on angel-cake, sharply and 
 touchingly typical is the Clayhangers' alternation 
 between sacrament and sacrilege. Not by words do 
 the Clayhangers reach comprehension. Hilda is 
 curiously more ready to surrender her body than to 
 surrender her mind. She never foregoes a hard con- 
 sciousness, " it's each for himself in marriage, after 
 all." But apart from this rather unusual articula- 
 tion of the warfare that is marriage, she and Edwin 
 represent with extraordinary accuracy the permuta- 
 tions of allied but rival purposes purposes which 
 can no more be made identical than the weather 
 that favors oats can be made identical with the 
 weather that favors corn. 
 
 One thing I miss in Hilda her sexual conscious- 
 ness outside marriage. One thing I vainly expected 
 in Edwin jealousy. Even of the resurrected 
 George Cannon he is not apprehensively jealous, 
 merely fiercely instinctive that Hilda shall not see 
 him. One thing I wondered about that Hilda 
 and Edwin did not have a child. One thing I dis- 
 liked that Hilda "padded" about her bedroom. 
 But that last is the pathos of things as they are. 
 
 If Hilda and Edwin were not set in the community 
 of the Five Towns, the provincial England of 1892, 
 the peculiar richness and thickness of their veracity 
 would be infinitely less powerful. But Mr. Bennett 
 
 [ 160]
 
 has revived with mastery our sense of that com- 
 munity, and restored it to us in new significance be- 
 cause his perception and his charity are more mature. 
 The death of Auntie Hamps alone appeared to me 
 a lapse in artistic intuition. It was too reminiscent 
 of unforgettable reflections in The Old Wives' Tale. 
 
 Whether Hilda proves less liberating than one ex- 
 pected, or Edwin more frustrated, These Twain 
 completes with great success a drama for which many 
 must have trembled. There are things about These 
 Twain that seem fuzzy the delineation of Tertius 
 Ingpen, for one, and the business capacity of Edwin. 
 But on the whole there is a power and security of 
 characterization that is incontrovertible, and an am- 
 plitude of incident so natural and so significant that 
 the sense of life never departs. Whether one re- 
 gards the amusingly accurate idiom of young 
 George, the picture of Trafalgar Road or of Dart- 
 moor, the flashes of anger or of passion, These 
 Twain is the product of a searching and just sus- 
 ceptibility to the tone and movement of life. 
 
 The gratitude that is due to any real artist is great, 
 but the gratitude due to an artist who adheres to life 
 in its common motivation seems to me exceptional. 
 The very sensitiveness that makes a man an artist 
 tends to confine him to those situations which engage 
 and indulge his sensitiveness. Because the world of 
 gross and urgent action, of common necessity, is hos- 
 tile to the spectator, the spectator easily becomes 
 hostile in return. But Mr. Bennett is a spectator 
 who has retained a beautiful sympathy for motiva- 
 tions and susceptibilities alien to the artistic type. 
 He has transcended interest in " ideas " and pur- 
 
 [ 161 ]
 
 poses to spread human nature before us. It is a 
 triumph of disciplined fictive imagination, a triumph 
 both of artist and man. 
 
 December 4, 1915. 
 
 I 162 ]
 
 GREEN SICKNESS 
 
 1 HERE is a laconic unreasonableness about the 
 ways of creators. It is quite true that the Irish lit- 
 erary revival was beginning to be recognized at pre- 
 cisely the period of Mr. Joyce's novel, and it is also 
 true that his protagonist is a student in Dublin at the 
 hour of the so-called renaissance, a writer and poet 
 and dreamer of dreams. So perverse is life, how- 
 ever, there is scarcely one glimmer in this landscape 
 of the flame which is supposed to have illuminated 
 Dublin between 1890 and 1900. If Stephen Deda- 
 lus, the young man portrayed in this novel, had be- 
 longed to the Irish revival, it would be much easier 
 for outsiders to " place " him. The essential fact 
 is, he belonged to a more characteristic group which 
 this novel alone has incarnated. One almost despairs 
 of conveying it to the person who has conventional- 
 ized his idea of Ireland and modern Irish literature, 
 yet there is a poignant Irish reality to be found in 
 few existing plays and no preexistent novel, pre- 
 sented here with extraordinary candor and beauty 
 and power. 
 
 It is a pleasant assumption of national mythology 
 that the southern Irish are a bright and witty people, 
 effervescent on the sunny side and pugnacious on the 
 other, but quick to act in any event, and frequently 
 charming and carefree and irresponsible. It may be 
 that the Irish exhibit this surface to outsiders and 
 
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. 
 Huebsch, New York. 
 
 [ 163 ]
 
 afford a case of street angel and house devil on a 
 national scale, or it may be that the English landlord 
 has chosen to see the Irishman as funny in the way 
 the Southern gentleman chooses to see the Negro as 
 funny, but, however the assumption got started, it 
 has been fortified by generations of story-tellers and 
 has provided a fair number of popular writers with 
 a living. It is only when a person with the invincible 
 honesty of James Joyce comes to write of Dubliners 
 as they are, a person who is said to be mordant 
 largely because he isn't mushy, that the discrepancy 
 between the people and the myth is apparent. When 
 one says Dubliners, " as they are," one of course is 
 pronouncing a preference. One is simply insisting 
 that the Irishmen of James Joyce are more nearly 
 like one's own estimate of them than the Irishmen 
 of an amiable fabulist like George Birmingham. But 
 there is the whole of the exquisite Portrait of the 
 Artist as a Young Man to substantiate the asser- 
 tion that a proud, cold, critical, suspicious, meticulous 
 human being is infinitely more to be expecte.d among 
 educated Catholic Irishmen than the sort of squireen 
 whom Lever once glorified. If this is a new type in 
 Ireland, come into existence with the recent higher 
 education of Catholics, one can only say that it is 
 now by far the most important type to recognize. 
 Bernard Shaw suggested it in the London Irishman, 
 Larry Doyle, who appeared in John Bull's Other 
 Island, but the main character of the present novel 
 is much more subtly inflected and individualized 
 than Larry Doyle, and is only said to belong to a 
 type to intimate that his general mode is charac- 
 teristic. 
 
 Mr. Joyce's power is not shown in any special in- 
 [ 164]
 
 ventiveness. A reader of novels will see at once that 
 he has never even thought of " plot " in the ordinary 
 sense, or considered the advantage or importance 
 of consulting the preferences of his reader. The 
 thing he writes about is the thing he knows best, him- 
 self, himself at boarding school and university, and 
 any radical variation on the actual terms of that 
 piercing knowledge he has declined to attempt. He 
 has sought above everything to reveal those circum- 
 stances of his life which had poignancy, and the firm- 
 est claim on him to being written was not that a 
 thing should be amenable to his intentions as a so- 
 phisticated novelist, but that a thing should have com- 
 plete personal validity. It did not weigh with him 
 at any moment that certain phrases or certain inci- 
 dents would be intensely repugnant to some readers. 
 Was the phrase interwoven with experience? Was 
 the incident part of the fabric of life? He asked 
 this searchingly, and asked no more. It is not even 
 likely that he made inquiry why out of all that he 
 could write, he selected particularly to reveal details 
 that seldom find expression. Had he made the in- 
 quiry he might well have answered that the mere 
 consciousness of silence is an incitement to expres- 
 sion, that expression is the only vengeance a mortal 
 can take on the restrictions to which he finds him- 
 self subject. If others submit to those restrictions 
 it is their own affair. To have the truth one must 
 have a man's revelation of that which was really sig- 
 nificant to himself. 
 
 Considering that this portrait is concluded before 
 its subject leaves college one may gather that the 
 really significant relations are familial and religious, 
 and that the adjustment is between a critical spirit 
 
 [ 165 ]
 
 and its environment. What gives its intensity to the 
 portrait is the art Mr. Joyce has mastered of com- 
 municating the incidents of Stephen's career through 
 the emotions they excited in him. We do not per- 
 ceive Stephen's father and mother by description. 
 We get them by the ebb and flood of Stephen's feel- 
 ing, and while there are many passages of singularly 
 lifelike conversation such, for example, as the 
 wrangle about Parnell that ruined the Christmas din- 
 ner or the stale banter that enunciated the father's 
 return to Cork the viridity is in Stephen's soul. 
 " Stephen watched the three glasses being raised 
 from the counter as his father and his two cronies 
 drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of 
 fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. 
 His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly 
 on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a 
 moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred 
 in him as it had stirred in them. He had known 
 neither the pleasures of companionship with others 
 nor the vigor of rude male health nor filial piety. 
 Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel 
 and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost 
 and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he 
 was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the 
 
 moon." 
 
 It is his mortal sin of masturbation that preys most 
 terribly on this youth, and he suffers all the blasting 
 isolation which is created by the sense of sin in con- 
 nection with it. Eventually he makes a " retreat " 
 he is being educated by the Jesuits and goes to 
 confession and for a time knows religious happiness. 
 The explicitness of this experience is more telling 
 than the veiled account of sexual stupidity in Samuel 
 
 [ 166]
 
 Butler's Way of All Flesh, and Mr. Joyce is more 
 successful that Samuel Butler in making religious be- 
 lief seem real. The efforts of a Jesuit Father to 
 suggest a religious vocation to Stephen are the begin- 
 ning of the end of his religion. In " lucid, supple, 
 periodic prose " Mr. Joyce describes the transition 
 from devotional life and a private specializing in 
 mortification to the acceptance of nature and the 
 earth. " His soul had arisen from the grave of boy- 
 hood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes ! Yes ! Yes I 
 He would create proudly out of the freedom and 
 power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name 
 he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beauti- 
 ful, impalpable, imperishable." The u Yes ! Yesl 
 Yes ! " gives that touch of intense youthfulness which 
 haunts the entire book, even though Mr. Joyce can 
 be so superb in flaunting Aristotle and Aquinas. 
 
 The last chapter of the portrait gives one the 
 esprit of the Catholic nationalist students in Uni- 
 versity College. It is a marvelous version of scur- 
 rilous, supercilious, callow youth. Mr. Joyce's sub- 
 ject is not in sympathy with the buzzing internation- 
 alist any more than with the arcane Irishman whom 
 he compares to Ireland, " a batlike soul waking to 
 the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy 
 and loneliness." Stephen walks by himself, disdain- 
 ful and bitter, in love and not in love, a poet at dawn 
 and a sneerer at sunset, cold exile of " this stinking 
 dunghill of a world." 
 
 A novel in which a sensitive, critical young man 
 is completely expressed as he is can scarcely be ex- 
 pected to be pleasant. A Portrait of the Artist as 
 a Young Man is not entirely pleasant. But it has 
 su.cn beauty, such love of beauty, such intensity of 
 
 [ 167 ]
 
 feeling, such pathos, such candor, it goes beyond any- 
 thing in English that reveals the inevitable malaise 
 of serious youth. Mr. Joyce has a peculiar nar- 
 rative method, and he would have made things 
 clearer if he had adopted H. G. Wells's scheme of 
 giving a paragraphed section to each episode. As 
 the book is now arranged, it requires some imagina- 
 tion on the part of the reader. The Catholic " re- 
 treat " also demands attentiveness, it is reported 
 with such acrimonious zeal. But no one who has 
 any conception of the Russian-like frustrations and 
 pessimisms of the thin-skinned and fine-grained Irish- 
 man, from early boarding school onward, can miss 
 the tenacious fidelity of James Joyce. He has made 
 a rare effort to transcend every literary convention 
 as to his race and creed, and he has had high success. 
 Many people will furiously resent his candor, 
 whether about religion or nationalism or sex. But 
 candor is nobility in this instance. 
 
 March 3, 191 J. 
 
 [ 168 ]
 
 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS, 4
 
 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 1 HERE is a conspiracy among people who have 
 read great books to make the account of them dis- 
 mally impressive. People urge you to read a mas- 
 terpiece in the same way that they urge you to join 
 the City Club or subscribe to the Survey. They want 
 to do you good. For years people have told me to 
 read War and Peace. By Tolstoy. " It's stupen- 
 dous," they've said, " it takes you a month to read 
 it three large volumes. It has more characters 
 in it than you can possibly remember. It's immense. 
 It is a panorama of the Napoleonic wars, of the in- 
 vasion of Russia and the retreat from Moscow. It 
 explodes Napoleon. It's the greatest novel ever 
 written." 
 
 This to me is the bare and glistening hook. I 
 want bait. There may be voracious natures that 
 crave three-volume panoramic novels. I envy such, 
 but do not seek to emulate them. And I avoid their 
 suggestions. 
 
 But this tone is exactly the official tone adopted 
 by Vicomte de Vogue about War and Peace. It 
 " presents us," he says solemnly, " with a complete 
 tableau of Russian society during the great Na- 
 poleonic wars from 1805 to 1815. The stage is 
 immense and the actors are innumerable; among 
 them are three emperors with their ministers, their 
 marshals, and their generals, and a countless ret- 
 
 War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. Dutton, New York.
 
 Inue of minor officers, soldiers, nobles and peasants. 
 We are transported by turns from the salons of St. 
 Petersburg to the camps of war, from Moscow to 
 the country districts. And all these diverse and 
 varied scenes are joined together with a controlling 
 purpose that brings everything into harmony. Each 
 one of the prolonged series of constantly changing 
 tableaux is of remarkable beauty and palpitating with 
 life. The interminable series of incidents, of por- 
 traits, of reflections which the author presents to us, 
 unrolls itself around a few fictitious personages; but 
 the true hero of the story is Russia in her desperate 
 struggle against the foreigner, and the real person- 
 ages, Alexander, Napoleon, Koutouzof, Speransky, 
 occupy almost as prominent a position as the imag- 
 inary ones." 
 
 The pivot is indeed Russia. That is a grave and 
 genuine observation. But now that I have read War 
 and Peace my heart rebels against the whole tone in 
 which this novel is discussed. Emperors, marshals, 
 ministers, generals! It is not for these that Tolstoy 
 wrote this great, humane, wise, tender book. Some- 
 where near the middle of it these words about his 
 War occur: " It happened because it was bound to 
 happen; and so it came to pass that some millions of 
 men, ignoring all common sense and human feeling, 
 started to march eastward to slaughter their fellow- 
 creatures, just as, some centuries before, unnumbered 
 swarms had rushed down on the west, killing all in 
 their way." It is of this vast untoward flood of war 
 that Tolstoy was thinking, this torrent in which the 
 men and women of his story are caught, some to ride, 
 some to spin, some to struggle, some to drown. And 
 although he stands for Russia, his country, in the 
 
 [ 172 ]
 
 invasion, no military genius is the hero of his story. 
 There are no heroes, only human beings, giving 
 their impress to events or taking their impress from 
 them; and "the heart of kings is in the hand of 
 God." 
 
 The tumult of Austerlitz, Friedland, Borodino, is 
 to be found in War and Peace. Tolstoy has dram- 
 atized each battle by focussing it at one point after 
 another, and in one person after another persons 
 we already know. We stand on the bridge as it is 
 being shelled. We see the army stream by. We 
 charge with young Rostow's squadron across " the 
 gulf of terror." We run with him on foot from the 
 vicious hook-nosed Frenchman, run in fear. With 
 Bolkonsky we rage at the moment of retreat, seize 
 the standard and advance, fall, open eyes on " the 
 deep, far away sky above." With Nicholas we at- 
 tack without orders, wince at killing and are deco- 
 rated. With Tonchine we are so insane as not to 
 fall back, we save the day with one battery, and are 
 reprimanded for losing two guns. With Peter we 
 are civilians wandering aimlessly on the battlefield, 
 ending up behind the breastwork where the fighting 
 is thickest. With Bolkonsky again we stand under 
 fire on that fatal day when the French got the range 
 of the reserve. 
 
 'Good God! what has happened? In the 
 stomach? Then he is done for! ' said the officers. 
 
 * It actually grazed my ear ! ' said the aide-de- 
 camp." 
 
 And with Petia, too, the youngster, we spend that 
 last wonderful night on which he listens to his or- 
 chestra playing an unknown beautiful hymn. 
 
 But it is not this multiplicity of impressions, this 
 [ 173 ]
 
 incredible resource and diversity, which stands out 
 as the boon of War and Peace. Other titanic novel- 
 ists have assembled details with energy and piled up 
 effects only a little" less tremendous. Zola could do 
 it, Balzac, Dostoevsky. It is something else which 
 distinguishes War and Peace and gives it its indis- 
 putable glory. As one's mind roams back over the 
 thronging events, one is for the moment bewildered. 
 There is no order in them and no end to them. But 
 whether one begins to reflect on Natacha or Bol- 
 konsky or Maria or Peter; whether it is the death of 
 Peter's sire or the dreadful affair between Natacha 
 and Anatole, or Maria's relations with her tyran- 
 nical father, or the sad unearthly estrangements of 
 Bolkonsky before he died; whether it is the grand 
 barbaric hunt or the magnificent sleigh-ride or Nata- 
 cha's ball or Peter's initiation into freemasonry or 
 his duel or his imprisonment and imminent execution 
 whatever one of these ramified scenes comes to 
 mind, it is instinct with the great spirit of Tolstoy. 
 Like a full and equable light he reveals every inflec- 
 tion and contour. Keen to expose as well as to dis- 
 play, he has for peace as well as war the same height- 
 ened faculties, the same depths of sympathy, the 
 same psychological zeal. When he philosophizes 
 fatalistically about war one may decline to follow 
 him. When he passes judgment on Napoleon one 
 may hesitate to accept him. But when he sets afoot 
 any encounter between man and man, or man and 
 woman, or man and nature, he is a master in dramatic 
 intensity, in beauty, in understanding, in that clean- 
 ness and firmness and economy of line which comes 
 only with a genius for sincerity. 
 
 Natacha is the most vibrant creature in War and 
 [ 174]
 
 Peace. It is the triumph of Tolstoy's art that she 
 is carried from saucy childhood to maternal ampli- 
 tude and successfully identified in every process of 
 that change. No torrent that ever ran from high 
 hills to a smooth union with the sea was more per- 
 fectly defined in its movements. The same is true 
 of Maria, perhaps, a stream that rises on a plateau, 
 but the person of Natacha is so charming that she 
 arrests one for her own sake. Take her at sixteen, 
 cajoling her mother: 
 
 " Come, mamma, do not laugh so; the bed shakes! You 
 are just like me; you laugh as easily as I do. Wait a min- 
 ute," and taking her mother's hand again she went on with 
 her fortune-telling: "June, July and August mamma, 
 he is desperately in love; do you not think so? was any 
 one ever so much in love with you ? And he is nice very 
 nice ! Only not quite to my taste ; straight and narrow like 
 the tall clock in the dining room. Do you not understand? 
 quite narrow and pale gray. . . ." 
 
 "What nonsense!" 
 
 " Why don't you understand ? Nicholas would under- 
 stand exactly. Now Besoukhow is blue, dark blue and red ; 
 and he makes me think of a square thing. . . ." 
 
 " I believe you are flirting with him too . . ." and again 
 the countess could not help laughing. 
 
 And then see her with Prince Andrew Bolkonsky. 
 He had kept their marriage waiting, in deference 
 to his father. On the eve of his return she had 
 fallen in love with an adventurer. Bolkonsky never 
 saw her again until he was dying. 
 
 " Forgive me," she murmured, looking up, " Forgive 
 me." 
 
 " I love you," he said. 
 " Forgive me." 
 
 I 175 ]
 
 "What have I to forgive?" 
 
 " Forgive me for what I did," said Natacha, in a low 
 voice, and with a painful effort. 
 
 " I love you better than I did before," replied Prince 
 Andrew, lifting her head to look in her eyes, which were 
 timidly fixed on his, swimming with tears of joy, but lumi- 
 nous with love and pity. Her pale, thin features, and lips 
 swollen with crying, had, at this moment, no trace of 
 beauty; but Prince Andrew saw nothing but her beautiful 
 eyes radiant through tears. 
 
 In one sense it is the story which makes a novel 
 worth reading, meaning by the story the calculated 
 progress of events. There is that famous formula, 
 the good story well told. But it is forlorn to seek 
 in the story all by itself, no matter how thrilling, 
 the explanation of the peculiar joy which is bestowed 
 by a work of art. What a man has to tell is signifi- 
 cant. How well he tells it, is also significant. More 
 significant than either is the spirit with which he is 
 endowed. By what sensitive and mysterious process 
 this spirit of the creator steals into a narrative, gives 
 it his livingness, no one has yet defined. But it is 
 this subtle presence, this communication through nar- 
 rative of a being that has conceived the world afresh, 
 which makes the novel an artistic form. Persons 
 who tell you that War and Peace has for its subject- 
 matter the fate of Russia in the wars a hundred years 
 ago are sticking to an important fact. But there is 
 more in it than their honest reports can tell you. 
 There is a great testimony to life generously and 
 deeply experienced; to mankind's emotions in peace 
 or strife; to the vast variety of human nature that 
 this one man has embraced and transmuted. There 
 is in this miraculous imaginative organism, as in any 
 
 [ 176]
 
 other organism, life and the impulse of life. There 
 is something that belongs only to life itself. 
 is a beauty and a reality indefinable. 
 
 September 30, 1916. 
 
 I 177 ]
 
 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 
 
 IN the great Russian novels there is a naive, an 
 extraordinarily fresh personal impression of life. 
 Not only do the Russians conceive specific impres- 
 sions with the clarity of children, but they have the 
 gift of placing a true value on their emotions. The 
 moment does indeed pass when they stand on the 
 threshold, tremulous and eager, lips parted, cheeks 
 flushed, heart beating high. But whether life leaves 
 them reverent or bitter, deeply humble or sadly ironi- 
 cal, it has given them treasured and ineradicable 
 memories. And not only do the great interpreters 
 of Russian life seem to evaluate their experience ac- 
 cording to the dreams and expectations of youth, but 
 they never appear to be drained of their human sym- 
 pathies. There is no great Russian novel that is not 
 instinct with the brotherhood of man. 
 
 In our own novels there is often a sense of the 
 brotherhood of man, but life in the west is provided 
 with so many checks and balances that to be real 
 (that is, to live at first hand) is almost impossible, 
 and human sympathies are insulated by a tame and 
 unemotional religion and insistence on property dis- 
 tinctions, a social externality, and especially by the 
 Anglo-Saxon tendency to compromise and tempor- 
 ize. As a theory the brotherhood of man survives. 
 In practice we find ourselves safer and more com- 
 fortable by avoiding the consequences of such a the- 
 
 Crime and Punishment, by Fedor Dostoevsky. Button, New York. 
 [ 178 ]
 
 ory. The result is a fiction which has excellencies of 
 its own, but which, compared with Russian, is cribbed 
 and cabined. 
 
 In Crime and Punishment the horizontal partitions 
 of society are pulled out, as well as the vertical, and 
 we observe with Dostoevsky the fate of a man, 
 wretchedly poor, who contemplates, commits and ex- 
 piates the crime of murder. In writing of Raskol- 
 nikov, Dostoevsky has a singularly different manner 
 from Tolstoy. Tolstoy has been called crazy, but 
 there never was a writer who had such a clear, such 
 a reasonable view of people. He delights to show 
 us his hero as he wakes in the morning in bed, and 
 to depict each move as the hero bathes and shaves 
 and puts on one garment after another, and to tell 
 us exactly how much toast and how much coffee he 
 took for breakfast, and how he read the morning 
 paper, and agreed or disagreed with the editorials, 
 one by one. By such details of daily life, familiar 
 to every man and interesting for the most personal 
 reasons, Tolstoy gets our confidence. We know 
 these things to be true. We have felt them and seen 
 them, and we marvel at the insight of this man who 
 interprets us to ourselves. When it comes to the less 
 familiar events, we are already persuaded of Tol- 
 stoy's immense good sense and wisdom (which cer- 
 tainly exists) and he has taken the best way to over- 
 whelm us by his conclusions. Nothing at all of this 
 large, paternal, almost omniscient feeling is com- 
 municated by Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky does not 
 surround his story with the atmosphere of familiar- 
 ity and common sense. He does not appear to be 
 saying: This you know. On the contrary, his novel 
 is bathed in sepulchral blackness, and his murderer 
 
 [ 179 ]
 
 moves about the stage in a single intense spot of 
 light. There is no familiarity about the scene, but 
 an exceptional set of circumstances, presented with 
 an uncanny sense of their morbidity. Each defini- 
 tion of Raskolnikov's state of mind insists upon his 
 fever and his monomania. It is actually a clinic 
 a clinic, however, of such extraordinary realism that 
 it is very nearly insupportable. 
 
 It is the convention among Anglo-Saxons to desist 
 when a situation becomes too intense, and to convert 
 the tale of horror into palpable fiction a game at 
 horror. There is no game about Crime and Pun- 
 ishment. The pool of blood into which Raskolnikov 
 accidentally steps after he has murdered the old 
 money-lender is the most real thing one can conceive. 
 One does not see that blood. But one feels Ras- 
 kolnikov's ever present sense of it. One feels his 
 terror lest he step in it, or get blood on his clothes. 
 One realizes his chilled frenzy as he washes his 
 hands, and his renewed horror as he discovers that 
 the blood has got on his boots. It is not grewsome 
 exactly. It is simply real. And Raskolnikov's sub- 
 sequent delirium affects one as a nightmare. To 
 wake him up, to help him remove the traces of blood, 
 to settle the uncertainty of his concealments, is an 
 unceasing impulse. And to have Raskolnikov 511 in 
 the novel is worse than having an invalid in the 
 house, he is so much more helpless and incapable of 
 help than a human invalid could be. It is " only a 
 book " of course. But it is a book that obsesses its 
 reader night and day. The crime of Raskolnikov 
 stains one's own conscience. Unbearably does Dos- 
 toevsky keep up the suspense and agony, and it is 
 only after passing through the worst vicissitudes of 
 
 [ 180 ]
 
 a guilty criminal that a partial and scrupulously hon- 
 est relief is granted. 
 
 Had Raskolnikov had any moral justification for 
 his crime, or been a defenseless victim of society, this 
 book would have few elements of horror. But Ras- 
 kolnikov is an " intellectual." His crime is the out- 
 come of a monomania. Although a destitute stu- 
 dent, anxious to help the mother and sister he loves, 
 the motives of his crime are utterly insufficient to 
 support it. It is morbidity, diseased intellectualism, 
 which makes the plan possible. And the thing that 
 gives the book its peculiar hold on the imagination 
 is the shocking lucidity of Raskolnikov. If he were 
 remorseful, the centre of one's interests would be his 
 moral fate. But for the first 400 pages one lives 
 with the man in the midst of exterior circumstances. 
 It is agony over his possible detection that is ex- 
 citing. One watches Raskolnikov in horrible breath- 
 less suspense as one might watch a crazy man clam- 
 ber up the Flatiron building, hand on hand. And 
 where Dostoevsky has surpassed all other masters of 
 horror is in communicating Raskolnikov's own trepi- 
 dations, as well as the natural dangers of his posi- 
 tion. The spot light in which Raskolnikov moves 
 through real and imaginary dangers penetrates his 
 brain. We see him as others see him, and also as 
 he sees himself. 
 
 If the interest of Raskolnikov's situation were 
 confined to its dangers, Crime and Punishment would 
 be essentially melodrama. Where Dostoevsky con- 
 verts it from melodrama is in the sympathy with 
 which he depicts the murderer's environment. There 
 is a curious quality in Dostoevsky's recital. It has 
 at times the fitful, outrageous character of a dream, 
 
 [ 181 ]
 
 But when the situation is brought into focus, and 
 Dostoevsky escapes his Dickens-like tendency to draw 
 grotesques and freaks (increased so much by his 
 dwelling on neurasthenic and hallucinatory factors), 
 he induces the reader to share his exalted sympathy 
 for misfortune and wretchedness. During the period 
 when Raskolnikov is brooding over his plan, he wan- 
 ders into a filthy saloon, where he is joined by a 
 fatuous drunkard. Into Raskolnikov's ears the 
 drunkard pours all his woes. It is the kind of story 
 almost everyone has heard, but Dostoevsky gives it 
 a new human significance. To his raucous tenement 
 home Raskolnikov accompanies the drunkard, and 
 there he meets the consumptive Catherine Ivanovna, 
 whose blows but increase the humility of the drunken 
 husband. It is not De Morgan's sentimentalism or 
 Tolstoy's religious spirit that pervades this scene, but 
 an understanding at once more caustic and more in- 
 timately sympathetic. Catherine Ivanovna is a por- 
 trait full of wry humor, and Sonia, from under whose 
 hat appeared " a poor little wan and frightened coun- 
 tenance," is a character beautifully and sublimely 
 conceived. It is she who has taken the yellow ticket 
 at the behest of Catherine Ivanovna, and it is to her 
 that Raskolnikov eventually unburdens his soul. 
 Were the irony, the fantastic humor, of these slums 
 less clearly perceived, the pathos of Sonia could not 
 deeply touch us. But Dostoevsky has no brief for 
 the miserable. And it is characteristic that when he 
 makes Raskolnikov empty his pockets for the drunk- 
 ard's home he lets it be considered by one a noble 
 impulse, and by another a pathological sympathy, an 
 aberration. 
 
 The most moving scene in the book is that in which 
 [ 182 ]
 
 Raskolnikov comes for the first time out of the mor- 
 bid and furtive mood in which he has tortured his 
 mother and sister, and visits Sonia in her squalid 
 room. Here the desire to confess himself is quali- 
 fied by his abnormal fear that Sonia is mad. At last, 
 however, her heartbroken faith that God will save 
 Catherine Ivanovna leads to his own sincere and bit- 
 ter outcry: "There may be no God." Here Sonia 
 breaks down. " Several minutes went by whilst he 
 continued his tramp, not noticing her. Suddenly he 
 approached her. His eyes gleamed, his lips trem- 
 bled, and, resting his two hands on her shoulders, 
 he cast an angry look on this face bathed in tears. 
 In a moment he bent downwards, kissing the girl's 
 feet. She started back frightened, as she would have 
 done from a madman. For Raskolnikov's face this 
 moment was that of one. 
 
 "'What are you doing? And to me?' stam- 
 mered Sonia, growing pale with sorrow-smitten 
 heart. 
 
 " Upon this he rose. * I did not bow to you per- 
 sonally, but to suffering humanity in your person.' ' 
 
 It is in this scene that Sonia reads to Raskolnikov 
 that passage from the Testament in which faith 
 maketh a man whole. And it is here Sonia declares 
 from her heart the need for a murderer to repent. 
 Long after, when Raskolnikov is on his way to the 
 police to give himself up, he remembers, still hard- 
 hearted, the words of Sonia. 
 
 Having got to the centre of the place, the young man 
 suddenly recalled Sonia's words: "Go to some public 
 place, bow to the crowd, kiss the earth you have soiled by 
 your sin, and say in a loud voice, in the presence of everyone: 
 I am a murderer." At the recollection of this he trembled 
 
 [ '83 ]
 
 in every limb. The anguish of the last few days had hard- 
 ened his heart to such an extent that he felt satisfied to find 
 himself yet open to feelings of another kind, and gave him- 
 self entirely up to this one. Sincere sorrow overpowered 
 him, his eyes filled with tears. He knelt in the very middle 
 of the place, bowed earthwards, and joyfully kissed the miry 
 ground. After having risen he knelt down once more. 
 
 " There's a fellow who has got a tile loose," observed a 
 lad standing by. This observation was received with shouts 
 and laughter. . . . On seeing himself the object of general 
 attention, Raskolnikov lost his self-possession somewhat, and 
 the words " I have killed," which he had on the tip of his 
 tongue, died away. 
 
 Only Dostoevsky could have written this, an irony 
 which, unlike Anatole France's, is not a smile at hu- 
 manity, but a grave understanding. 
 
 The fact that Crime and Punishment has a moral 
 for those animalculae who are endued only with in- 
 tellect and will is one of its unexpected disclosures. 
 Not till half the book is read is the Superman idea 
 introduced. But the moral of Crime and Punish- 
 ment would be nothing if it were not a novel at once 
 fascinating and horrifying. That horror could so 
 fascinate, or fascination be so horrible, is one of the 
 wonders of the written word. 
 
 To conclude everything as to Dostoevsky from 
 this one novel would be fatuous, but it is at least pos- 
 sible to recognize a master, one of the few great 
 interpreters of man. On the borderland Dostoev- 
 sky stands, the borderland between sanity and in- 
 sanity, between poverty and crime, between student 
 life and the underworld. .There, where men and 
 women flash from one side to the other in the phan- 
 tasmagoria of passion and necessity, Dostoevsky 
 
 [ 184]
 
 watches with intensity and yet with consummate pa- 
 tience. He has no illusions and no useless pity. He 
 attempts no easy pathos. The Crime, at which so 
 many sympathies halt and hearts begin to harden, 
 Dostoevsky accepts without protest. It is the Pun- 
 ishment that awakens his soul, and as the flame of 
 the inner life rises and falls one can feel the heart 
 of Dostoevsky beat quicker, believing as he does in 
 the forces that heal as well as wound. 
 
 June 30, 1911. 
 
 [ 185 ]
 
 DRAMA AND THE THEATRE, i
 
 JOHN SYNGE 
 
 1 HE monosyllable Synge will convey little to many 
 American readers. In Dublin, where the dramatist 
 died last March, the name is known to every one. 
 In London, where his plays were acted frequently, it 
 is known at least to the cultivated minority. In 
 Paris, where Synge invited his soul on the slopes 
 where so many lose their souls, perhaps a few do 
 know his name to-day. It was uttered, however 
 strangely, in Prague, where one of his shorter plays 
 was given. On Inishmaan and Aranmor, the islets 
 that are separated from Connemara by racing seas, 
 the fishermen will still think of the man they called 
 John, who now lies in his black coffin, never to talk 
 to them again in that low rapid voice of his, or laugh 
 through his closed teeth, or watch in his silent way 
 with fine steady gaze as they went on with their manly 
 work, or spoke to him of things he loved to hear, 
 their wills and their desires, and their colored 
 dreams. 
 
 Synge was not 38 when he died. Up to 1903 he 
 was unknown as a writer except by his friend Yeats. 
 In that year his first play was acted in Dublin, and 
 he had definitely left Paris, where Yeats had met 
 him and drawn him to thinking of the Gaelic he had 
 forgotten, and the Irish imagination he was starving. 
 Yeats served letters the day he turned Synge west. 
 
 Poems and Translations, by John Synge. Luce, Boston. 
 [ I8 9 ]
 
 It makes one wince to think of the other genius that 
 has kept astray in baffling forests of life, where 
 the branches conceal the stars. 
 
 Not a few things will work against the proper un- 
 derstanding of Synge here in America. In the first 
 place his dramas are not published in America. 
 Next he wrote solely of the Irish people. Again his 
 English is as strange as it is beautiful. Again he has 
 been blasphemed by stupid patriots, and by priests 
 who know not beauty and pervert truth. Finally, 
 a little clique is likely to appropriate him, to refer to 
 him darkly and ecstatically, and to make of him a 
 god for their jealous devotion. 
 
 In spite of these things, I believe that Synge's 
 fame will spread wherever English is spoken. Men 
 going on long journeys will slip into their satchel 
 a book of Synge's that, loving, they cannot relinquish. 
 I believe that Ireland, which spat upon Synge while 
 he lived, will exalt him at last as she has exalted 
 others who loved her without being able to senti- 
 mentalize. And I am sure also that his five dramas 
 will come to be more and more familiar in the the- 
 atre, as more and more there are managers who 
 value their audiences, and audiences who value them- 
 selves. 
 
 While glancing at the poems and translations by 
 Synge, his dramas may be recalled. The common 
 lingo of book reviewing is not worthy of these joy- 
 ous and salty plays. We are accustomed to un- 
 measured praise of the Elizabethans. Well, here 
 in our own time is a man who writes English as 
 fresh, as unruly, as gorgeously rhetorical, as fiercely 
 dramatic, as the miraculous English of the renais- 
 sance. Leaf came before bloom, no doubt. There 
 
 [ 190 ]
 
 is gray as well as cardinal red in the five dramas of 
 Synge. But to recede from his work and look back 
 upon it is to behold a blaze of color, prose that stands 
 out first in separate sharp patches, like an impres- 
 sionist masterpiece, and then composes, composes dis- 
 creetly, into hues not all brilliant, but tender and 
 vague and mournful, the mist creeping over the hills 
 and the dusk drooping on the sea. 
 
 If one has an impression of color in thinking of 
 The Playboy, The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker's 
 Wedding, The Well of the Saints, it is because a 
 primal delight is in them all, a delight of image, of 
 figure, of poetry. Sounds the sound of a woman's 
 low voice, the cry of the heron, the roaring of the 
 rain might as well be in one's mind, or touch 
 waves of warmth from the earth in spring, the soft 
 air of evening or the kiss of a sweet mouth. What- 
 ever the impression Synge leaves, it is beautifully 
 sensuous, not merely in the romantic vision he sum- 
 mons, but more contagiously in his rhythms, his joy- 
 ous or plaintive evocation. 
 
 Mr. Yeats speaks of the " astringent joy and hard- 
 ness that was in all he did," and again of his " hunger 
 for harsh facts, for ugly surprising things, for all 
 that defies our hope." And he thinks of that little 
 poem in which Synge, after looking at one of A. E.'s 
 pictures, The Passing of the Shee, was " repelled by 
 the contemplation of a beauty too far from life to 
 appease his mood " : 
 
 Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand, 
 Ye plumed yet skinny Shee, 
 That poets played with hand in hand 
 To learn their ecstasy. 
 
 [ 191 3
 
 We'll stretch in Red Dan Sally's ditch, 
 And drink in Tubber fair, 
 Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch 
 The badger or the hare. 
 
 Synge did, indeed, find little reality for himself in 
 the dim goddesses of Yeats, les belles dames sans 
 merci. Like Yeats, he felt the wrong of unsightly 
 things, and, like Yeats, he hated the timid, the banal 
 and the sordid life of our modern bourgeoisie. But 
 Synge's passionate desire was for poetry in the life 
 about him, poetry that he could feel and hear 
 and see. Not by a seclusion and exaltation of his 
 nature could he be satisfied, but by the energetic dis- 
 charge of his thought, the expression of his exuber- 
 ant fantasy, the reaction in drama of all the emotions 
 which flourish in man, never to be admonished by 
 the moralist in view, but to be proportioned by irony, 
 by satire, by the ringing laughter of Rabelais. 
 
 In the preface to The Playboy, speaking of reality, 
 " which is the root of all poetry," Synge made this 
 significant criticism: 
 
 In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is 
 found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two 
 elaborate books that are far away from the profound and 
 common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarme 
 and Huysmans producing this literature; and, on the other, 
 Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless 
 and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and 
 must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern 
 drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false 
 joy of the musical comedy that has been given them in place 
 of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in 
 reality. 
 
 [ 193 ]
 
 Now, while Synge believed that " there is no one 
 timber that has not strong roots among the clay 
 and worms," this does not seem to me to imply that 
 he hungered for harsh facts. Ibsen and Zola, whose 
 words were surely not pallid, did hunger for harsh 
 facts with the hunger that drove other men to locusts 
 and wild honey. But Synge was a romantic. He 
 believed in " what is superb and wild in reality." 
 Being at the opposite pole to the fat and rosy Irish- 
 man of the Thomas Moore order, he could not in- 
 clude anything in his romance that did not suffer his 
 brooding imagination and his personal experience. 
 When he sang of queens, of Etain, Helen, Maeve 
 and Fand, " Queens of Sheba, Meath and Con- 
 naught," it was to turn to the woman he loved, 
 
 saying: 
 
 i 
 
 " Yet these are rotten I ask their pardon 
 And we've the sun on rock or garden, 
 These are rotten, so you're the queen 
 Of all are living, or have been." 
 
 Is this mordant? On the contrary, it is fiercely 
 vigorous and healthy. Synge knew the irony of fate, 
 the falsity of dreams, the vanity of vanities. Yet 
 this knowledge disgusted him not with life, but with 
 the curmudgeons of life; and he took his joy not 
 in belaboring fate or annulling dreams, but in ob- 
 serving with frank delight or frank stoicism the 
 dance of life, merry, grotesque or mournful, accord- 
 ing to the music of circumstance. 
 
 Synge said once that the drama, like the symphony, 
 does not teach or prove anything. And contemn- 
 ing the plays that have one sort of propaganda or 
 another, he spoke joyously of the best plays of Ben 
 
 [ 193 ]
 
 Jonson and Moliere, that " can no more go out of 
 fashion than the blackberries on the hedges." Be- 
 ing so little anxious to prescribe for the revolution 
 in the soul of man, Synge is in danger of being 
 underestimated by people who expect drama to be a 
 " criticism of life," and want to leave the theatre 
 saying: " And the moral of that is . . ." He takes 
 no account of such shocking morality, such prurient 
 idealism. 
 
 Yet I do not feel that there is anything unreal, or 
 unconcerned about the women and men in Synge's 
 plays. In their lives, as in yours and mine, there 
 are hard material conditions, and if they were wise 
 with the wisdom of this " age of reasons and pur- 
 poses " they would give us pointers on the conserva- 
 tion of national resources, the municipalization of 
 street railways, the sterilization of habitual crim- 
 inals. But Synge has found little of wild and superb 
 reality in these estimable topics. Instead, he writes 
 a little play like The Shadow of the Glen that has 
 not an opinion in it, nor a purpose in it, nothing but 
 the emotions of everyday living, the thoughts of a 
 woman on growing old, the gray lonesome thoughts 
 of a fine woman married to a wheezy old man, the 
 angry and painful thoughts of the old man, the words 
 of a callow lover who thinks he owns the woman, 
 the words of a tramp who paints for her, in words 
 that sing with, the beauty and illusion of freedom, 
 the " grand evening " of the happy wanderer, and 
 the fine songs she'll be hearing when the sun 
 goes up. 
 
 You may read that play twenty times, and you will 
 find that it wears like gold. It is a marvelous play, 
 with fierce humor, gallantry of image, pungent real- 
 
 [ 194 J
 
 ism. Here is the wild and superb reality of our 
 common nature, with nothing to show it off in the 
 lonely farmer's cottage at the head of a long glen, 
 where all one sees are " the mists rolling down the 
 bog, and the mists again, and they rolling up the 
 bog." 
 
 The Playboy of the Western World is a play so 
 unexpected in action, so racy in idiom, so perplexing 
 in its first paradox of the murderer honored and re- 
 spected, so satisfying in its final revelation of laugh- 
 able, vain, miserable, heroic human nature, that to 
 discuss it in a cursory manner is neither tempting 
 nor fitting. 
 
 It is a play in which Mr. Yeats sees the general 
 characteristics of all Synge's plays, wherein person 
 after person is " the like of the little children do be 
 listening to the stories of an old woman, and do be 
 after dreaming in the dark night it is in grand houses 
 of gold they are, with speckled horses to ride, and 
 do be waking again in a short while and they de- 
 stroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe, 
 and the starved ass braying in the yard." This is 
 the truth of all of them, and yet Synge did not send 
 his planet through space to the tune of the bray- 
 ing ass. 
 
 Riders to the Sea is tragedy, bitter, sorrowful, re- 
 signed, dignified. The Well of the Saints is ca- 
 cophonous, perhaps, but The Tinker's Wedding is 
 splendid fun, a beautifully veracious version of the 
 Irish tinkers, a grand tribe of characters, full of 
 ribald gayety and blasphemy, superstitious, irregular 
 and verging on the criminal, no respecters of per- 
 sons, their own least of all. To enjoy them, as they 
 plot and lie and squabble, may seem fearfully aban- 
 
 [ 195 ]
 
 doned, but whatever prevents one enjoying The 
 Tinker's Wedding is essentially evil. 
 
 The romance which Synge found in life, however, 
 is best expressed in the endings of The Playboy and 
 of The Shadow in the Glen, endings on the upward 
 wing, with certainly a swoop downward, but with 
 a hope of love and of power that are proof of the 
 invincible Gael. 
 
 How invincible was Synge personally is to be 
 learned in this last book, Poems and Translations, 
 a handful of verse and prose which Mr. Yeats has 
 prefaced with a touching comment on the man and 
 his work. Synge knew he had been dying for 
 months, but he spoke to no one except his betrothed. 
 " He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never 
 asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy, 
 but in this Book's momentary cries; all folded up in 
 his brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new 
 books and newspapers, reading the great masters 
 alone." 
 
 How well Synge realized himself, this book is 
 final proof. The man gave nothing that was not 
 himself, either in the things he spoke of or the way 
 he spoke of them. He had technique, excellently 
 applied, but his one purpose was to further the ex- 
 pression of that keen, critical, ironical, humorous 
 and impossibly romantic creature who hated shams, 
 hated compromises, but loved reality whether it came 
 in vagrants or tinkers, in a lonely farmer woman in 
 the hills, or a fine girl in a Mayo shebeen. 
 
 In his translations of Petrarch Synge has per- 
 formed the miracle. His own poems have no more 
 vitality than these heart-breaking poems rendered in 
 the prose of an Irish countryman. 
 
 [ 196 ]
 
 Whatever the desolate woman or man may miss 
 of humanity in the other Irish writings of to-day, 
 there is in Synge unending humanity. The idiom is 
 foreign to most. The imagery leaps and startles 
 like flame. But the deep spirit of a man has gone 
 into this work, and those who read with the spirit 
 will know it. 
 
 July 2, /pop, 
 
 [ 197]
 
 SHAW ON MARRIAGE 
 
 1 HE last person in the world to take Getting Mar- 
 ried seriously as a drama would be Bernard Shaw 
 himself. He knows that his name at last arouses 
 joyous expectation in a large American public, and 
 he is probably human enough to be gratified that 
 Getting Married has had an excellent New York 
 run. But there can be few of his achievements in 
 the theatre about which he has smaller illusion than 
 this same manipulation of dialectic. In other plays 
 he has been really interested in the people he created. 
 He has given them some chance to have an accent 
 of their own, and to behave spontaneously. Here, 
 except for Mrs. George and perhaps the bishop, he 
 shows little interest in his characters as persons. 
 They are mouthpieces, and subservient mouthpieces 
 at that. They have one excuse for appearing in the 
 " action " and one function when they are present 
 on the stage, to spout about marriage. They have 
 no other reason for being. If the events of the play 
 provided such enormous pressure that one's atten- 
 tion could not wander from marriage any more than 
 one's attention at Ghosts can wander from heredity, 
 Getting Married could be regarded as a drama. But 
 the only solid compulsion in the play is the compul- 
 sion worked by the inclusively argumentative author. 
 Mr. Shaw was never so little occupied in suggesting 
 a specific dilemma that depended on idiosyncrasy, or 
 
 [ 198 J
 
 so much occupied in discussing an institution. To 
 engage people's minds by the sheer vivacity of his 
 discussion seemed to him the thing worth doing. 
 And he made no serious effort to do anything else. 
 
 The trouble with a play so disputatious is the 
 trouble with all purposeful documents. It is the 
 purpose that is fascinating, and there is no fun in 
 the processes once the purpose is accomplished. So 
 long as one has the purblind conventions that Mr. 
 Shaw seeks to undermine in Getting Married, there 
 is considerable excitement in the scheme and plot of 
 his proposals. Then it is really thrilling that a 
 woman like Lesbia can want children without want- 
 ing a husband, that a woman like Leo can want a 
 lover without wanting to give up a husband, that a 
 woman like Edith can want a husband without want- 
 ing to give up free speech. But once these impulses 
 have been accepted beforehand and one's mind has 
 dwelt on them, the flinty opposition on which Mr. 
 Shaw must count for his steely spark is absent, and 
 there is little in the drama except the equation of 
 the personalities involved. Of course one may say 
 that it is the vitality of Mr. Shaw's ideas, not their 
 novelty, that justifies Getting Married, and that so 
 long as such prejudices as the ones he is encountering 
 are viable, his exposure of them is bound to have 
 verve. That assumes he really has exposed preju- 
 dices, not tried to titillate his audience with a facile 
 perception of them. For myself, he'd have to re- 
 veal a much stronger feeling about the whole busi- 
 ness of institutionalized sex than Getting Married 
 exhibits to make his witticism about marriage do 
 more than seem rather mildly tickling. In 1908, 
 perhaps, the public skin was thinner and his point 
 
 [ 199 ]
 
 sharper. That is the unfortunate part of his long 
 indulgence as the spoiled Irish tag-player among 
 bumbling Philistines. 
 
 It is perfectly all right for Mr. Shaw to have 
 his characters " talking all over the shop," but either 
 the quality of their talk ought to be better or it ought 
 to be representative of persons in a plight more 
 related to love. The plight of Cecil and Edith is, 
 of course, a facetious one. On their wedding morn- 
 ing they start reading pamphlets he on a man's 
 legal liability for his wife and she on the laws of 
 divorce. It is amusing, but it requires an enormous 
 spirit to carry it off, and there is nothing in the 
 bishop's daughter or the young man who plans to 
 marry her to make their feelings or reasonings par- 
 ticularly poignant. It is, however, the twists to the 
 discussion that remind one of Mr. Shaw's amazing 
 capacity for groundling wit. ' This is not quarrel- 
 ling, Lesbia; it is only English family life." " Go 
 and get married first: you'll have plenty of arguing 
 afterwards, miss, believe me." " Lord bless you, 
 ma'am, I'm that fond of old Matilda that I never 
 tell her anything at all for fear of hurting her feel- 
 ings." These are the kind of mediaeval, even ar- 
 boreal, jests that one gets a little tired of. And one 
 needs a real conviction as to sincere characteriza- 
 tion before one can enjoy the young lady who keeps 
 asking: "Have you worn your liver pad?" 
 " Have you rubbed your head with the lotion every 
 night?" 
 
 As a shameless playwright, Mr. Shaw knows that 
 these lines are laugh-getters, and he knows it is ex- 
 pedient to pick up laughs. That is not in itself a 
 monstrosity, but a play has to be extremely witty to 
 
 [ 200 ]
 
 redeem such witticism. For all its exhibition of 
 conventional inconsistency and pretense and mind- 
 lessness, Getting Married is hardly the play. 
 
 Mrs. George is a thrilling person. " Her beauty 
 is wrecked, like an ageless landscape ravaged by 
 long and fierce war. Her eyes are alive, arresting 
 and haunting; and there is still a turn of delicate 
 beauty and pride in her indomitable chin; but her 
 cheeks are wasted and lined, her mouth writhen and 
 piteous. The whole face is a battlefield of the pas- 
 sions, quite deplorable until she speaks, when an 
 alert sense of fun rejuvenates her in a moment, and 
 makes her company irresistible." A play that lived 
 up to Mrs. George, and kept the discussion of mar- 
 riage in the hands of persons worth considering, 
 would have had greatness. As it is, Mrs. George 
 provides a moment of greatness in her intranced 
 speech. Mr. Shaw is not a poet. His rhetoric is 
 always the rhetoric of noble intention rather than 
 inspiration. It is built, not born. But there is 
 beauty and valor in every line of that rhapsodic 
 utterance " When you loved me I gave you the 
 whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eter- 
 nity in a single moment, strength of the mountains 
 in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all 
 the seas in one impulse of your souls. A moment 
 only; but was it not enough? " If Mr. Shaw rises 
 by climbing, he never rose to a greater height. 
 
 On this summit Getting Married does not stand. 
 Mr. Faversham and Mr. Cherry and, in some ways, 
 Miss Grossman, did better by their author than any 
 playgoer was likely to expect. But the total result 
 was decidedly short of happiness. What is happi- 
 ness to a propagandist like Mr. Shaw? He ex- 
 
 [ 201 1
 
 pressly disavows happiness as a decent human con- 
 sideration in that magnificent preface to Getting 
 Married which says so much more than the play. 
 He may be right about matrimonial happiness, but 
 about theatrical he is dangerously wrong, and play- 
 goers can fairly blame him for not having deepened 
 his characters or heightened his wit. 
 
 February IT, 1917. 
 
 t 203
 
 TIME CANNOT WITHER? 
 
 A MAN so virtuous as Bernard Shaw is entitled 
 to one incontinence, but the lifelong habit of debating 
 societies has finally gone to his head. In Getting 
 Married there were parentheses and divergences and 
 footnotes that play was as chaste as the Parthe- 
 non compared with the diffuse Misalliance. It ap- 
 peared sufficiently long, Misalliance, when one read 
 it. The Faversham production at the Broadhurst 
 Theatre shows how much the eye is quicker than the 
 ear. It is a powerful long performance to sit 
 through, and during it Mr. Shaw shrinks several 
 sizes in the estimate of normally patient men. 
 
 It is an amusing production. Mr. Maclyn Ar- 
 buckle in particular raises a gale of refreshing laugh- 
 ter as soon as he enters, and his performance as the 
 great Tarleton of Tarleton's Underwear goes far 
 to make the evening hilarious. But subtract Mr. 
 Arbuckle, fix attention on the wily and nefarious 
 dramatist behind him, and one soon realizes how 
 much one is being nourished on wind. The play 
 is shamelessly self-indulgent, an orgy on the part of 
 a man who neither drinks, smokes nor chews. Bet- 
 ter for us if Bernard Shaw were as wild as the Yelr- 
 low Book wanted to be, and kept for his own laxities, 
 in Misalliance the eye that he actually had for vacr 
 cinators and eaters of shrimps and prawns. 
 
 It is all very well to urge that discursiveness is 
 quite possible under the guise of drama, and that 
 
 [ 203 ]
 
 the mind may be engaged and satisfied by the lively 
 development of pregnant ideas. Something else is 
 bound to be expected, if the situation that starts the 
 discussion is an emotional situation and the partici- 
 pants in it look like actual men and women. For 
 the convenience of the insuppressibly argumentative, 
 it is necessary to suppose that every one has a special 
 line of conduct and is perfectly aware of it and is 
 enormously articulate about it and is engaged in dis- 
 cussing it a large part of the day. This assumption, 
 so suitable for the ventilation of ideas, is hopelessly 
 incompatible with the state of mind that a dramatic 
 situation actually begets in the man at a play. What 
 one demands in a play, knowingly or unknowingly, 
 is the conviction that the situation is genuine to its 
 participants, and if the situation is genuine one ex- 
 pects a chemistry of mood and circumstance that has 
 an emotional outcome, satisfying the mind that has 
 been engaged by the issue but also satisfying the 
 heart that, in genuine drama, is the partner of mind. 
 Misalliance is unfortunately farcical in its contempt 
 of such obligations. It makes every one in the play 
 an exponent of a cause rather than an element in a 
 vital chemistry, and what is developed is not a drama 
 but a series of arguments, a display of ideas rather 
 than a display of their signification. 
 
 What could be more superficially comic than the 
 juxtaposition of fastidious Summerhays and the ir- 
 reverent Hypatia? Or the linking of romantic old 
 Tarleton and the pragmatic Lina Szczepanowska? 
 Or the contrast of young Summerhays, a male who 
 keeps his end up by crying and screaming, and Lina, 
 a female who possesses the sort of physical courage 
 that is supposed to go with comb and spurs? But 
 
 [ 204 ]
 
 the fertile invention of Bernard Shaw is not taxed 
 to arouse anything but this easy amusement at his 
 combinations and collisions and contrasts. No 
 emotion in the farce, not that of Tarleton senior or 
 Tarleton junior for Lina, or that of Summerhays 
 senior or Summerhays junior for Hypatia, or that of 
 Hypatia for Percival or Percival for Hypatia, has 
 any employment except to promote amusing com- 
 ment. And the greatest ardor of all, the ardor of 
 Gunner to murder John Tarleton, is grasped as a 
 supreme chance to turn a laugh. 
 
 If the ideas of Misalliance were fresh, one might 
 be content to assume that drama as one long oppor- 
 tunity for opinion. The staleness, the pleasant and 
 friendly staleness, of much of its material, is enough 
 to exclude that possibility. PercivaFs willingness to 
 bully the clerk as a matter of honor is a happy touch 
 of satire in an excellent scene. Mrs. Tarleton's 
 practical attitude toward her husband's polygamy and 
 her diverting notions of the aristocracy are new ele- 
 ments in that humane maternalism to which the dram- 
 atist is so well disposed. But Hypatia's assault on 
 Percival, Johnny Broadbent Tarleton's literalness, 
 the physical cowardice of Summerhays, all suggest 
 that Misalliance was made from chips that littered 
 the dramatist's workshop. And this lack of novelty 
 fixes attention on the perfunctory nature of the 
 drama, especially on the sacrifice of its development 
 to the immediate theatre-laugh. 
 
 It is a theatre-laugh, for example, that Gunner 
 earns. The seduction of his mother may or may not 
 have been a joke, but Mr. Shaw plants the poor idiot 
 so that he is merely ludicrous, regardless of his 
 mother's death and everything else. So it is a thea- 
 
 [ 205 ]
 
 tre-laugh, not a laugh of corrective comedy, that at- 
 tends every suggestion of love in Misalliance. A 
 man in love is no more laughable, really, than a man 
 in a gas-mask. His appearance may be silly, but 
 the question is, what is creating the appearance ? To 
 laugh at the grotesque intensity of him is to behave 
 like a child. Yet Mr. Shaw continues to parody the 
 appearances of love and to make them the material 
 of his farce. 
 
 It is a little hard on Shaw to blame him for such 
 relaxed behavior. No one has become so serenely 
 at home with the theatre public or is allowed to 
 saunter with such informality among idols. He may 
 sit on the floor where other people sit on chairs, may 
 enter souls without knocking and leave without leave- 
 taking, and each touch of his familiar imusualness 
 is happily anticipated and recognized. There is a 
 certain responsibility on his side, indeed, to meet 
 these expectations of his public. He would be pain- 
 fully disappointing if his characters did not jump 
 through paper rings or hang their hats on the intel- 
 lectual gas. But while the luxury of prattle is eager- 
 ly permitted to him by scores and hundreds of audi- 
 tors, including every English-speaking critic, it is 
 absurd not to regret that he is luxuriating, taking his 
 ease in disporting rather than exercising his gifts. 
 While the struggle was on, he tried harder. Now 
 that it is won, he has dropped the discipline of self- 
 criticism and lets his quick-silver mind run loose. 
 The penalty is not apparent. He fills theatres as he 
 never filled them in his heyday. His audiences know 
 when to laugh, if not when to think. But there is a 
 penalty in the end. 
 
 In the mossy corners of America, where pride is 
 [ 206 ]
 
 synonymous with tradition and heads are moulded 
 to lit the metal of inheritance, the name of Shaw is 
 still distasteful and a little alarming. A charlatan, 
 he is still called, a mountebank, a jackanapes, but 
 the substance of his offense to the ancien regime of 
 Brooklyn and Hartford and Orange and Boston is 
 what they regard as his smart irreverence. And 
 wherever there is the habit of reverence and the creed 
 of authority, as to property or family or love or 
 seniority or government or taboo, the tone of Shaw 
 has earned a persisting resentment. To give com- 
 fort to such people by dispraising a great man would 
 be lamentable, but the dispraise is chiefly because he 
 is becoming less deadly to the enemy. It is his sea- 
 son of mists and mellow fruitfulness, and in this 
 autumnal drama there is less fruitfulness than mist. 
 
 October 6, 
 
 [ 207 ]
 
 a general rule one does not ask how a new play 
 reveals a personality. One goes further back and 
 asks with considerable heat whether it has any per- 
 sonality to reveal. That, fortunately, is the kind 
 of skepticism one can drop in dealing with J. M. 
 Barrie. One can revel in his positive acclimatiza- 
 tion as a dramatist. He is not a man so unversed 
 in the language of the theatre that he is driven to 
 hackneyed situations and conventions and platitudes. 
 The play is his suitable, mastered medium. He does 
 not work at it, but in it. He is no more hampered 
 by the theatre than Caruso or William Jennings 
 Bryan by their singing voice. 
 
 Because he has such idiosyncrasy as a dramatist, 
 has so managed to effectuate his qualities, the good 
 knight James dissuades a fair number of people. 
 They do not believe in fairies, thank you. They do 
 not like him. He gets over to them only too well. 
 A good deal of this comes into the criticism of A 
 Kiss for Cinderella, especially in its Miss Maude 
 Adams version. It fails not because it is A Kiss for 
 Cinderella, but because it is Barrie, too much Bar- 
 rie, for a quite reputable kind of taste. There are 
 others who like Barrie but think he is not at his best 
 in this creation. It is thin, they feel, hasn't the gimp 
 the earlier plays had, hasn't the earlier spice and 
 ginger. They see, or profess to see, a real falling- 
 off. 
 
 [ 208 ]
 
 Dramatists do fall off, of course. Pygmalion 
 limped for Shaw, and Percy Mackaye has pecked at 
 a fence or two. Henry Arthur Jones has moved 
 steadily down. But one has to be suspicious of the 
 oracular cuss who takes a dramatist's pulse and al- 
 ways shakes his head. He may be discovering a 
 regular condition, not a crisis. He may have for- 
 gotten his patient's constitutional alienation from 
 norm. Personally I do not think this " fancy " of 
 Barrie's is as happy as Peter Pan, which I pretended 
 to love but never returned to. I do not think, for 
 one thing, that it has the same degree of inspiration, 
 the same airy independence of fact. The first act 
 of Cinderella, for example, is like the preliminary 
 clucking of an aeroplane before it even trills along 
 the ground to start flying. It is vibration without 
 compensatory motion. It is just a little dull. But 
 when Cinderella does get started it becomes Barrie, 
 Barrie in what the newspapers call his " whimsy," 
 Barrie in his essential infantility of attitude. And 
 the last act, after the prepotent " fancy," has its fa- 
 miliar sickabed-lady lyricism. If Barrie isn't like 
 that, what is he like? 
 
 Your attitude toward this man's genius depends 
 altogether, I should imagine, on your general atti- 
 tude toward heaven. If you believe in heaven, the 
 peculiar kind of child's heaven that is Barrie's, you 
 find it easy to lend yourself to him, to his general 
 wistfulness and shy sensibility and hazel-twig gift 
 for nostalgia. You find it easy, in this particular 
 instance, to follow Miss Thing in wartime London, 
 the naive Scottish maid in the studio by day, being 
 cute about Venus de Milo and pathetic in the eyes 
 of her employer; and finding pathos at night herself 
 
 [ 209 ]
 
 in services for the poor who visit her shop, and in 
 services for the children who perch in packing-cases 
 all about her. As tailor and doctor and barber Miss 
 Thing earns her pennies, a symbol to London of the 
 exigencies of her wartime, and she spends her pen- 
 nies caring for the refugees (one of them a Gretchen, 
 God bless Cinderella's 'eart). It is to please the 
 children that Miss Thing plays Cinderella, plays it 
 out in the street waiting for her Prince, as she con- 
 fides to the policeman; and gets pneumonia and her 
 'Dream, and recovers to have the policeman speak 
 poetry without knowing it and make the dream come 
 true. 
 
 Although it is with humor that Barrie sees his 
 policeman, humor as to his pompous idiom and his 
 romance so pawkily enjoyed by Cinderella, the full 
 humor of the play is in the fairy dream. Miss 
 Thing sees herself arriving late at the ball, of course, 
 and triumphantly chosen by her prince-policeman 
 over the beautiful Carmencitas and Mona Lisas 
 reminiscent of the studio. She also sees a lovely 
 Maxfield Parrish background for King and Queen 
 and Lord Times and the lord mayor. But the Bar- 
 rie touch is the Cockney tone of the court that Miss 
 Thing is projecting, a cuteness with laughter in it at 
 every turn. The music is as Cockney as the lingo. 
 It is a glorification of hurdy-gurdy and gives the ball 
 a hilarity that would be coster hilarity if Miss Adams 
 could unbend as miraculously as she strops a razor. 
 This humor saves Barrie's tenderness from the ex- 
 tremities to which it leans. 
 
 On those extremities depend, however, the legiti- 
 macy of J. M. Barrie's inspiration. For the ten- 
 derness that suffuses him is the tenderness of a spe- 
 
 [ 210 ]
 
 cial romance to- which Anglo-Saxons as a rule are 
 early inured. Few grown persons of my own ac- 
 quaintance take any great stock in heaven, but when 
 they were little all of them believed in it, not be- 
 cause they were told to so much as because they were 
 able. They found life different from their childish 
 dream. In childhood, in other words, one might 
 still believe in heaven because one still might take 
 experience in a wondrous heavenly way. One woke 
 early on a Christmas morning to a world where there 
 were no chores or chidings at the moment, where 
 there were to be many surprises, but all of them 
 pleasant, where the promise was to have a swift and 
 merry performance, where one could count on a 
 warm fire in the breakfast-room and a warm glow in 
 the parental heart. Those were golden mornings, 
 mornings of a world unified and indescribably benign, 
 and one revelled in the expectancies they realized. 
 It was before one began to emphasize the shatter- 
 ing question, Why don't the wheels go round? 
 
 In convalescence in later life, to cite a common 
 experience, there can be a similar unity. At such a 
 time, particularly if one have an attractive nurse, the 
 universe comes into tune. Lying in the sanctified 
 irresponsibility of the sick-bed, flowers to the right 
 of us, flowers to the left of us, all the creases seem 
 gradually to smooth out. Serene in emancipation, 
 one falls into sweet, mild, radiant moods, with little 
 rills of ecstasy, as of lake water crisping on a sunny, 
 silent beach. In those moods one pronounces one's 
 own absolution, thinks well of one's former employ- 
 ers, regrets every unanswered letter, makes mel- 
 lifluous speeches to absent camerados and cameradas, 
 and generally carries on. The clash of life seems 
 [ 211 ]
 
 nonsense. The game becomes as amicable as soli- 
 taire. And, if one is able to stand the gaff, one 
 thinks back to paradise, flowers to the right and to 
 the left rather more than in the sick-room, and an 
 infinitely more sanctified irresponsibility, a more di- 
 vine suspension of hapless cause and gritty effect. 
 
 The belief in this sort of heavenliness is perhaps 
 the richest daydream in the American and Anglo- 
 Saxon world. It is the escape from life which peo- 
 ple seek in fiction which J. M. Barrie spontaneously 
 supplies. If his middle age has sapped a little of 
 his inventiveness, he is no less a romanticist. He 
 still believes in fairy godmothers and would like to 
 wave his own wand over an errant world. 
 
 January 6, 1917. 
 
 I 212 ]
 
 BARRIE'S PLAYLETS 
 
 DRAMAS that capitalize the charm of nursing the 
 wounded, the romance of waving a flag, the sadness 
 of lovers leaving for the front these have a right 
 to be mentioned by virtue of being so thoroughly 
 offensive. There was something horrid about even 
 Bernhardt wearing a bloody shirt and dying pro 
 patria at the end of a loud recitation. The war is 
 like radium in its intensity as a theatrical subject. 
 Misused, it is doubly like radium in doing atrocious 
 harm. For these reasons, reasons pregnant with 
 recollection for New York playgoers this season, 
 one hates to confess that J. M. Barrie's new playlets 
 are mainly about the war. 
 
 The signal fact, however, is that Barrie has writ- 
 ten The New Word and The Old Lady Shows Her 
 Medals with a decency that is utterly impossible to 
 the second-hand and third-hand playwrights, who 
 merely appeal from their own vulgar preconceptions 
 to the vulgar preconceptions of their audience. The 
 war about which Barrie is writing is not a sentimen- 
 tality derived from daydreams of prowess, Kipling 
 fantasy, school yarns of knighthood, pleasant fan- 
 cies of endless effort and cheery self-sacrifice without 
 a single hint of flagging energy, depression, poison- 
 ous fatigue. Slick and smug as the outsiders make 
 war, Barrie has forgotten all that he ever dreamed 
 of unreal heroisms and has aimed to give back 
 through art the wartime London in which he is im- 
 
 [ 213 ]
 
 mersed. Tender, whimsical and sensitive he re- 
 mains, with all his old conviction that human beings 
 are ever groping for each other through a fog of 
 inarticulateness, but the unity that the war has given 
 to his England has put him in sober possession of his 
 own people in London, and he writes of them with 
 a sense of the meaning war has for ordinary people 
 such as the American pot-boiling playwrights have 
 entirely missed. 
 
 Quite often at Barrie plays I find myself unper- 
 suaded by the author. I resent having him suggest 
 how misunderstood I am, and how forlornly sym- 
 pathetic, and how I keep lighting a signal in the 
 window of my heart for a lover who never, never 
 comes. If such preoccupations existed, I'd be for 
 curing them, and not so much for nursing them into 
 a solitude romance. But in the two war playlets 
 there is such humor mingled with the recognition 
 and indulgence of sensibility, and such excuse for it 
 under the circumstances, that only a man with a 
 heart of leather could fail to respond. The Barrie 
 mood has not greatly altered, but the theme is per- 
 fect for it, and so delicately accommodated to the 
 beloved familiarities of Barrie's nature that a finer 
 result could scarcely be supposed. 
 
 The first one-act play, The New Word, did not 
 seem so well performed as The Old Lady Shows 
 Her Medals, and for my own part I remember The 
 Old Lady with deeper satisfaction. As a searching 
 account of the human animal, however, The New 
 Word is incomparable. A middle-aged, middle- 
 class Englishman is left alone with his young son, 
 who is in his uniform as lieutenant and next day is 
 to depart for France. The father is proud of his 
 I 214 ]
 
 boy and the boy loves his father, but neither of them 
 has ever overcome the embarrassment of close kin- 
 ship, and Barrie exhibits them in all the awkwardness 
 of their emotional illiteracy. For a really civilized 
 person, perhaps, this playlet would have little or 
 nothing to say. It would mean no more to such a 
 rare person than the periodic grunts of visiting In- 
 dians mean to us, or the immeasurable silences of 
 babies inspecting one the other. But far as we may 
 have progressed beyond the mute Indian or the mute 
 baby, most of us are aware of relationships that ache 
 inside us like life awaiting birth. There is a peculiar 
 estrangement that is bred by the very similarity of 
 temperament between father and son, and an affinity 
 that makes expression seem indecent. This is so 
 gently, so humorously, suggested in The New Word, 
 that the mawkishness of meaningful theatrical hand- 
 clasps is avoided. Father and son do come near to 
 each other, but Barrie is satisfied to leave them Brit- 
 ish to the end. Had he made them more articulate 
 it might have been more admirable, but it would have 
 destroyed their realness. To the last embarrassed 
 cough of Mr. Trevor the father is real. 
 
 A chorus of London charwomen gave the second 
 war playlet its body of flavor. However little the 
 war may be theirs in point of advantageousness, it is 
 indubitably theirs by association and sentiment and 
 preoccupation, and Barrie shows how the tentacles 
 of maternal emotion have fastened about the riddled 
 hulk of Europe without regard to anything but the 
 personal and regimental adventure to which these 
 women give their sons. It is enough for those 
 women that their sons are at the front to become 
 parties themselves to the pomp and circumstance of 
 
 [ 215 ]
 
 war, and just this home proprietorship in the task 
 of the empire excites a lonely charwoman, tl Mrs." 
 Dowey, to wish herself the mother of a soldier. 
 She becomes adopted in that capacity after harsh 
 resistance by a singularly outspoken, uncompromis- 
 ing and breezy Scotchman. The first interview be- 
 tween the demure though pertinacious Mrs. Dowey 
 and the angry male who has fallen into her clutches 
 is exceedingly racy and yet touching, and the ma- 
 neuvring of the gigantic Black Watch soldier by the 
 small body that wants to mother him is all the more 
 amusing because it is so clearly recognized by both 
 woman and man. Wonderfully acted by Miss Beryl 
 Mercer and Mr. John M. McFarlane. If Barrie 
 had been sentimental in this playlet, if he had made 
 the man talk to slow music about the trenches, it 
 would have been an unbearable nuisance. It is ex- 
 quisitely enough that the man should say in his reso- 
 nant tone that the men in the trenches are thinking 
 of " chiffon " and then ruthlessly inspect the old 
 lady's best dress to see if he can take her to the 
 theatre. The melting of Dowey is finally admissible, 
 and his formal reception of parting gifts from the 
 other charwomen, including The Submarine, is a nice 
 touch. Here, with or without the silent finale, there 
 is a mood of the war that is true for a whole people, 
 one that gilds dark depths with silvern light. 
 
 When the Barrie programme was first arranged 
 there were three war plays, but the possibility of in- 
 cluding Miss Barrymore in The Twelve Pound Look 
 caused the management to retire one war play from 
 active service. The exchange could not but be wise. 
 Barrie has never contributed anything more incisive, 
 more capacious, more generous, more profound, than 
 
 [ 216 ]
 
 this short stinging commentary on male illusions, and 
 Miss Barrymore has never given so serious or so 
 spirited a performance. In a short play there are 
 all kinds of technical difficulties. To prepare for an 
 incident is almost impossible and to present an inci- 
 dent without preparation is to leave out the dimen- 
 sion that makes for reflectiveness. The author of 
 The Twelve Pound Look surmounts these difficulties 
 like a master. With a few strokes of characteriza- 
 tion and reminiscence we have before us three com- 
 plete persons, the woman who rejected the egoist, 
 the woman who accepted the egoist, and the egoist. 
 The broadness of Mr. Dalton's acting as the suc- 
 cessful man rather detracts from the play, but Miss 
 Barrymore is always in the picture reasonable, 
 ironic, perceptive, vigorous, humane. She is the 
 event of the evening. 
 
 June 23, 1917. 
 
 I 217 ]
 
 DRAMA AND THE THEATRE, 2
 
 IT would be interesting to discover why Miss 
 Rachel Crothers, who is a sensitive and knowing 
 dramatist, decided to stoop to conquer. In spite of 
 her stoop Old Lady 31 is decidedly to be seen. 
 From the point of view of a producer it is even quite 
 courageous, but it makes concessions which, granting 
 how intelligent Miss Crothers is, provoke a morbid 
 curiosity. 
 
 Any one who has ever talked to a theatrical pro- 
 ducer may imagine how Old Lady 31 first hit that 
 professional mind. Twelve old women on the stage 
 for three acts, old women in the decrepitude of an 
 old ladies' home. You can imagine this thought im- 
 pinging on a Broadway mind. Nothing but old 
 women old women with their hair in nets, old 
 women with high shell-combs, old women with 
 shawls, old women with mittens, old women with 
 caps frumpy, toothless, deaf, quavering, senescent 
 old things listening for the soundless footsteps of 
 death. You may guess how this might strike a pro- 
 ducer. Miss Crothers is an artist, with a strong 
 sense of character. She could see it. But a pro- 
 ducer! What do you see in the crystal, my dear? 
 I see $42 in the house and ten old women on the 
 stage. What do you see now, my dear? I seem 
 to see twelve old women on the stage, and $18.75 i n 
 the house. 
 
 To produce Old Lady 31 for Broadway was not 
 [ 221 ]
 
 considered possible until it was heavily " sugared 
 up." After the fashion of sunshine biscuits and 
 sunlight soap and sun-kist oranges, it was termed a 
 " sunshine comedy," to begin with. That was un- 
 doubtedly supposed to remit some of the perils of 
 asking Broadway to contemplate old age. It meant, 
 in the sight of poverty and loneliness, the assurance 
 of optimism which Broadway is supposed to crave. 
 But the advertisement of optimism was not enough, 
 the written bunkum of " wholesomeness " and sun- 
 shine. It had to be squirted into the play. And, 
 in the prologue and also at the end, the syringe of 
 sweetening was used. 
 
 The old couple Angle and Abe are leaving their 
 sun-kist cottage Angie to go to the old ladies' 
 home, Abe to go to the poor farm. They have been 
 married many, many years, but there are no children. 
 " 'Twan't to be." This is a real situation, one in 
 which there is a great length of human retrospect, a 
 definite pathos, a chance to reveal human nature and 
 make the most of the drama to come. Well, Be- 
 lasco couldn't have done a fouler deed. There was 
 much excuse for the old lady's inevitable allusion to 
 a lifetime of marriage without a single misunder- 
 standing or a cross word. The couple next me held 
 hands at this touching misrepresentation of inter- 
 sexual experience, but I noticed he went out to smoke 
 at the end of the first act and left her to boredom, 
 just as usual. The rest of the prologue was a des- 
 perate effort to establish Angle's angelic character. 
 She scrimped a little tobacco every day so that Abe 
 might have a last smoke. " You beat all, mother." 
 She regrets the poor auction at the end of their life- 
 time but rejoices that her old tea-strainer brought 
 
 [ 222 ]
 
 three cents more than it cost. Think of it, the good 
 Lord letting fall that crumb of consolation. " Ain't 
 the pansies sweet to-day? I'm out here talking 
 things O7er with the pansies." Then a little sun- 
 shine philosophy. " That's what the pansies under- 
 stand." 
 
 Few people know What Every Pansy Knows, of 
 course, but is there anything more pestiferous in real 
 life than these cooing human beings? Angie is to 
 be the sweetest of old ladies. When she refers to 
 her " bridal wreath " and blows a kiss to her old 
 house, when she gives Abe a flower to press in his 
 bible or plucks a bouquet for Abigail, she is to be 
 the dearest old thing. It is a matter of scientific 
 record, however, that mature women who live in the 
 past to such degree as this, who hold conversation 
 with the pansies at sixty and rejoice over a three-cent 
 episode at an auction sale, are merely half-witted. 
 If they had had less sentimentalism and more sense, 
 there would have been absolutely no necessity for an 
 auction. No sea-captain could have survived to old 
 age with such a spouse. While he was at sea he 
 might have gotten away with it. That is one of the 
 attractions of life on the ocean wave. But if he had 
 lived " to hum," as Miss Emma Dunn and Mr. 
 Reginald Barlow so exultingly pronounced it, he 
 would certainly have arisen one night while Angie 
 slept, and tenderly extinguished her for ever under 
 the tea-cosy, and then strode forth to take the good 
 news to the sheriff. 
 
 So far Old Lady 31 is sheer conformity to the 
 professional idea of what Broadway wants. The 
 minute we get to the old ladies' home, however, and 
 have Miss Crothers reveal the human nature of the 
 
 [ 223 ]
 
 women in that home, there is that precious veracity 
 which is bound to dominate a comedy audience. 
 Louise Forsslund's book may have given Miss Croth- 
 ers many pointers, but it is she alone who made 
 possible for the stage the reality of these super- 
 annuated types. The conventions of the stage re- 
 quired performers who were not actually as much 
 " old ladies " as the title suggests. But this hardly 
 interfered with one's sense of reality. One beheld, 
 first, a rattlepate, spitfire, " gabby " person rocking 
 violently on the veranda, in conversation with an 
 imposing and funereal doctor's widow, joined in a 
 few minutes by a saturnine practical person, a Mar- 
 tha in a universe of Marys, a " grouch." Nothing 
 could have been more humorous than this idiomatic 
 talk on the veranda. It was soon enhanced by the 
 addition of a coy, gurgling creature with Victorian 
 curls. The kindliness with which these " inmates " 
 were observed in all their foibles and sensitiveness 
 and pettiness and magnanimity was not at all like 
 the sentimentalism of the prologue. It had an art- 
 ist's sagacity and penetration, and took the whole 
 performance out of theatricality and back to the 
 immense divertiveness of the world we know. 
 
 The pathos of the play is the separation of old 
 Abe from Angie, at the door of the old ladies' home. 
 Its inventiveness is shown in the successful revolu- 
 tionary proposal to have a place made for Abe in 
 the home, as Old Lady 31. Had Miss Crothers 
 gone into the business of projecting this story with- 
 out knowing and respecting her human material, it 
 would have been a thin entertainment. But she had 
 such a strong grasp of the characters she proposed 
 to deal with that the new factor of a man in their 
 
 [ 224 ]
 
 communal life gave her just the chance she needed 
 to exhibit their amusingness. Every kind of femi- 
 ninity comes out in the galvanizing presence of Abe, 
 and every kind of masculinity is produced in Abe, 
 and in the misogynistic Mike, by the presence of so 
 many concentrating women. In all this part of Old 
 Lady 31, the core of its drama, there are the quali- 
 ties which make Miss Crothers a genuine contributor 
 to American drama and America's capture of its 
 own life. Aided by an admirable cast of women, 
 and by a remarkable costume designer in A. Deutsch, 
 a drama has been honestly placed in one of those 
 neglected yet ramified areas of possibility which an 
 integral group always provides, and not only has it 
 been placed there with regard to its plausible oc- 
 currence but with regard to the fine interest of the 
 group itself. By reason of her ability to appreciate 
 such a group, to see its powerful interest regardless 
 of the supposed needs of Broadway, Miss Crothers 
 really equips herself extraordinarily to write genu- 
 ine drama. And that one enjoys about Old Lady 
 31. But my enjoyment is marred by the stupid con- 
 ventionality of the ending Abe's windfall and 
 by the sunshine so assiduously poured in and about 
 the character of Angie. Miss Crothers has integ- 
 rity as a creator. It is worth fighting for, against 
 Broadway and hell combined, and she has apparently 
 not managed to plan for her integrity or to risk profit 
 for it as much as she should. 
 
 December 23, iQi6. 
 
 [ 225 J
 
 TWENTY iYEARS AFTER 
 
 man boiled and served with caper sauce I 
 do not believe you could tell him from mutton. In 
 his own mind man always fears to be a wolf. The 
 much greater probability, of course, is his approxi- 
 mation to a sheep. If there were more deep self- 
 knowledge in the prayer-book human beings would 
 not exclaim against their turbulent desires. They 
 would beg God for courage enough to keep from 
 giving the hat-boy a dime. They would ask the 
 good Lord to deliver them from the terror of wear- 
 ing a Panama after September I5th. It is very 
 gratifying to pretend to the Lord that we restrain 
 ourselves with great difficulty from murder. The 
 horrible truth, as we well know, is our mute submis- 
 sion to every form of grand and petty tyranny. 
 Why are we strap-hangers ? Why do we wear black 
 evening clothes? Why do we go to funerals? 
 Why do we eat baker's white bread? Why do we 
 sign our letters " yours sincerely " ? Why do we let 
 Horlick and Hershey and Burrowes and Carter and 
 all the other infamous vulgarians scrawl their ugly 
 names across the fair face of America? Not be- 
 cause we are such surging iconoclasts that we need 
 the Lord to keep us in a cage. 
 
 In relation to the things we like in the theatre 
 there is no essential difference as to American be- 
 havior. There is the same mute submission to fash- 
 ion, the same sheepishness about a change. The 
 
 [ 226 ]
 
 Philadelphia lady who recently bemoaned the mis- 
 take we made in 1776 in breaking away from Eng- 
 land has merely a formal grievance. We broke, but 
 we did not break away. It still needs an Arnold 
 Bennett to discover George Cohan in the American 
 theatre. Our own critics, timid reporters for the 
 most part, could not discover the excellence of 
 George Cohan because no one had given them the 
 lead. 
 
 The immediate cause of these observations is Mr. 
 Lazarus, a comedy by Miss Ford and Mr. O'Hig- 
 gins. The authors are friends of mine, and I have 
 read many of the clippings from newspapers, and 
 nowhere have I seen an original critical appreciation 
 of their aims. Praise, yes, a great deal of it, and 
 some obvious discriminations of an intelligent kind, 
 but no positive grasp of these authors' accomplish- 
 ment. It may be put down to the feebleness of 
 Americans about validating their art. Had J. M. 
 Barrie invented the same situations, had Arnold 
 Bennett invented them, the critics would have ap- 
 proached the comedy in a proper frame of mind. 
 They would not have stumbled over its lightness or 
 slightness, stopped with its brightness or triteness. 
 They would have functioned as critics. It is an 
 enormous handicap to dramatists in America that 
 only foreigners of a reputation that gives assurance 
 to sheep can hope to be considered with anything 
 like full seriousness and respect. 
 
 The situation in Mr. Lazarus would, one imag- 
 ines, provoke in J. M. Barrie the same amusement 
 that it did in its own authors; the same sly, slim 
 comedic smile. It is an inherently amusing situa- 
 tion, and one that owes its value to its suggesting 
 
 [ 227 ]
 
 life. A sentimental author could not have used it, 
 but Mr. Lazarus is essentially unsentimental. Hav- 
 ing no desire to romanticize, the authors could avail 
 to the full of the contingency they proposed. They 
 set in the background, over twenty years in the back- 
 ground, an ordinary love-at-first-sight marriage. 
 They indicated the accident that cut the couple apart. 
 They then showed the woman of this marriage as 
 she had developed developed from a shy young 
 thing into a middle-aged, fussy, worthy, mentally in- 
 consequential boarding-house keeper, now remarried 
 to a greedy, pompous, self-deceived parasite male. 
 And they brought up against this transmutation of 
 the idyllic girl-bride the man who has kept the idyl 
 for over twenty years, the successful but lonely first 
 husband. For any one who has the presumptions of 
 romantic love in mind, as the authors undoubtedly 
 had, there are elements of high humor in this con- 
 junction and also of tenderness, because of the 
 daughter that was born subsequent to the railroad 
 accident which had separated John Molloy from his 
 young wife. Molloy had been a Western miner. 
 He is the sort of man who " comes back " with every 
 sentimental intention to pick up the threads. The 
 second husband creates a difficulty, but one that 
 solves itself through his own crookedness. The real 
 difficulty springs out of the change that has been 
 wrought by time. So far as the authors of Mr. 
 Lazarus were concerned, this change was grasped 
 securely. It was wittily, humorously, delicately, 
 sympathetically revealed. 
 
 To find slightness in such a comedy argues, to my 
 mind, a taste for stronger flavors than Mr. Lazarus 
 attempts to afford. It is no dramatic onion. 
 
 [ 228 ]
 
 Where it calls for criticism is not in any inherent 
 slightness of theme, but in certain feebleness of han- 
 dling by the actors and in one fragility in the con- 
 struction. That fragility, as I see it, is in the char- 
 acterization of Mr. Molloy's daughter Patricia and 
 of the penniless, whimsical artist-boarder who is in 
 love with her. The mother is, so to speak, thor- 
 oughly exemplified. She is a fool about the mort- 
 gage. She is divertingly futile about the impecuni- 
 ous boarder. She drops life out of her hands as 
 she drops the bed linen out of her hands, and she 
 grabs on to John Molloy as she grabs on to the near- 
 est chair. Dr. Sylvester, too, is exemplified in his 
 work on " instinctive therapeutics " and the rest. 
 The case of the boy and the girl is largely, on the 
 other hand, the tenuous case of their charm. The 
 main situation involves them but does not extract 
 their full character. They are not inevitably salient. 
 Had Miss le Gallienne the vigor to suggest the girl's 
 personality, or had Mr. Powers the skill to appear 
 as a young artist with backbone in his work, a man 
 to carry the girl with him, the sketch of their court- 
 ship would take on roundness. As it is, it is thin. 
 The thinness of John Molloy, however, is a different 
 kind. It derives chiefly from the imaginative pov- 
 erty of Mr. Henry Dixey. Mr. Dixey' s utter lack 
 of authority is not due to the authors of the play. 
 They gave him a real conception a man rich in 
 texture as well as in purse, who came out of the West 
 to find a wife and a child, and was doomed to lift a 
 curtain on an empty shrine. This man Mr. Dixey 
 promenaded as a. creature pleasant so far as his foot- 
 falls went, and mobile of countenance, but not an 
 atom like the man intended. One did not want a 
 [ 229 ]
 
 miner with steel ribs in his chest and steel rivets to 
 keep his heart from bursting open with tenderness. 
 One did want something not so essentially perfunc- 
 tory, so lazily and vacantly gracile. In Miss Florine 
 Arnold as the wife, on the other hand, there is a real 
 capacity for that broad but shrewd characterization 
 which is necessary in such comedy. She had her 
 tricks, as the authors had, but she joined with them 
 in keeping a clear eye to life. 
 
 Comedy is the Roentgen ray of the spirit. It re- 
 veals without injury the realities which appearances 
 fail to reveal. There is this digestive eye in Mr. 
 Lazarus. Its wit is one element in its attractiveness, 
 a wit quite fresh in the theatre, but the real triumph 
 of the authors is their credible and amusing version 
 of a fairy tale put to the test. 
 
 September 23, 1916. 
 
 [ 230 ]
 
 THE LIGHT TOUCH 
 
 1 HE essence of priggishness, Samuel Butler re- 
 marks, is setting up to be better than one's neighbor. 
 For persons like ourselves, who are really better than 
 our neighbors, this definition has no teen; but I know 
 a man to whom I'd apply it. We met him as we 
 came out of the theatre after seeing Good Gracious 
 Annabelle. He was obviously sustaining emotion. 
 On his ordered young countenance he exhibited the 
 traces of an anguish nobly borne. My companion, 
 who knew him from childhood, addressed him thus- 
 wise: 'Well, Blankie, didn't you have a good 
 time?" Blankie answered: "Are we never to 
 have a play in which there is not an intoxicated man? 
 It is too disgusting. I have done nothing this win- 
 ter but see drunken men on the stage." " The 
 world," my companion smiled on him, " is all too 
 clearly going to the dogs." To me she murmured, 
 " The poor simpleton, he has absolutely nothing in 
 his head, absolutely not a thing. And hear him talk, 
 I beg of you, as if we'd been wallowing in the sink 
 of iniquity." And on him, as he solemnly bowed 
 his head to depart in a motor, very likely his moth- 
 er's, she purposely refrained from smiling a gossip's 
 perfidious good-night. 
 
 As to other inebriate performances this young man 
 was possibly sound. I do not recall them. But his 
 freezing disapproval of Good Gracious Annabelle 
 showed too great a preoccupation with correctness. 
 
 [231 ]
 
 It was his business at Good Gracious Annabelle to 
 be amused. He had no other business there, and 
 if that play did not succeed in amusing him he could 
 only say he failed it or it failed him. He could not 
 successfully raise the question of taste. For the play 
 was so arranged from the start, both by author and 
 by cast, that a neighborliness was aroused in the au- 
 dience, and the one kind of man who could hold out 
 against that neighborliness was the kind that sets up 
 to be better than his neighbor. 
 
 The fable of Good Gracious Annabelle hardly 
 needs to be mentioned. Its object is merely to give 
 a competent cast its chance to be amusing, and to 
 give the author play for her fancy. Everything 
 really turns on the charmingness of Annabelle. 
 Without that, without the fillip to our friendliness 
 that is provoked by a piquant girl, there would be no 
 excuse for taking up with her little adventure. But 
 once we willingly adopt the tone of the good-natured 
 lawyer who is guardian of Annabelle's misfortune, 
 once we second him in taking her under our wing, 
 the humor of her position and its solution becomes a 
 source of constant entertainment. Seeing the penni- 
 lessness of every one with whom she is stranded in 
 her stylish New York hotel, in the midst of giving a 
 luncheon party, the tax on Annabelle's charm as well 
 as her purse is evident. It is actually a farcical situ- 
 ation, but a single trace of farce in Annabelle would 
 change everything. By the art of actress and au- 
 thor, however, this subsidized, extravagant, inde- 
 pendent princess of the American realm manages in 
 every impulse and gesture to capture that American 
 blitheness out of which, one might loosely say, Henry 
 James eked a greater part of his treasure. This 
 
 [ 232 ]
 
 comedy is of a cheaper metal, naturally, but of the 
 same national currency that Mr. James delighted to 
 specialize in, the currency with a winged victory for 
 model. She is irresponsible, this Annabelle, but she 
 does not lose her note of happy expectations and 
 fresh confidence and sensible girlish candor. And 
 when she decides to make her way via the kitchen, 
 with all her friends as fellow-servants, she wins her 
 audience to the extent of their issuing a blank check 
 on credulity. 
 
 Fortunately for the dramatist, there is no limit to 
 the luck through which Annabelle is hired as cook 
 for a Long Island country-house. The swigging 
 little spendthrift whose butler engages her is none 
 other than the man who has come to possess her 
 priceless share of stock. And the man who pays for 
 her luncheon party and who bribes the spendthrift's 
 butler to make him free of the Long Island estate is 
 none other than the man who wants the priceless 
 share of stock, and who, years before, etc.; which is 
 the marvelous secret of the whole play. There is 
 little in these contrivances to justify amusement in 
 Good Gracious Annabelle. They are unusually pre- 
 posterous. But no comedy depends less on its fable, 
 or more on the manner in which each clash of char- 
 acter is heightened and displayed. Displayed, that 
 is, for the sake of a pleasant silliness, of a merri- 
 ment showing that sympathy has been engaged. 
 
 To turn a story of life into an amusing game a 
 dramatist must either have a remarkable plot or a 
 singular prettiness of fancy or a happy gift for en- 
 gaging the sympathy of the audience. It is this last 
 gift that, for most of those who see it, makes the 
 slightness of Good Gracious Annabelle as irrelevant 
 
 [233 ]
 
 as the vagrancy of a perfume. One cares nothing, 
 as one sits at it, about the fatuity of the poet turned 
 gardener or the squalor of the bibulous scullery- 
 maid or the unrelieved drunkenness of the dissipated 
 little heir. All these exhibitions of character and 
 the lack of it come out only as part of a comedy pat- 
 tern, in which the redemption of Annabelle's fortunes 
 is the game at which one plays. She is a ninny about 
 money, just as the hotel detective is an idiot about 
 psychoanalysis, but we never feel that the drunken- 
 ness has any significance except in relation to Anna- 
 belle's escapade, and it is no more a thing to be 
 moralized about than the departure of Don Quixote 
 from pacifism. Unless, of course, we are moralists 
 like the Rockefellers, who unanimously frown upon 
 indulgence in anything except industrial alcohol. 
 The pattern of comedy in Good Gracious Annabelle 
 is quite readily accepted as soon as Annabelle her- 
 self attains our sympathy, and to that she should be 
 sufficiently helped by her completeness as a daughter 
 of the feministic American gods. 
 
 If an Elizabethan came to New York and man- 
 aged the dangerous journey from his hotel to Broad- 
 way and 42nd Street, I do not believe he would find 
 as much amusement inside the theatres as he would 
 on the earth outside, and above the earth, and under- 
 neath. If he sought Turn to the Right, I think he'd 
 be amused by its quips but amazed at its imaginative 
 emptiness and its vapid sentimentality. If he looked 
 to Willie Collier in Nothing but the Truth, I think 
 he'd be surprised at the exaggerations of the accom- 
 plished star's performance and dismayed by the want 
 of dramatic resource and subtlety in developing so 
 good an idea. If he saw The Thirteenth Chair, I 
 
 [234]
 
 believe he'd be intrigued and excited, recognizing 
 some old tricks and many new ones, and seeing dis- 
 tinguished perception in the work of Miss Margaret 
 Wycherly. He might try many other plays, in the 
 mood of a stranger seeking gayety and elation and a 
 flight into the sun of comedy. I believe he could 
 seek farther than Good Gracious Annabelle and fare 
 worse. Neither Miss Vokes as scullery-maid nor 
 Mr. Nicander as the master nor Mr. Roland Young 
 as the poet would offer him performances at any 
 great remove from his own tradition. They'd be 
 likely to amuse him. And if the Annabelle of Miss 
 Lola Fisher failed to pique him, I miss my Eliza- 
 bethan guess. 
 
 January 20, 
 
 [235 ]
 
 FOR THE ELEVENTH TIME 
 
 THERE is no good reason why, if you have lost 
 him, you should seek out the T. B. M. But if you 
 should be looking for him, in all the fat prosperity 
 that is mixed up with corn bread and self-sacrifice, 
 you can easily find him, very hot and probably a lit- 
 tle drunk, at the eleventh reproduction of the Zieg- 
 feld Follies. He sits at the Follies in rows, red- 
 faced and genial and pop-eyed, his dinner an immedi- 
 ate and pervasive recollection, his drink between the 
 acts a happy prospect. The extent to which he gulps 
 at the semi-naked chorus is the greatest tribute there 
 is to the shrewdness of the leg-show producer. 
 Like a large fish floundering after a butterfly, he 
 yearns toward the pseudo-nudity on the stage. Just 
 how much nudity to give the T. B. M. must be a fine 
 problem for the Ziegfeld management, the dullness 
 of giving too little being apparent and the risks of 
 giving too much being obvious. But nudity is un- 
 doubtedly the bait that fetches him to the Follies 
 and it accounts for a good deal of that entertain- 
 ment's otherwise unaccountable success. 
 
 Is there any objection to a semi-naked chorus? 
 Not from me. But I do dislike to see sour, unripe 
 and poisonous entertainment disguised by the over- 
 employment of sex. If the Ziegfeld chorus were 
 clothed in brown jaegers by order of the mayor, the 
 paucity of the entertainment in general would be 
 shockingly revealed. And just because I am not a 
 
 [ 236 ]
 
 tired business man in an active state of anti-prohi- 
 bition I decline to take glimpses of nudity in lieu of 
 every other amusement. The titillation of sex is not 
 of itself a sufficient evening's diversion, not even 
 when the lingerie advertisement becomes incarnate 
 and walks around as a bride-to-be on the stage. 
 
 As against the humbler variety show, with under- 
 trained chorus and garish setting and shoddy clothes, 
 there is always something to be said for the Follies. 
 In everything that calls for a promoter with money 
 at his command the Follies surpasses the kind of pro- 
 duction that was stereotyped years ago. It uses 
 electric light in a hundred ways and uses enough of 
 it to flood a town. It has a large and quite noisy 
 orchestra. The chiffon in one scene alone cost 
 $3,000 or $30,000, and in every scene, semi-naked 
 or the reverse, the costumes of the chorus are bril- 
 liant, audacious, superb. Whatever Mr. Joseph 
 Urban does in the way of decoration is an attractive 
 substitute for the stuffy settings that he came to 
 banish. The blue distance he so often arranges is 
 itself a fine relief in the theatre eye, and is just one 
 note in his suave decorative scheme. But when these 
 excellences have been dutifully contrasted with the 
 slipshod failings of the older or cheaper musical 
 comedy, something does remain to be said on the 
 score of entertainment. 
 
 Two Ziegfeld fans, " released n by whatever firm 
 manufactures these typical New Yorkers, felt it their 
 mission to reenforce the orchestra the night I at- 
 tended the Follies. Male and female created He 
 them, and the male whistled while the female trilled. 
 Judging by the zeal of this pair, much should be said 
 for the music by Raymond Hubbell and Dave 
 
 [ 237 ]
 
 Stamper, and it is only fair in my dullness as to music 
 to insist that this particular music may be excellent 
 of its kind. But if it be agreed that the rhythms 
 of the Ziegfeld Follies are not routine rhythms, re- 
 peating on an elaborate scale the rhythms to which 
 the Ziegfeld patrons have long been accustomed, then 
 they are unique in a production where everything 
 else is routine, the routine humor and the routine 
 sensuousness and the routine Manhattanese mag- 
 nificence. For, in spite of or because of the re- 
 sources that distinguish this lavish production, there 
 is nothing about it to suggest that it was produced 
 by creative human beings. It is, on the contrary, 
 institutional in the sense that a hotel banquet is 
 institutional. And for perhaps that reason, unfor- 
 tunately, it seems to reach the tired business man 
 where he lives. 
 
 There are oases in the glittering desert. Will 
 Rogers in the wise patter that accompanies his rope- 
 act is thoroughly human and amusing, and there is 
 a small dog managed by Russell Yokes that is ex- 
 tremely funny as an inebriate. For the rest, apart 
 from a rare moment or two, there is nothing in the 
 exhibition of the comedians that is out of routine. 
 Poor Bert Williams has an act which is watered 
 down from all the leaves of past performances, and 
 W. C. Fields merely substitutes tennis for billiards 
 in order to repeat his juggling. Miss Fanny Brice 
 has a good deal of cleverness though not much taste. 
 It is only in her caricature of the Egyptian dancer 
 that her particular kind of coarse humor has its op- 
 portunity. Two other comedians, Eddie Cantor and 
 Walter Catlett, try hard, but a dismal memory of 
 bug-humor and jokes about money and the stock rep- 
 
 [ 238 ]
 
 resentation of effeminacy is all that I can now revive. 
 
 There must be a cause for this aridity, aside from 
 the Ziegfeld dependence on the sexual appeal, and 
 I am inclined to think that the biggest cause for it is 
 the undemocratic character of the T. B. M. Of 
 course the T. B. M. will stand for stock patriotism. 
 Few things are more unpleasant than to have patriot- 
 ism the excuse for tableaux in the Follies, and to have 
 impersonators take off Washington and Lincoln and 
 Wilson, but the business man rejoices in this sort of 
 dreadful literalness and applauds " Can't you hear 
 your country calling?" Where the T. B. M. is 
 limited is in his enslavement to prosperity and the 
 narrowness of the life connected with it, and it is the 
 devotion of the Follies to the preoccupations of the 
 prosperous that makes it so dull, outside of its sex- 
 uality. There is nothing humane about any one of 
 the episodes that engross the producers. There is 
 nothing that ventures on such homogeneity as Briggs 
 the cartoonist can count on, or that has a glimmer of 
 the national sentience of George Ade. There is 
 only the showy exhibition of clothes, the " episode of 
 the purse," the " episode of the information bu- 
 reau," the " episode of the telephone wires," the 
 " episode of New York Streets and Subway " the 
 purse, the railroad station, the telephone booth and 
 Broadway all being symbols for the externalized 
 existence of the T. B. M. The fact that sentimen- 
 tality is revealed over the telephone, not money- 
 humor, hardly alters the situation. In the life that 
 Ziegfeld wishes to celebrate there is a place for sen- 
 timentality " episode of the garden of girls." 
 
 He is by no means a regular New Yorker, this 
 sympathetic patron of the Follies. Much more 
 
 [ 239 ]
 
 often he is a business-seeker and business-dispenser 
 from smaller cities, away from home and hungry for 
 excitement. He is out of his safe reins and blinkers. 
 He has no idea how to entertain himself, and every 
 desire to be entertained. It is in boredom and the 
 restlessness of boredom that he goes to the Follies, 
 almost fatuously ready to be lured and allured. 
 
 If the business man were less antisocial there 
 could easily be a leg-show that was also amusing and 
 humane. The present narrowness of his existence, 
 however, tends to keep the Ziegfeld Follies ostenta- 
 tious and empty and dull. Even genuine comedians 
 like Bert Williams cannot break the crust that keeps 
 forming over the producers of the Ziegfeld Follies 
 for the real producers, after all, are the business 
 men in front. 
 
 [ 240 ]
 
 THE POPULAR HIT 
 
 ''iHEY don't come much better than that" I 
 agree with my unknown contributor. It is warm 
 praise, but it gives the first fine, free reaction on the 
 fun of Watch Your Step. 
 
 After all, it is a pleasant thing to live in a small 
 town. Out in the big, cold world you know nobody, 
 and nobody knows you. But here in New York we 
 all know the local gossip, share in the local jokes, are 
 on to the local celebrities. It isn't as if you lived 
 in the great lonely city where people are stiff and 
 formal, where nobody ever " loosens up." I am 
 thinking of centres like Rockland, Me., where the 
 standard is sixteen to one, sixteen seductive silvern 
 remarks on your part to one golden token of silence 
 on the part of the exuberant native. In New York 
 there may be certain provincial drawbacks, certain 
 narrow interests and island ways, but at least when 
 our local talent is let loose we all feel the coziness 
 and neighborliness that comes in a one-horse town. 
 
 Take, for example, our accomplished townsfolk, 
 Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle. Everybody in New 
 York knows the Castles. On Broadway they are in 
 the midst of intimate and often communicative 
 friends. And when Frank Tinney says : " Vern, 
 you'll be in the hall of fame all right, but you'll be 
 there with Tracy the Outlaw, Captain Kidd and all 
 the other hold-ups," everybody sees the jape, because 
 the prices he gets for his dancing lessons are the talk 
 
 [ 241 ]
 
 of the town. And when Mr. Castle says he likes 
 singing, Frank Tinney remarks : ' You say you like 
 singing. Well, you married her." And the roof 
 lifts. They give Mrs. Castle a piece in the show 
 so that she may dance, but her singing is very Chi- 
 nese. 
 
 Vernon Castle is a good deal of the show. Not 
 every one knew he could chant, and it was a surprise 
 when he sat down before two drums and proved his 
 fingers were as rhythmic as his toes. In the play he 
 is a fashionable Englishman, very creditable for 
 home talent, but the chief thing was of course his 
 dancing. There wasn't enough plot in the play to 
 put in a teacup. He simply danced whenever he got 
 rested. Every time Mrs. Castle entered she ap- 
 peared in a new and more lovely costume, sometimes 
 a figured and formal dress, sometimes little more 
 than draperies of exquisite shades. Her perform- 
 ance was a delight, especially when she came careen- 
 ing in and just sailed lightly around the stage. She 
 and he did a polka, the sort of thing people used to 
 dance in the sarsaparilla age, before we discovered 
 that dances could be made up like cocktails and gin 
 fizzes. They gave many of these Bronx, Manhattan 
 and Martini varieties as well, with fifty in the chorus 
 to assist them; all to syncopated music, the music so 
 fittingly named after a very Disastrous disorder of 
 the heart. 
 
 One reason every one in New York is keen about 
 the Castles is that they are the living exhibits of a 
 get-rich-quick romance. Frank Tinney says in the 
 play that Mr. Castle used to be a waiter. Now he 
 takes his salary home every night on a push-cart. 
 In a big city this would not interest anybody, but 
 
 [ 242 ]
 
 every one likes to drink in the appearance of such a 
 marvel in a small place like New York. 
 
 In vaudeville, the most rigid form of entertain- 
 ment, a man is disgraced whose act does not run like 
 a machine. One of the joys of Watch Your Step is 
 the local ease and freedom. The trick dog of vaude- 
 ville becomes in Watch Your Step the " good dog " 
 that calmly lies down when he is told to stand on his 
 head. It is very irregular and wrong. It would 
 never do where people were not at home. But so 
 little sense has this audience of the serious obliga- 
 tions of trick dogs, that they laugh as if the per- 
 former were a friend. 
 
 Another thing characteristic of a genial town is 
 the fun you can have about grand opera. In a big 
 city they take opera seriously. In Chicago people 
 begin to get gloomy at the prospect of opera early in 
 November, and the gloom rests over the entire 
 North Side until the hilarious season of Lent. The 
 first thing Chicagoans thought about when the war 
 broke out was : " Thank God, we can cut out grand 
 opera without letting the cat out of the bag." But 
 in New York a pleasantly " jay " attitude toward 
 opera is quite the thing. Watch Your Step has one 
 scene revealing the Opera House. All the boxes are 
 full of morose men reading the religious news, the 
 only column left in their papers. The ladies' hair 
 is all ablaze with private electric-lighted tiaras, Mr. 
 Edison's latest cultural device not so useful as his 
 cement houses, but almost as beautiful. Several of 
 the patronesses go home, complaining that the sleep- 
 ing accommodations are mediaeval. The stage is 
 first occupied by Caruso, the only opera singer uni- 
 versally known. Caruso is succeeded by Frank Tin- 
 
 [ 243 ]
 
 ney, the carriage caller, who immediately takes the 
 real audience into his confidence about the expert co- 
 median's favorite topic, nothing in particular. 
 
 When an innocent damsel asked her swain to re- 
 peat one of Tinney's jokes in the orchestra, the co- 
 median came forward to remark: " Don't tell her. 
 Make her listen herself." But he was too kind to 
 give her name to the rest of Broadway. Tinney's 
 color in the play was black. He changed his clothes 
 from a carriage caller's to a Pullman porter's, and 
 from the Pullman porter's to a coat room boy's, but 
 like a good comedian, he never changed his face. 
 Because of the plot he was not let come on till the 
 second act, when the plot was removed. As the 
 Pullman porter he made no effort to reach the plane 
 of metropolitan wit. Of the proud father of twins 
 who had just received a silver loving-cup from Colo- 
 nel Roosevelt he solemnly inquired: " Do you get 
 it outright, or do you have to win it three times? " 
 
 Watch Your Step does not keep up a serious plot. 
 The story it tells New York is the story New York 
 likes to hear, the story of its own times, its own 
 foibles, its own favorites. It does not play up to, 
 or down to, its public. Undisguisedly assured, it 
 plays directly with its public, and, cleverly, viva- 
 ciously, successfully, plays on it. There is nothing 
 fulsome about its flattery, nothing transparent about 
 its device. It does not buttonhole New York too 
 rudely or attempt too obvious an appeal. But with 
 a great deal of adroitness and considerable real 
 humor it rolls the ball not too swiftly until the 
 audience is as excited as a kitten. And when it over- 
 takes the ball not too difficult the audience lit- 
 
 [ 244 ]
 
 erally purrs. It is an immensely successful enter- 
 tainment. 
 
 It succeeds because it has a friendly common 
 touch. A stranger from Mars might be puzzled 
 at our motor jokes, our Erie jokes, our Pullman 
 jokes, our hotel and coat room and dancing-school 
 and grand opera humor. He might miss these 
 touches of urban familiarity that make our whole 
 world kin. But it would be his loss. He would not 
 have had the advantages of living in little old New 
 York. 
 
 January 9, 1915. 
 
 [ 245 ]
 
 THE NEGRO PLAYERS 
 
 .NOT long after Mr. Edward Sheldon began his 
 career he wrote a play called The Nigger, which ag- 
 gregated and solidified in one production almost 
 everything that an audience of wine agents might 
 require in a racial melodrama. There was, as I 
 remember it, a rape committed somewhere off stage. 
 There was a lynching in the wings. There was the 
 imminence of a mixed marriage, a drop of Negro 
 blood being discovered in the hero just in time to 
 save the white fiancee. Mobs, I recollect, rumbled 
 around the house where the fated man was com- 
 muning with his soul, and these grim deliberations 
 ended in his renouncing the governorship to which 
 he'd been elected and deciding to devote his life to 
 his own people instead. Such incidents were not 
 selected, as Mr. Thomas Dixon might have selected 
 them, out of a large natural endowment of malig- 
 nancies. Mr. Sheldon had no animus against the 
 Negro, but, like most Americans, he had remembered 
 his newspapers too well. The things he associated 
 with the Negro were the copy-desk conventional 
 things. To the Negro he could discern for himself 
 he had turned a wall-eye. 
 
 This conventionality has its splendid reaction in 
 Mr. Ridgely Torrence's plays which Mrs. Hapgood 
 has just produced at the Garden Theatre. Mr. Tor- 
 rence is an Ohio poet who, looking at the Negro 
 beyond the miasma that surrounds him, has seen 
 
 L 246 ]
 
 something so utterly different that his tenderness has 
 occasionally got the better of him, and he has poured 
 out his heart to the colored people like a hospitable 
 wine. So different are the men and women and chil- 
 dren whom Mr. Torrence has perceived for himself, 
 it is scarcely strange that his impulse should be ex- 
 cessively generous, but one rejoices that this impulse 
 enabled him to share the self-consciousness of a par- 
 ticular group of American citizens as it has seldom 
 been shared before. There are three plays in the 
 programme of the Garden Theatre, the first a com- 
 edy, the second a tragedy, the third a " Passion inter- 
 lude " the incident of Simon the Cyrenian in the 
 way of the cross. And, under the fine direction of 
 Robert Edmond Jones, these plays are acted entirely 
 by Negro players. What marks the occasion in spite 
 of Mr. Torrence's sympathies and the specialty of 
 the players, is not, however, only racial solicitude or 
 propaganda. Not all the propaganda or solicitude 
 on earth can add a cubit to artistic stature, and unless 
 there is artistic stature in a theatrical production it 
 has no excuse for existing. Its purpose may be 
 humane, but no purpose is humane enough to justify 
 inhumane behavior to an art. There is nothing in- 
 humane in the behavior of Mrs. Hapgood's enter- 
 prise. It is, all things considered, as fine an enter- 
 prise as the American theatre has seen for years. 
 It is the emergence of an artistic Cinderella into the 
 palace where she belongs. One undiscovered coun- 
 try in emotional America is Negro country, and these 
 productions have disclosed it in a fresh and vigorous 
 and lovely way. The costumes and scenery by Mr. 
 Jones go far toward making the performances suc- 
 cessful, apart from the dramatist's contribution, but 
 
 [ 247 ]
 
 for myself the actors had unusual power and charm. 
 Had the Negroes been Puritans perhaps they would 
 not speak so musically. Thank the Lord they were 
 not Puritans. Besides their gracious speech there 
 is, despite much amateurishness, a real capacity for 
 creating illusion. The performance of Miss Marie 
 Jackson-Stuart as Granny Maumee had real limita- 
 tions, but I found myself curiously thrilled whenever 
 she raised her empty gaze and declared, " My eyes 
 will yit behold! " Considering the other awkward- 
 nesses in the play my responses were due, I suppose, 
 to the adventitious eloquence of a racial identity 
 between actor and dramatis persona. How could it 
 help being poignant? But the artistic transporta- 
 tion of one's sympathies was accomplished, I think, 
 in the first play, The Rider of Dreams. 
 
 What white man, what white magistrate even, has 
 failed to chuckle over the Negro chicken-stealer? 
 Mr. Torrence has taken a Negro for The Rider of 
 Dreams who has, in some sort, this light-fingered 
 habit, and he has made out of him the chief character 
 in a flashing, lustrous comedy, the kind of comedy 
 that reveals in waywardness such a riding of dreams 
 as only a man touched with the spirit of Puck could 
 imagine. The way Mr. Torrence has caught the 
 poet in his Rider of Dreams, has kept the rollick and 
 lilt of Madison Sparrow without disturbing his in- 
 nocence, is a proof that with delicate art any kind 
 of personality may be established on the stage. But 
 in the intoxicated romance of Madison Sparrow, in 
 the gallop of his imagination, there is no dependence 
 on the popular idea of the Negro. Who supposes 
 that in the whitewashed cabin, the child eating his 
 bowl of mush, the strict woman of the house sprin- 
 
 [248]
 
 kling clothes at the ironing-board to one side, a ne'er- 
 do-well husband will scarcely start his supper before 
 breaking out into a glorious humorous chant, at once 
 racial and personal, which spurns the wife's leading- 
 strings just as much as the laborious earth itself? 
 No one reared on the fodder of newspapers is pre- 
 pared for such a burst of poetry, but the domestica- 
 tion of it by Mr. Torrence is as completely convincing 
 as it is enchanting. The bombast of the child is in 
 Madison Sparrow, as one might expect, but the 
 clouds of glory that stream from him as he wings 
 along are too full of color and delight not to enlist 
 the wilding in every heart. It is good luck that the 
 part fell to an actor like Mr. Opal Cooper who could 
 droop his wings as well as spread them, and exhibit 
 the humor of a Sparrow's fall as well as his rise. 
 
 The tragedy of Granny Maumee does one grim 
 service, it lifts a corner on the Negro aspect of racial 
 hate. Here there is a reversal of that contamina- 
 tion which would thrill wine agents in The Nigger, 
 The contamination which the blind Granny Maumee 
 dreads is white man's blood in a family of royal 
 Negro blood. Mr. Torrence's invention seemed 
 rather feeble in this tragedy, and it was hard to 
 listen to the actress who kept saying of Mr. Light- 
 foot, the white villain, " He Would Have 
 His Way." You felt sorry for her, but you 
 wished she could command a less mechanical utter- 
 ance. The white baby, too (performed by a large 
 doll), was too reminiscent of Broadway acting to 
 make one happy. 
 
 The emotionality of Mr. Torrence reached satura- 
 tion point in Simon the Cyrenian. Why Procula 
 (Mrs. Pontius Pilate) should have pleaded so hard 
 [ 249 ]
 
 for Jesus was not easy to grasp, and there was some- 
 thing not entirely simple about the machinery that 
 projected Simon the Negro into prominence in the 
 story of the Crucifixion. The symbolism of that 
 crown of thorns which Simon also came to wear was 
 not enough to carry the play. And is it not possible 
 that Simon was a poor, trembling, intimidated man, 
 on whom the soldiers laid brutal hands? This would 
 be an irrelevant question if it were not relevant that 
 Simon the Cyrenian provokes irrelevant questions. 
 Its picturesqueness lifts it into interest, however, and 
 keeps it from canceling a victory. 
 
 April 4, 
 
 [ 250 1
 
 VARIA
 
 WHITAKER'S ALMANACK 
 
 most people see it, a desert island is a place of 
 extreme intellectual respectability. Thanks to Dr. 
 Eliot and Sir John Lubbock, we know what that 
 means. It means, among other things, spending a 
 definite portion of each day pondering Plutarch's 
 Lives. And hundreds of thousands believe in this 
 programme, for a desert island. Deprived of ac- 
 cess to current fiction and periodicals, they believe 
 they would there take the literary veil. In the world 
 he lives in, an unregenerate man seldom puts the 
 classic programme in practice. He thinks highly of 
 Spinoza, Aristotle, Gibbon, the Volsunga Saga. But 
 he no more adheres to them than he adheres to the 
 admirable habit of walking eight miles rain or shine. 
 If he were cast upon an ultimate isle, he fancies, all 
 would be different. Should a visiting ship's crew 
 come roving into his secreted lagoon, he would be 
 discovered under a plane tree conning the best trans- 
 lation of the Inferno. Such is his faith in the idyllic 
 character of natural man. It is a pleasant but I fear 
 a fantastic persuasion. 
 
 It has never been my own fate to be cast upon a 
 desert island. I was, however, once cruelly ma- 
 rooned for twelve hours in a small hotel bedroom. 
 There, by the courtesy of the Gideons, I found await- 
 ing me a copy of the greatest book in the world. 
 What were my emotions? Did I gratefully leap at 
 it, plunge into it as a porpoise plunges his beak into 
 
 [ 253 ]
 
 his native seas or a teamster into his native An- 
 heuser? On the contrary, I perused with great care 
 the hostelry's declaration of independence on the 
 back of the door. I read a bit of newspaper that 
 lined the bureau drawer. I knew that the book of 
 Job beckoned me, the story of Ruth, the Song of 
 Solomon. But a strange rigidity of spirit arrested 
 me as I sought to open the Bible. I sank as a valley 
 below the height of formidable culture. I was as 
 water invited to come upstairs. At the other side 
 of the height was the sun. I did not venture to deny 
 it. But the shadows of Dr. Eliot and Sir John Lub- 
 bock painted the approach to elevation an incredibly 
 inky black. I spent the rest of my isolation joy- 
 riding through a time-table. 
 
 Out of sheer subserviency a Bible would go with 
 me to a desert island. I'd take a Shakespeare. If 
 possible, I'd also take a shovel and a lump of chalk, 
 the two other requisites of a noble style. But for 
 recreation's sake, for lazy gratification, I should not 
 depend upon the classics. I would smuggle along 
 with me some such diverting masterpiece as Whit- 
 aker's Almanack. Although English and conserva- 
 tive, Whitaker's is incomparable, the dean of al- 
 manacks. It is to the World Almanac of New York 
 what opera in a foreign tongue is to opera in English, 
 what the Republican party is to the Democratic, what 
 the Martini is to the Clover Club. It is the porter- 
 house, the Corona, the J. P. Morgan of almanacks. 
 This is its comparative excellence. It does not show 
 why Whitaker's is a literary palladium. Perhaps 
 it isn't. These things are matters of idiosyncrasy. 
 But after years of browsing in its rich fields, after 
 nights of long delectation among its placid, saga- 
 
 [254]
 
 clous, indomitable facts, it would be infidelity not to 
 speak for it even in the company of the classics. 
 
 It is not for any " cultural " reason that I should 
 wish to have Whitaker's Almanack on the island. It 
 is not for any utilitarian reason. It is largely, I 
 think, for the immense sense it gives of life, espe- 
 cially Anglo-Saxon life. Whitaker, after all, is no 
 mere collector of reliable and disconnected facts. 
 He is an indefatigable, scrupulous, positive, meti- 
 culous inventory-taker of the universe, " with special 
 reference to the British Empire." He is the kind 
 of man who, in a club, makes you believe that there's 
 no place like home. He is the kind of man who 
 desolates a Pullman car. But strictly under one's 
 own control, obedient to one's whim, assiduous at 
 one's slightest command, he is extremely interesting, 
 even gratiating. And there is a certain humor in 
 him. The unavailing pretentions and unraveled 
 complexities of races and classes amuse him. " India 
 has 147 vernacular languages," he permits himself 
 to marvel, " of extraordinary variety." Why ex- 
 traordinary, when you think of its size? But in a 
 world where an inch of rain is " an inch of rain 
 on the surface of an imperial acre," these foreign 
 things are extraordinary. At the Cape of Good 
 Hope, for example, Whitaker particularizes 13,704 
 Baptists, but he adds: "Of no religion, 1,077,998, 
 of whom 1,047,233 were natives." These imperial 
 shrugs are part of Whitaker's repertoire. 
 
 He begins, as he should, with a conspectus of the 
 solar system. Fixed stars, star clusters, colored 
 stars, clock stars, are duly noted. But my pleasure 
 is not derived from this. It is such a thing as his 
 table of " distance from London to the Capitals of 
 
 [ 255 ]
 
 Europe" that seems ambrosial to me. It is 1843 
 miles from Paris to Moscow. It is 2030 miles from 
 Constantinople to London " with the mails." What 
 of it? Yet such facts engage me. So equally does 
 the fact that Marquess Camden is John Charles Pratt 
 under his title, and that I address him " My Lord 
 Marquess! " So, equally, that the revenue of the 
 Nizam of Hyderabad is 3,000,000 a year and that 
 he is entitled to a salute of 21 guns. Should you 
 need to know the correct salute for the Jam of 
 Nawanagar, Whitaker can tell you. It is a mean 
 ii guns. But the Jam's revenue is only 151,000: 
 the more revenue, the more guns. These lists of 
 potentates serve no purpose of mine. They de- 
 velop no principle. But to read them, to hop from 
 Nawab to Raj Rana, from Rampur to Jind, is to be 
 filled with a sense of magnificence. The world is 
 multiform. From the revenues in opium to the 845,- 
 871,300 oysters produced in France, I proceed with 
 a mind carefree, unconstrained, charmed. I did not 
 know the French ate so many oysters. I did not 
 remember that India depended so greatly on opium. 
 I regard Whitaker as the most startlingly omniscient 
 of men. 
 
 For the incipient vers librist, Whitaker's is a mine 
 of raw material. Take South Africa, with its sor- 
 did materialistic imports, its exports so often primi- 
 tive and romantic. 
 
 Fish, fodder, fruit, 
 Sugar and tobacco, 
 Wine, 
 
 Bark wattle, buchu leaves, 
 Ostrich feathers, mohair, 
 Hides and skins and 
 [ 2 5 6]
 
 Wool. 
 
 Asbestos, whale oil, 
 
 Coal, copper, tin ore, 
 
 Diamonds, 
 
 Dynamite, and 
 
 Gold. 
 
 These are the most trivial offerings of Whitaker. 
 He has 1065 pages. But they may indicate why I 
 decline to be parted with him. He fills me with a 
 sense of importance and virtue. Like business it- 
 self, he is sedative. He twists a tourniquet about 
 the questing, disturbing soul. 
 
 February 5, 1916. 
 
 D257]
 
 THE IMITATION OF CHRIST 
 
 THAT clean sunlit morning she appeared at the 
 door in youthful white, ready for the garden with a 
 pink parasol. She said good morning in her bell- 
 like chest tones, and I stood up with my finger in 
 my book. 
 
 She was a wonderful woman, I thought, a won- 
 derful creation, and I ventured to speculate as to her 
 age. Her hair was still dark, her cheeks faintly 
 tinged with color, but how long her cheeks had been 
 tinged, how long her hair dark, I did not dare to 
 guess. In all the capitals of Europe, as they put it, 
 she had been at home for a generation, her eyes a 
 swift look-out, her nose a cleaving prow, her tongue 
 a keen blade. Various ambitions for this world she 
 had sown and reaped. Her cheek was finely fur- 
 rowed like a harvested field. Her presence in the 
 white doorway made me uncomfortable. I wished 
 to return to my book. 
 
 It is only by accident that such people as ourselves 
 came together mainly the accident of living in a 
 land where guardian railings are uncommon, where 
 it is not the fashion to have walls ivied, and hos- 
 pitable with broken glass. But the accident was 
 chiefly my secret, one which her tilted telescope could 
 not take in. 
 
 She did not know me. That is to say, she was a 
 person of high preoccupations and while I had swum 
 before her vision she had never had occasion to 
 
 [ 258 ]
 
 identify me or to suppose that I could have any 
 significance worth her while. This morning, indeed, 
 I arrested her attention, but largely because her eye 
 roved too incautiously into the room off the veran- 
 da, and the human body is opaque. In this fact, 
 had I remembered it, was my protection. I had only 
 to remain politely mute to go on being inconse- 
 quential. In her eyes I was matter but not neces- 
 sarily organic matter a harmless brick, probably, 
 in the path of her four-in-hand tour. But I did not 
 remember I was a brick. I fancied I was human, 
 and I fancied I was generating a current of atten- 
 tion which it was my instant, impulsive object to 
 divert. Why I should have feared her attention I 
 do not know, but I did fear it, and, standing helpless 
 before her, I instinctively raised my book. 
 
 She gathered, simple soul, that I wished to bring 
 her notice to it. Being timid and therefore ready 
 for any convenient insincerity I at once pretended 
 to myself that I had wished it to find her notice. 
 
 " Have you ever read it? " I asked eagerly. 
 
 Age may be circumvented in other people's eyes. 
 It takes liberties with one's own. She had not her 
 glasses, and she could not read the title. 
 
 ' What is it? " she inquired, as if the pleasure of 
 imparting the title must be mine. 
 
 A sudden sense of incongruity came to me. It 
 was incongruous, in the first place, that I should be 
 reading this book. It was not my habit. It did 
 not represent me. This, as I guessed, could make 
 no difference to her. She would not care if, away 
 from her presence, I stood on my head. But even 
 more incongruous was it to ask her if she had read it. 
 I did not suppose she had. I did not really care, 
 
 [ 259 ]
 
 either. But the embarrassment of our encounter had 
 plunged me into a senseless question and I had to 
 go on. 
 
 " It is," I said brightly, " The Imitation of Christ." 
 
 Had it been Admiral Mahan or the memories of 
 an indiscreet Duchess or the history of the Floren- 
 tines she would have understood. But Thomas a 
 Kempis, presumably, was no friend of hers. Her 
 manner, however, betrayed nothing. She may have 
 had a thought. I do not believe she did. She did 
 not pause for an instant. She felt nothing per- 
 ceptible, no incongruity, no discordancy. 
 
 " Oh, yes," she rose to the occasion. " Isn't it 
 charming? " 
 
 In all the capitals of Europe she had, as I said, 
 pursued a career sufficiently proud. She belonged 
 to the great world and she was a power in it, a power 
 in personal relations through her vigorous and un- 
 scrupulous will, a power through her people in most 
 of the affairs that count. She was an oligarch, an 
 insider. Wherever a strip of red carpet intersected 
 the sidewalk her motor would naturally stop of its 
 own volition, and if the heavens were at that mo- 
 ment raining on the just and the unjust alike an um- 
 brella would spring up by the side of her limousine, 
 like a magic mushroom, and she would go up the 
 steps as unconscious of the machinery of her class 
 as a baby is unconscious of the milk problem. In 
 all the conversation beyond those steps, on politics, 
 on dominion, on character, on art, on style, on en- 
 tourage, on the sultry affairs of men and women, her 
 deep chest tones would be heard resonant and amus- 
 ing, with enough friendliness in it to win attention to 
 her and enough danger to make herself felt. I had 
 
 [ 260 ]
 
 never seen her in action, but even a warship in bunt- 
 ing cannot belie its long predacious guns. She would 
 be heard from in action, and when the smoke cleared 
 away there would be a gash in the other fellow's 
 hide. 
 
 Supposing that she was like this, letting one's 
 fancy play about her, there was an unexpected pleas- 
 ure in her reaction on my morning's book. Charm- 
 ing! She could not invent it. Her tone had that 
 perfect surface which only comes with long practice 
 in intercourse. It was not deferential. It was not 
 glib. It was not heartfelt. It was simple, authori- 
 tative, complete. When she said that the Imitation 
 of Christ was charming, there was no more for any- 
 one to say. It was not impatient or perfunctory. It 
 was, as she held it, adequate. But it closed the door 
 on the subject impartially, without fury or furtive- 
 ness. It quite politely let Christ out. 
 
 Had such a One been to call, had she actually con- 
 fided in me, I do not believe it would have been 
 in any way different. In her set, very likely, the 
 opinions about him would rapidly have been can- 
 vassed. There would have been glowing, excited 
 young women, disturbed elderly women, angry wives 
 of men downtown, a few thin, ascetic, unmarried 
 women in whose dark eyes the experience would be 
 deep. It would have come up at tea. " What do 
 you think of him? What sort of impression did he 
 make on you? " and every one would have gone into 
 the discussion, one of those discussions which are the 
 human equivalent of multitudinous twitterings in the 
 sky. But she, bell-voiced, wrinkled, hawk-eyed, she 
 would have no trouble about accounting for him. It 
 would not occur to her to repel him or discountenance 
 
 [ 261 ]
 
 him. If he fluttered the world she lived in, that flut- 
 tering she would regard with keen malice, without 
 disturbance or alarm. On such a matter she would 
 have equanimity, so long as he did not throw bombs 
 or destroy governments. And she would appreciate 
 his sincerity. " Isn't he charming? " It might 
 readily be conceived. 
 
 As she left me to my book, to walk among the 
 early flowers in the gracious garden, it seemed to 
 me a deity had left me, one who was beyond my 
 good and evil, a creature from another sphere. All 
 the vertebrates, says a big tome, are obviously re- 
 ducible to one style of architecture and she and I 
 are both vertebrates. But I was incapable of re- 
 solving our style. Is it necessary to attempt such 
 things? Is it necessary to make human nature con- 
 gruous? The struggle, if necessary, passes beyond 
 my power. I was content just to watch her making 
 friends with her quick grandchild down the garden, 
 and see them en rapport among the flowers. 
 
 April 29, 1916.
 
 THE SICKBED OF CULTURE 
 
 newspaper made breakfast rosy. Oats were 
 steady. The coffee market had rallied. Linen was 
 moving better. Lard and ribs were easier. But in 
 the late afternoon I bought the Atlantic Monthly 
 and thereupon came to behold the seamy side of this, 
 our mortal adventure. A reactionary tendency, it 
 appears, has developed in the realm of the spirit. 
 There is a sag in culture. Culture is slowly but hide- 
 ously being extirpated from our midst. The Extir- 
 pation of Culture is the very legend of the composi- 
 tion that details our shame. As if it were a weed, 
 a heresy, an abnormal growth, culture is being rooted 
 out and destroyed. Oyez ! Oyez 1 Oyez ! Come, 
 sweaty varlets, scriveners, senators, vestrymen, chi- 
 rurgeons, chymists, draymen, ironmongers and such- 
 like ! Awake to the crisis. Attend to the disgrace 
 and peril of our state. 
 
 It is a woman who appears with bitten visage from 
 the sickbed of culture. Ordinarily she refrains from 
 speaking of these things to the gross multitude. She 
 " habitually says nothing to the professional op- 
 timists in the public square." But there is a time 
 when the worst must be faced. And it is in this 
 mood of chilled yet passionate reproach that our lady 
 Agoraphobia fetches us to the shaded chamber of 
 the culture we are doing to death. Culture, poor 
 dear, " contact with the best that has been said and 
 thought in the world," has had a time in the vulgar 
 
 [ 263 ]
 
 jostle of modernity. As an image of this refine- 
 ment (not as an image of this refinement's defender) , 
 imagine a fragrant New Englander, a reticule in 
 one mitten, perhaps the odes of Sappho in the other, 
 conscious that she is the " disciplined and finished 
 creature," conscious that she is " intellectually ex- 
 clusive," conscious also that " culture is inherently 
 snobbish," being asked to fight her passage into a 
 metropolitan subway. "Step lively!" The im- 
 perative jars the lady. She gingerly boards the train. 
 On the platform there is contact, but it is not pre- 
 cisely " contact with the best that has been said and 
 thought in the world." Do you wonder, seeing her 
 chaste bonnet somewhat tipsy, her lips compressed, 
 an alarming color tinging her marmoreal cheeks, that 
 Barrett Wendell emits a tiny squeal of pain, that 
 Edith Wharton rolls an eye to heaven, that the 
 shades of Pater and Matthew Arnold flutter un- 
 happily? New England culture is laid between 
 sheets, with nothing but the Atlantic for hot-water 
 bottle. 
 
 And who is to blame for this prostration of our 
 precious culture? The gross multitude. Once cul- 
 ture had seclusion. The social scheme did not allow 
 intrusive minions. " Still less would the conception 
 of the public intellect have admitted the notion. 
 Every one was not supposed to be congenitally quali- 
 fied for intimacy with the best that has been said and 
 thought in the world." But now, mainly due to " the 
 increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the pub- 
 lic mind," the slums pour forth dreadful aspirants to 
 culture, encouraged by traitorous Brahmins; science 
 contributes its stinking acid-stained barbarians; prag- 
 matic philosophers take away the guardian standards 
 
 [ 264 ]
 
 of beauty and truth. The angry daughter of the 
 Brahmins descends to slang, the expletive of the con- 
 tinent, in her rage at the invasion. " Science is on 
 top." " The classics are back numbers." We are 
 " overrun by the hordes of ignorance and material- 
 ism." Our children sip English from the founts de- 
 filed by the poor, " an active and discontented ma- 
 jority, with hands that pick and steal." 
 
 Belonging to the upper classes, as she confesses, 
 this gifted prosecutor is certainly entitled to our sym- 
 pathy. For conceive, she is experiencing in her de- 
 gree the loneliness of God. Looking down on the 
 inimical multitude she suffers the pangs of isolation. 
 " I begin to think," she observes sadly, " that our 
 age does not really care about perfection." But 
 since " culture must always be in the hands of an 
 oligarchy," perhaps a voice de profundis might be 
 raised to the heights. It is quite permissible, even 
 if the monitor herself is unfortunate enough to use 
 the German word " kultur " like an ignoramus, to 
 be decidedly severe about the bumptious ignorance 
 of the masses. It is quite permissible to argue that 
 upper-class people are " apt " to arrive through 
 riches at the aesthetic truths. But a passion for ex- 
 clusiveness, a belief in the restriction of cultural sus- 
 ceptibility to the well-nurtured, is all to no purpose 
 if she permits outsiders to come up like flowers. 
 The worst handicaps of the neglected culture over 
 which she wrings her fair hands is not " the material- 
 ism of all classes," " the influx of a racially and 
 socially inferior population," " the idolatry of sci- 
 ence." It is its supersession by another culture to 
 which orthodox culture has not the clue. 
 
 To prevent this rivalry there should be a most 
 [265 ]
 
 vigilant campaign against every new human expres- 
 sion. That is the best way to keep the oligarchy 
 entrenched. If the ignorant foreigners, " immi- 
 grants who bring n6 personal traditions," come from 
 countries of oppression, she must decline to believe 
 that they had a literature and a culture. There is 
 only one culture, our own. Perhaps in steerage you 
 can evoke noises from a Lithuanian that sound like 
 human speech. Yes, but soon that Lithuanian will 
 have " the locutions of the slum." Beware of Lith- 
 uania. Do not pat the strange dog. He might bite 
 a piece out of your culture. What if the young 
 Jewess on the immigrant ship glows with assent 
 when, without Russian or Yiddish or German, you 
 query: Dostoevsky? Gogol? Tchekov? Lermontov? 
 Tolstoy? Schnitzler? Sudermann? Artzibashef? Ib- 
 sen? Strindberg? It is not conversation. It is mere 
 fraternal intercourse through modernity's names. 
 The suppression of such names is the first great neces- 
 sity of a pinhead conception of culture. And what 
 of Poles and Spaniards and Italians and Scandi- 
 navians? What of Constantine Meunier, thrusting 
 Walloons into culture? And H. G. Wells with his 
 counter-jumpers and Bennett with his human inch- 
 worms, merely keeping the earth fertile, and Shaw 
 with that dreadful winnowing fan in his head? 
 These things must be stopped. Upstairs in the Brah- 
 min mansion there is a delicate lady, disturbed by 
 modernity. She hates pathology and economics. 
 She hates that science which " challenged the super- 
 eminence of religion." She honestly cared for things 
 of the spirit, attempted no royal road to salvation. 
 For her comfort it is required that democracy, sci- 
 ence, industrialism, suspend their evolutions. It is 
 
 [ 266 ]
 
 a good deal to ask, perhaps, but she asks in the name 
 of beauty and moral imagination. These, she takes 
 it, she has loved above all others. It is not her 
 fault if she insists with tight acidity. She hates 
 crowds. She is confined within. She cannot take 
 the air. 
 
 October 9 
 
 [267]
 
 A STYLIST ON TOUR 
 
 Vv HEN you speak admiringly of Henry James, 
 the later Henry James, it is the platitude among a 
 large class to say: " Life is too short. I loved the 
 early Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady was 
 wonderful, and I could follow him to The Turn of 
 the Screw, but never again. It is probably my own 
 stupidity, but I can't stand the later style." 
 
 It is a matter of taste, a matter, that is to say, of 
 emotion, and you cannot argue a man out of his emo- 
 tions. But for my own part, I am happy that I 
 enjoy the later labyrinthine James. Had I pos- 
 sessed the open straightforward nature of my 
 friends, had I been more like a locomotive engineer 
 in my own psychology, I do not imagine that a sup- 
 posedly tortuous style could give me exquisite pleas- 
 ure. But if it is discreditable to be like this, at any 
 rate it is a happy viciousness. And I am even sorry 
 for my more straightforward friends. 
 
 It is utterly mistaken and not a little tiresome, 
 however, to believe that this pleasure is all esoteric. 
 If Henry James lacks Biblical simplicity it does not 
 mean that he is not the sincerest of the sincere. A 
 simple style, every one agrees, is the most desirable 
 thing in literature, and there is no doubt that the 
 more completely a man is inspired the more simply 
 he expresses himself. But if a man is in the plight 
 of the analytic, if at the moment of asseveration he 
 is supremely conscious of the kind of man it is who 
 
 [268]
 
 is asseverating, his expression is bound to be com- 
 plex. It is this extreme self-consciousness, this in- 
 cessant introspection, that baffles most readers. And 
 yet there is little reason for being baffled. The 
 greatest literature, no doubt, is the result of a com- 
 pletely confident interaction between head and heart, 
 the authentic utterance of perfect realization. An 
 artist may merely say: " The hare limp'd trembling 
 through the frozen grass." But, so far as that im- 
 pression was concerned, he was simple lord and mas- 
 ter, and the result is to make us lords as well. But 
 if an artist is constantly aware of the dubieties of 
 impression, if he is so scrupulous that he refuses to 
 give currency to any impression without recording 
 the degree and the circumstance of authentication, 
 why should we resent him? Perhaps Mr. James's 
 power to lose himself in any conviction is meagre. 
 Perhaps his interest in his emotions is sometimes 
 monstrously greater than the emotions themselves. 
 Perhaps he weighs his little feelings too preciously, 
 putting his coal as well as his gold in the apothe- 
 cary's scales. But even if his meticulousness becomes 
 impractical at times, becomes an accountancy infi- 
 nitely more delicate than life has any use for, exhibits 
 a craving for adjustment so preposterous that it 
 would petrify all vital processes for its accomplish- 
 ment, the fact remains that few have so succeeded 
 in submitting civilized intercourse to justly sensitive 
 analysis. As for sincerity, it is his god. If he 
 has recorded the last ripple of his emotional pebble 
 it is, in his own phrase, " for sweet truth's sake." 
 
 To re-read The American Scene is to discover 
 how intensely valuable is just this meticulousness. 
 Here, if anywhere, we have the later James, the in- 
 
 [ 269 ]
 
 sistent excoriator, and here, if anywhere, a finikin 
 ineptitude would be betrayed. But a faithful read- 
 ing leaves the sense of a fine, inclusive, meditative 
 spirit, a man who seeks beauty first but who seeks 
 it on the terms of the familiar social comedy in 
 America. No one who does justice to these mild but 
 remorseless discriminations can ever afford again to 
 deprecate the "later James." 
 
 Take, for example, the quite casual characteriza- 
 tions of New York architecture. Looking at the 
 Tiffany building, Mr. James does not dismiss it as 
 a handsome reproduction. To him New York is an 
 " ample childless mother who consoles herself for 
 her sterility by an unbridled course of adoption. 1 ' 
 He does not baldly state that he prefers the Public 
 Library to a skyscraper. " Any building that, being 
 beautiful, presents itself as seated rather than as 
 standing, can do with your imagination what it will; 
 you ask it no question, you give it a free field, con- 
 tent only if it will sit and sit and sit." Similarly he 
 can hit off New York in one phrase as " all for- 
 midable foreground." He can criticize its gridiron 
 form for its " longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet 
 meanly, intersected." He can defend a desired 
 " vulgar " conformity on Riverside Drive by say- 
 ing: "A house-front so 'amusing' for its personal 
 note, or its perversity, in a short perspective, may 
 amid larger elements merely dishonor the harmony." 
 He can illuminate his own diminutive boyhood in 
 New York in a single reference to " the great dim, 
 bleak, sonorous dome of the old Bowery " Theatre. 
 And the clearest note in suburban architecture is 
 struck by his acute response to the houses' " candid 
 look of having cost, as much as they knew how." 
 
 [ 270 ]
 
 Equally searching is his eye for people. He took 
 a " shining steamer " for Jersey on a summer after- 
 noon, and drank in " the immense liberality of the 
 Bay . . . the gayety of the light, the gladness of the 
 air, and above all (for it most came back to that) 
 the unconscious affluence, the variety in identity, of 
 the young men of business." We get social New 
 York at a cotillion : the " collective alertness of 
 bright-eyed, light-limbed, clear-voiced youth, with- 
 out a doubt in the world and without a conviction." 
 He discerns " its instinctive refusal to be brought to 
 book, its boundless liability to contagion and bound- 
 less incapacity for attention, its ingenuous blankness 
 to-day over the appetites and clamors of yesterday, 
 its chronic state of besprinklement with the sawdust 
 of its ripped-up dolls"; disputable, if you like, but 
 intelligibility itself. And who else has so discerned 
 the empty imitativeness of " conspicuous waste " in 
 New York. In worlds otherwise arranged, the oc- 
 casion itself produces the tiara. " In New York this 
 symbol has, by an arduous extension of its virtue, to 
 produce the occasion." 
 
 Vulgarity of various kinds arrested his musing 
 glance. The palaces at Newport he described in a 
 characteristic mixed metaphor as " the white ele- 
 phants, all cry and no wool, all house and no gar- 
 den." The spoiled resort on the East Side had 
 found " that pestilent favor of * society ' which is 
 fatal to everything it touches and which so quickly 
 leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use 
 and uninteresting for any other." He speaks of 
 " the general grimness of the person he deals with 
 over the counter." " The wage-earners, the toilers 
 of old, notably in other climes, were known by the 
 
 [ 271 ]
 
 wealth of their songs; and has it, on these lines, been 
 given to the American people to be known by the 
 number of their ' candies '? " 
 
 He dislikes " the little tales, mostly by ladies, and 
 about and for children romping through the ruins of 
 the Language, in the monthly magazines." He sees 
 many points of the Boston Public Library as " ad- 
 mirable for a railway-station." He speaks of " the 
 Pullmans that are like rushing hotels and the hotels 
 that are like stationary Pullmans." And in the hotel 
 there is " the lone breakfasting child to reckon with; 
 the little pale, carnivorous, coffee-drinking ogre or 
 ogress, who prowls down in advance of its elders, en- 
 gages a table dread vision ! and has the ' run ' 
 of the bill of fare." Vulgarity in more flagrant 
 form he also notes. He met some trying people 
 traveling in the same stage-coach. " They scaled 
 the pinnacle of publicity, and perched on it flapping 
 their wings." 
 
 But it is not all even so temperedly censorious. 
 Many things he loved and endeared, and he has a 
 tender avuncular habit of personifying every single 
 place that attracted him as an appealing feminine 
 presence. New Hampshire, Newport, Central Park, 
 Charleston, Florida each of these personalities 
 became for him alluringly feminine. A proclivity 
 such as this does not fail, in his own pet word, to be 
 " amusing." 
 
 The beauty of America is preserved in these pages, 
 as one might suppose. He could speak of the Amer- 
 ican sky as " often peeled of clouds, in the interest 
 of the slightly acid juice of its light," but there are 
 passages of lyrical tenderness. " I woke up in the 
 New Hampshire mountains, in the deep valleys and 
 
 [ 272 ]
 
 the wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the 
 far-seeing crests of the high places, and by side of 
 the liberal streams and the lonely lakes." 
 
 Deriving ideas from everything he witnessed, Mr. 
 James read more into, and got more out of, demo- 
 cratic possibilities as he penetrated into America. 
 Impatient of the South, of its " pretense of a social 
 order founded on delusions and exclusions," he grew 
 more patient, as he remained, of the national exem- 
 plifications. It is for his sense of these that The 
 American Scene is most worth studying, though he 
 had sharp words to speak of " bagmen " and sky- 
 scrapers, California and " untutored liberty." 
 
 It is nearly ten years old, The American Scene, 
 and by this time it is probably relegated to the top- 
 most shelf. But it is a mistake not to sit with it, and 
 attune oneself to its moderated voice. That voice 
 whispers inimitable revelations revelations which 
 Mr. James's inferiors will, as time goes on, deliver 
 to us as their own, with a " punch." 
 
 May i, 191$. 
 
 [ 273 ]
 
 THE RUPERT BROOKE LEGEND 
 
 ONE may guess what the theme of Rupert Brooke 
 means to Mr. Henry James. His favored word 
 " felicity " perhaps sums it up. Here was a youth 
 whom Mr. James early divined. He saw him first 
 at Cambridge in the splendid setting of the river at 
 the " backs." At " such a pitch of simple scenic 
 perfection " almost no personality could have sus- 
 tained the exorbitant demands of Mr. James's imag- 
 ination. Mr. James has spent much of his career 
 gently commiserating with the world on its heavy 
 failure to fulfill his delicate expectancies for it. But 
 with the figure and the gesture of Rupert Brooke he 
 was immensely, mutely charmed. Like a child that 
 holds his breath lest he disturb a top that is spinning 
 perfectly, Mr. James hovered above the young poet 
 in a familial solicitude. When the top moved off 
 the carpet of England on to the hard boards of for- 
 eign travel, Mr. James was in exquisite trepidation. 
 But the spin was vigorous. Through all the gyra- 
 tions Mr. James at last felt an unexampled Tightness. 
 He was not merely contemplating a phenomenon 
 that aroused his literary imagination. He was en- 
 thralled by a performance that sustained and ful- 
 filled his notions of highest amenity. It was the 
 personal, the social, culmination of Rupert Brooke 
 that most enamored Mr. James. 
 
 And then to Rupert Brooke's nation and tradition 
 
 Letters from America, by Rupert Brooke. Scribners, New York. 
 [ 274 ]
 
 there came an alien challenge. It was a challenge 
 that penetrated to the heart of everything in civil- 
 ized ways that had slowly and richly colored and 
 consecrated for Mr. James. Without a flicker of 
 outside consideration, without a tremor of readjust- 
 ment, Rupert Brooke took up that challenge as his 
 own, willingly risking and losing his life. It was not 
 a sacrifice. It was, in the light of all unspoken 
 preciousness, a consummation. At their face, which 
 proved their real value, it took all the easy affirma- 
 tions of his poetry. He had been the frank heir 
 of a given England. He had enjoyed his heritage. 
 At the challenge he went winging out of it, an arrow 
 from its bow. This was more than the allured spec- 
 tator could have reckoned on. There would have 
 been leniency for almost any behavior. But the hard 
 twang of Rupert Brooke's departure and finish left 
 nothing for Mr. James to surmise. Just because 
 he is exacting he is capable of rejoicing to the full in 
 a perfection. So he celebrates the symbol of the 
 end. 
 
 It is perhaps even a touch beyond any dreamt-of harmony 
 that, under omission of no martial honor, he was to be car- 
 ried by comrades and devoted waiting sharers, whose evi- 
 dence survives them, to the steep summit of a Greek island 
 of infinite grace and there placed in such earth and amid 
 such beauty of light and shade and embracing prospect as 
 that the fondest reading of his young lifetime could have 
 suggested nothing better. It struct us at home, I mean, as 
 symbolizing with the last refinement his whole instinct of 
 selection and response, his relation to the overcharged appeal 
 of his scene and hour. How could he have shown more 
 the young English poetic possibility and faculty in which we 
 were to seek the freshest reflection of the intelligence and 
 the soul of the new generation? The generosity, I may 
 
 [ 275 ]
 
 fairly say the joy, of his contribution to the general perfect 
 way makes a monument of his high rest there at the heart 
 of all that was once noblest in history. 
 
 To share completely this " joy " the reader should, 
 I feel, be at one with Mr. James in the totality of his 
 sense of English Tightness and the totality of his per- 
 sonal sense of Rupert Brooke. For this generous 
 effect, however, these letters from America are thin 
 support. They were casual journalism, of course, 
 never meant to indemnify so lofty a memorial as 
 precedes them. They were addressed, as Mr. James 
 says, with characteristic deprecation, to " a friendly 
 London evening journal." But they are part of a 
 personality about to become a legend. In so far as 
 one's own imagination happens not to nourish a con- 
 viction of English *' exquisitive civility," they are re- 
 quired to justify that conviction, or at any rate to 
 corroborate Mr. James's out of their unaided sub- 
 stance. In the measure that they fail, the outsider 
 is likely to modify " this ideal image of English 
 youth." 
 
 The letters punctuate a journey taken in 1913. 
 It ran from New York to Boston and Harvard, then 
 to Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec and the Saguenay, On- 
 tario, Niagara Falls. By Winnipeg it went to the 
 Rockies, including an excursion to the woods, an im- 
 pression of the prairies and their Indian descend- 
 ants. It went as far afield as Samoa before record- 
 ing the last utterance, the young Englishman re- 
 turned to his own country and reverberating to the 
 news of war. 
 
 ' Touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in 
 the measure of his good faith " so Mr. James 
 
 [ 276 ]
 
 defines Rupert Brooke. But conventional is the first 
 word I should apply to the poet's reactions on, and 
 from, the United States. It is true he was writing 
 for the Westminster Gazette. When he announced 
 he was going to trail his " many-colored mantle " 
 across the United States his friends had exclaimed 
 "My God!" "'El Cuspidorado,' remarked an 
 Oxford man, brilliantly." " One wiser than all the 
 rest wrote : ' Think gently of the Americans. They 
 are so very young; and so very anxious to appear 
 grown-up; and so very lovable.'' But even with 
 such admonitions to remember and respect, there 
 was a chance he might have done more than despatch 
 to England what he had so clearly brought with him 
 out of the vast fusty annals of prejudice. Other 
 Englishmen less recommended for amenity, less iden- 
 tified with the " frequent extraordinary beauty of 
 the English aspect " H. G. Wells, to wit, and 
 Arnold Bennett and even G. Lowes Dickinson had 
 seen in this Philistia something that probed for sym- 
 pathy and understanding. But what Rupert Brooke's 
 so exalted tradition conferred 'was not an ampler 
 sympathy and a swifter understanding. It was, if 
 anything, a pleasant though stuffy immunity. He 
 did not disdain. He brightly, humorously mirrored. 
 But he did not sufficiently penetrate. The love of 
 truth in him was not so keen as to compel him to 
 make profitable conjecture. He was tolerant, very, 
 but not really receptive. He could observe. ' The 
 upper-class head is long, often fine about the fore- 
 head and eyes, and very cleanly outlined. The eyes 
 have an odd, tired pathos in them mixed with the 
 friendliness that is so admirable as if of a perpet- 
 ual never quite successful effort to understand some- 
 [ 277 ]
 
 thing. It is like the face of an only child who has 
 been brought up in the company of adults." But the 
 jocularity of Harvard Commencement was aborig- 
 inal to him. He might have been a later Marius 
 beholding antics at once impossible and picturesque. 
 
 He saw Niagara Falls with poet's eyes. Mont- 
 real, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec, Winnipeg, he in- 
 spected affably and reported with friendliness and 
 wit. But the small, shifty, cruel, mean and untrust- 
 worthy expression of the French Canadian priest, 
 the flabby face, shifty eyes, inhuman mouth of the 
 real estate youth in western Canada, the fabulous 
 vulgarity of the fat Jew in Quebec, were the realities 
 that got deepest between his ribs. Had he not seen 
 the Saguenay and the Rockies, had he not kept on to 
 Samoa, he should have but commemorated nostal- 
 gia. The South Sea Islands captivated him. " Never, 
 clearly, had he been on such good terms with the 
 hour, never found the life of the senses so anticipate 
 the life of the imagination, or the life of the imag- 
 ination so content itself with the life of the senses; 
 it is all an abundance of amphibious felicity." For 
 all the interestingness of his earlier chapters, it is 
 this chapter, and the concluding moment of reverie 
 on the declaration of war, that help him abide. 
 
 To make a memorial to Brooke's personality it is 
 perhaps well that Mr. James should have testified. 
 Brooke achieved in person that miracle of felicity 
 for which the social scrutinizer looks so widely and 
 so vainly. He had not merely the grace of spirit. 
 He had also that gift so unusual outside unwarrant- 
 able romance, the accompanying grace of form. For 
 Mr. James, who had so often detected genius without 
 amenity or amenity without genius, this happy child 
 
 [ 278 ]
 
 of the English intention was something he could pe- 
 culiarly realize. Whether his ecstacy is not too pri- 
 vate, however, is a question his intricate introduction 
 arouses. There are passages in which he seems 
 rather to contract his whole gratification to a class 
 and a clime. This sort of thing is petty. Fine per- 
 sonality is not so esoteric that it requires such a nice 
 scenic and institutional equipment. Had Mr. James 
 written a fifth gospel I have no doubt he would have 
 been completely susceptible. A thousand delicate 
 implications of beauty and nobility and supremacy 
 would have been unfailingly traced. It may be af- 
 firmed, however, that the uninformed took no pains 
 to ensure their Personality against the ineptitude of 
 the crude and vulgar man. They simply spread 
 Him on a record and their brief story has survived 
 for many peoples and many ages. It is that sort of 
 success for a chronicle of the divine which makes 
 one wonder whether it is the infinitesimal adjustment 
 that most signifies, or the clean bravery of the event. 
 
 February 5, 1916. 
 
 [ 279 ]
 
 POETRY
 
 1887-19! 5 
 
 FOR some years past the work of Rupert Brooke 
 was known to a limited circle as that of a bright new 
 light in English poetry. With the war he emerged 
 for a much wider public. In the heyday of youth, 
 he immediately volunteered for active service, and he 
 went out to meet war and possible death with his 
 music attuned. Five heart-searching dauntless son- 
 nets were written in 1914, previous to his departure 
 on the expedition to the Dardanelles. In the ^Egean, 
 before he had written again, it fell to him to meet 
 one of the advance claims of war. He died of an 
 infection on board a French hospital ship at Scyros, 
 April 23, 1915. With his end came every emphasis 
 on his war poems and their great vogue in England. 
 And now, for minds still possessed with the thought 
 of his young death, his complete work is brought in 
 view. 
 
 In his lovely and tender lines on the immaculate 
 conception Rupert Brooke plays humorously with the 
 figure of the Angel Gabriel. He saw the heavenly 
 messenger as proud and changeless, " radiant, un- 
 troubled in his wisdom, kind," but he ventured to 
 suggest the golden wire that kept Gabriel's halo in 
 place. Any portrait that fixes his own attitude as 
 " immote, immortal," invites a similar smile. It is 
 easy, of course, to understand the rapture he inspires. 
 A beautiful soul, says an ancient critic, harmonizes 
 
 The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Lane, New York. 
 [ 283 ]
 
 with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one 
 mould. It is natural that those who ever looked 
 even casually on Rupert Brooke should wish now to 
 emphasize this harmony. The very antithesis of the 
 theatrical poet, he did not need to be named to be 
 noted. Eyes of a steady, fathomless blue looked his 
 strength and sensitiveness. Clear-featured, free- 
 haired, sunburnt, he was one of the most arresting 
 and satisfactorily handsome of men. But he was not 
 a classic marble or in love with classic marble. Ed- 
 ward Thomas speaks of him as " a golden young 
 Apollo." Walter de la Mare recalls " the radiance 
 and repose of an immortal." Gilbert Murray says 
 that he " typified the ideal radiance of youth and 
 poetry." Winston Churchill insists on his " classic 
 symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high, undoubt- 
 ing purpose." Lascelles Abercrombie strings out 
 the words exquisite, unforgettable, supreme, perfect, 
 incomparable, unspeakably beautiful. All this seems 
 to make him " a gold speck in the gold skies." But 
 his work belies it. Like the Mary of his poem, un- 
 der his breast he had " multitudinous burnings." 
 And like her, he was " pitiful with mortality." To 
 forget that is to miss the magic of his swift, way- 
 ward, trenchant, disdainful, winning, reticent, rev- 
 erent spirit. 
 
 He was a singer, not an aspirant to song. Terse, 
 compact, graphic, he was undoubtedly an analyst in 
 his medium. His marvelous gift for words was not 
 all ebullience. But the power that fuses a lyric out 
 of the conglomerate of experience was born in him. 
 He took his impulse from his nature, not from the 
 suggestion of books. The tradition of rhymed form 
 he accepted completely, but he never indentured him- 
 
 [ 284 1
 
 self to great poets. He rose serenely, as they did, 
 out of the amateur. And if he retold the fleeting- 
 ness of love, or fancied wooers turned to dust, or 
 held a muted sob in words, or sharpened his wit on 
 religion, it was because he conceived the poetry in 
 these things anew. Life, one may well see, was not 
 easy for him. It was not so much that he was born 
 into a world of searchlight hostesses and ladies im- 
 pecunious in emotion, a world of tennis and chatter 
 and afternoon tea. These he deflected. But he in- 
 herited the mortgage of the civilized, the handicap 
 of tilled fields and paved roads and deliberate efforts 
 at " sleeping out." No wonder he loved to swim 
 at night. He had imagination and the nostalgia for 
 freedom and danger and magnificence that goes with 
 it. One is conscious of that nostalgia in him, the 
 ache of emptiness, asking for something more re- 
 sponsive than the English girl eprise, something more 
 violent than tennis until the war. But of all this, 
 strangely enough, he made verse. 
 
 At his highest moment Rupert Brooke gave proof 
 that " the harmonious soul is both temperate and 
 courageous," yet the dissonances of his career make 
 his final music sweeter. In these collected poems one 
 is forced by his strict sincerity to observe the fluctu- 
 ant progress of a spirit, and if it were not for the 
 ache and wincing of that spirit, the juvenility and 
 self-consciousness, the defensive wit and aggressive 
 satire, one might believe that his halo also was held 
 by golden wire. 
 
 Never that mere warbler who " is melted and 
 softened beyond what is good for him," Rupert 
 Brooke was still sensuous, sensitive, complicated, in- 
 tensely personal. Too sophisticated from the be- 
 
 [ 285 J
 
 ginning to sing in obvious strains, he arrayed himself 
 against criticism by being critical himself. Even 
 those early poems conceived by the fledgling " on 
 the edge of silence, half afraid, waiting a sign," are 
 guarded against fatuity, " rife with magic and move- 
 ment." But in spite of his fine sophistication he was 
 too much the experiencer to halt because ugliness 
 and disregard afflicted him, because the hunger for 
 love preoccupied him, because the skepticism of 
 youth compelled him to sing certainties when certi- 
 tudes ached for acceptance. He was not the sort to 
 fail of certainties, however little they were; but the 
 life of the modern young man, the life of nature at- 
 tained out of complexity, he was able to reconcile to 
 exquisite phrase and music. 
 
 There are many poems that show his livingness 
 by exposing the bruises of broken flight. These 
 bruises he earned. He had in him much of that 
 ferocity " which only comes from spirit, which, if 
 rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much 
 intensified, is liable to become hard and brutal." 
 This was a tendency in Brooke. Jealousy, Menelaus 
 and Helen, The Voice and A Channel Passage 
 all grimly amusing showed sensitiveness ready to 
 inflict revenge. And delightful as such vigor was 
 in the midst of mawkishness, it beat savagely against 
 a world not concentric with desire. But he was the 
 enraptured as well as the irreconcilable. In Dining- 
 Room Tea and Blue Evening and Town and Coun- 
 try he could surely lift his wings. 
 
 His Phrygian harmonies, " the strain of the for- 
 tunate," had great loveliness in Grantchester and 
 The Treasure, and The Great Lover. His Dorian 
 harmonies, " the strain of the unfortunate," were 
 
 [ 286 ]
 
 more completely music in Peace, Safety, The Dead, 
 The Soldier. " I want to have one harmony war- 
 like," said Plato, " to sound the note or accent which 
 a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern 
 resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going 
 to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other 
 evil, at every such crisis meets the blows of fortune 
 with firm step and a determination to endure." So 
 Rupert Brooke sounded the accent of the brave. 
 Ripe to accept a destiny, he sang of it as few men 
 have ever sung. 
 
 In the present volume there is included a sym- 
 pathetic and subtle estimate by George Edward 
 Woodberry, and a capable biographic note by Miss 
 Margaret Lavington. There is also a romantic por- 
 trait. But neither these last, with their unconscious 
 stress on pathos, nor the final poems, should take 
 one completely away from the treasures of Rupert 
 Brooke's becoming. For he lives in these, and by 
 these too he is entitled to live. 
 
 December 18, 191$.
 
 VACHEL LINDSAY 
 
 OOME people are grudging about genius because 
 they are grudging about divinity. They do not think 
 the common man gives any pledge of divinity. They 
 feel " genius " is an aristocratic attribute and they 
 confine its attribution to the fit and few. This kind 
 of worshipfulness has its mean aspect. It is primi- 
 tive and denigrating. But even those of us who do 
 not kneel readily, who want to say our prayers 
 standing, cannot pretend that genius, the personality 
 which rises out of the mediocre plane and lifts the 
 eye to azure, is a personality frequently met with or 
 easy to be sure of. Glancing back down the Ameri- 
 can vista that is known to us, the personalities that 
 mark a great way of living, that catch the inner eye 
 and feed the inner fire, are so infrequent that the 
 vista is still like a shining street at dawn. There 
 are men of genius in that lane of the sun Lincoln, 
 Whitman, Washington, Emerson, William James; 
 perhaps others whom people better versed can sin- 
 cerely name. But the begetters of the spirit of this 
 nation, the complete and adequate persons of their 
 time who still swing like stars in our vision, find 
 few new companions to keep their stride. 
 
 It is difficult not to smile when Miss Harriet Mon- 
 roe, nervous guardian of the corn-fed poetic chick, 
 speaks of the distinguished Irish poet Yeats " honor- 
 ing " Vachel Lindsay by particularizing him as " a 
 
 A Handy Guide to Beggars, by Vachel Lindsay. Macmillan, 
 New York. 
 
 [288]
 
 fellow craftsman." Mr. Yeats is indeed distin- 
 guished but he did no egregious honor in honoring 
 this poet of Illinois. Perhaps it was wonderful 
 that a listener to the music that whispers in the 
 disengaging twilight should have caught the strange- 
 ness of Lindsay's ruder rhythms rhythms ruder in 
 the sense that orchestra is ruder than solo, or a 
 crowd ruder than a wraith. But from admitting 
 Lindsay's claims on Yeats, obvious enough to any 
 one who sees Lindsay's dimensions, it is a long way 
 to predicting or proclaiming the fullness of his pow- 
 ers. Genius is a large word and to be used warily. 
 It is enough perhaps, to say that here is an emerging 
 figure, a figure youthful and powerful, stone taking 
 wings. 
 
 Against Vachel Lindsay there is something to urge. 
 " Righteousness," he says in the preface of this book, 
 " is as filthy rags." Yet in his poetry there is, if 
 not much righteousness, much dualism of the kind 
 that John Dewey has characterized. " There is no 
 greater tragedy," says Mr. Dewey, " than that so 
 much of the professedly spiritual and religious 
 thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals 
 of self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead 
 of throwing its weight against this dualism of life." 
 Mr. Lindsay is very much a moralizing poet and in 
 his morality there is a great suspiciousness of the 
 devil, the flesh and the world. " No clean human 
 passion my rhyme would arraign," he says of the 
 Russian dancer; but the apogee of The Firemen's 
 Ball is the rage of desire. " By absence of passion, 
 he is made free." The same simplicity of morality 
 comes into his poems on the war "a curse upon 
 each King " and into his poem on Omar Khay- 
 
 [ 289 ]
 
 yam, " a book of the snares of earth." The indig- 
 nation of the verses against white slavery, against 
 the United States Senate, " swine within the Senate," 
 and the contrary celebration of John P. Altgeld do 
 one good. But it is an expensive orgy when one 
 thinks of the " shining universal church," the " angel- 
 song," the world of moral Dutch Cleanser and spirit- 
 ual Sapolio, in which the poet richly rejoices. His 
 idea of " a land transfigured " is a dreadful one. It 
 is a sort of perpetual World's Fair and Christmas 
 card and Sunday School picnic rolled into one. Sa- 
 cred capitals, clean temples, millions of boats pad- 
 dled by angels with silver oars on a festive lagoon, 
 " and silken pennants that the sun shines through " 
 his heart bounds with zeal at this vision. " Sages 
 and sibyls now, and athletes clean, Rulers of empires, 
 and of forests green ! " these throng his paradise. 
 And he thinks happily of " halls with statues in 
 white stone to saints unborn to-day." " Creed upon 
 creed, cult upon cult," " shrine after shrine " he 
 craves incense, ritual, censers; he has an enormous 
 appetite for communal buildings gleaming in a com- 
 munal sun. This is a side of his inspiration which 
 leaves the present writer cold, though one of his 
 finest poems is religious, Heart of God. 
 
 O great heart of God 
 
 Once vague and lost to me, 
 
 Why do I throb with your throb to-night, 
 
 In this land, eternity? 
 
 O little heart of God 
 Sweet intruding stranger, 
 You are laughing in my human breast, 
 A Christ-child in a manger. 
 [ 290 ]
 
 Heart, dear heart of God, 
 
 Beside you now I kneel, 
 
 Strong heart of faith. O heart not mine, 
 
 Where God has set His seal. 
 
 Wild thundering heart of God 
 
 Out of my doubt I come, 
 
 And my foolish feet with prophets' feet, 
 
 March with the prophets' drum. 
 
 The beauty that is in this poem is not the clamant 
 beauty of The Congo and General Booth and the 
 unpublished poems that Mr. Lindsay recited to many 
 audiences last spring. But where the recited poems 
 often need Mr. Lindsay's reading, as a roll of film- 
 needs the instrument to project it, there are many 
 poems like Heart of God, not glorious boom, boom, 
 boomelays or clang, clang, clangelays, that live for 
 a solitary reader. It is characteristic of Mr. Lind- 
 say that he does not always write for solitude. As 
 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty 
 attested, and as this present volume now attests, he 
 has his fullest being in association with fortuitous 
 crowds, people in the common ways of life, people 
 addressed and trusted as imaginative, and all born 
 attuned to poems that have in them the beat of the 
 waves of the blood. Were one asked by Mr. Lind- 
 say if it were possible to go through Florida and 
 Georgia and North Carolina, New Jersey and Penn- 
 sylvania, Missouri and Kansas, reading poems to 
 pore white trash and blockade whisky Americans and 
 old Southern ladies and railroad conductors and col- 
 lege boys and undertakers and farmhands and pious 
 grandfathers and Mennonites and livery-stable keep- 
 ers and stackers in the harvest-fields one might 
 
 [ 291 ]
 
 have doubts as to the value or even the expedience 
 of his mission. But because he has vigor and cour- 
 age, a hunger for romance whetted by years of life 
 in Springfield, Illinois, a yearning for enchantment 
 in the face of American flatness, he has been able 
 to find in the hills and fields of the South and the 
 plains of the West many deep and dear responses to 
 his searching heart. Not always is one satisfied with 
 his playfulness. He is too strenuously the sprightly 
 poet, the humorsome disciple of St. Francis, the reso- 
 lute adventurer insisting on a picturesque world. 
 But such strictures are not final. A Handy Guide 
 to Beggars is too varied to be invalidated by any 
 one squeamish reaction to it. It is much too full 
 of loveliness and fun, happy invention and sudden 
 shivering song, to be disregarded because young Illi- 
 nois feels he ought to feel like a fighting-cock and 
 starts to crow without showing cause. 
 
 I say loveliness. There is the family in the Blue 
 Ridge. Lindsay describes it and the people in it, 
 " nothing to remind one of the world this side of 
 Beowulf." " An inner door opened. It was plain 
 the woman who stood there was his wife. She had 
 the austere mouth a wife's passion gives. She had 
 the sweet white throat of her youth, that made even 
 the candle-flame rejoice. She looked straight at me, 
 with ink-black eyes. She was dumb, like some one 
 struggling to awake." These people have bad news 
 while their guest is with them. A brother brings 
 word that the host's mother is ill. There is the 
 host's refrain: " I can't think of anything except my 
 dying mother. I can't think of anything except 
 mother is going to die." In the morning Lindsay 
 leaves with this emotion : " A money-claim has defi- 
 
 [ 292 ]
 
 nite limits, but when will you ever discharge your 
 obligation to the proud and the fine in the House of 
 the Doom? You intruded on their grief. Yet they 
 held their guest sacred as their grief." 
 
 The fun of A Handy Guide for Beggars plays 
 over special incidents and general conclusions. 
 There Is the general conclusion as to the tramp and 
 his Missions. " A mission, an institution built by 
 speed-maniacs who use automobiles for speed-mani- 
 acs who use box-cars." The special incident of a 
 hideous coal town is amusing. " I'm awful glad to 
 see a white man," confesses his host. " This place 
 is full of Bohunks, and Slavs, and Rooshians, and 
 Poles and Lickershes (Lithuanians?). They're not 
 bad to have around, but they ain't Cawcasians. 
 They all talk Eyetalian." He read his poetry to 
 that family. " No, kind and flattering reader, it 
 was not above their heads. Earnestness is earnest- 
 ness everywhere. The whole circle grasped that I 
 really expected something unusual of those boys with 
 the black-diamond eyes, no matter what kind of per- 
 versity was in them at present. I ... dreamed 
 that this ungoverned strength before me, that had 
 sprung from the loins of King Coal, might some day 
 climb high, that these little wriggling, dirty-fisted 
 grandsons of that monarch might yet make the world 
 some princely reparation for his crimes. After the 
 reading the mother and father said solemnly, ' it is 
 a good book.' ' 
 
 Here is one of the poems Mr. Lindsay read: 
 
 LINCOLN 
 
 Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all, 
 That which is gendered in the wilderness, 
 From lonely prairies and God's tenderness. 
 
 [ 293 ]
 
 Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream, 
 Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream, 
 Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave, 
 About that breast of earth and prairie-fire 
 Fire that freed the slave. 
 
 No one who fails to read this travel book should 
 believe that he knows Vachel Lindsay or all fine 
 things that American literature has to show. Lind- 
 say makes New Jersey no less poetic than Georgia. 
 Democracy is not with him a phrase. It is some- 
 thing poignant of the people. It supposes an ab- 
 sence of classes, a conjunction of all kinds of hu- 
 man beings. It is that faith in the excellence of 
 human beings which makes life worth living. It 
 finds that excellence by inclusiveness. It is different 
 from any other and all other religions. It has at 
 root a kind relation to God because it has a kind 
 relation to man. It is more than liberty, equality 
 and fraternity. It is a feeling that the mortal planet 
 is a good and decent place to live in and on. It is 
 the thing Lincoln had. It is the thing Whitman 
 had. It is the thing Emerson partly had. It is the 
 thing that the West has, and not the East so much, 
 the thing that the Negro took away from the South 
 and yet the thing that abides, though not singularly, 
 in America. It is the thing that elects one man 
 president rather than another in time of war. It 
 may be religious. Perhaps it is. It comes down 
 from the mountains, it walks among the people^ it 
 plows through snow to say who shall be president. 
 Of course Lindsay is too simple about books. He 
 is not fair to the men who do not live among sense 
 impressions. He is not fair to the men who give 
 their lives to truth, the doctors, the men of letters, 
 
 [ 294 ]
 
 the lawyers, the men who strive for balance, the 
 men who will not gamble their lives, like the har- 
 vesters. He has crude gestures, this emerging poet 
 of Illinois. He has intonations of the preacher and 
 fancifulness of the infant wearing a paternal silk 
 hat. He finds it hard to forget Hathor, the Rose of 
 Sharon and ambrosial nouns. He forces his note. 
 But to say these things is not to reach the kernel. 
 Where else in this country of emergence is there in 
 combination nationalism so free and swinging, reli- 
 gion so vigorous, human contact so unprejudiced, 
 beauty so adored? Sometimes it is the adoration of 
 beauty we attend at, mere services in her name. But 
 not seldom he is at the heart of conviction and 
 ecstasy and splendor. The man who tramped as a 
 beggar through our states could afford to go light 
 because of his affluence. He had every man for his 
 comrade. He went afoot with a people. He 
 marched with the moon and the sun. 
 
 November 18, 1916. 
 
 
 I 295 ]
 
 NEW GROUND 
 
 you twitch your ears for a small boy you 
 create a special and apparently inexhaustible crav- 
 ing. You cease to be an ordinary human being in 
 that boy's eyes, you become an incarnated ear- 
 twitcher. The sole justification for your existence, 
 as he sees it, is your delicious faculty for twitching 
 your ears. In this respect the small boy is not un- 
 like the American people. The American people is 
 not quite so simply pleased but if you once do deeply 
 please it, if you once become identified in its vague 
 monstrous mind with any particular gesture or in- 
 tonation, you cannot get much response from it ex- 
 cept by duplicating the performance that aroused 
 and fixed its taste. You may not wish to repeat it. 
 You may, like Peter Dunne or Mark Twain or 
 George Barr McCutcheon or O. Henry, have a few 
 little intentions of your own. But there is some- 
 thing slow and obdurate about the public. Like a 
 horse, it is hard for it to form an idea. Once 
 formed, an idea is a devil's pitchfork in its brain. 
 
 Because of this trait in the public Songs and 
 Satires will probably be disappointing. In Spoon 
 River Anthology Mr. Masters did more than write 
 poetry. He presented his poetic themes in a way 
 peculiarly dramatic. His method, obviously, made 
 for striking success with the public, and it created 
 the notion that as an inventor of method Edgar Lee 
 
 Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. Macmillan, New York.
 
 Masters stood supreme. Only a madman would 
 have harped on the original device, and Mr. Masters 
 is not a madman. In the absence of another 
 startling device, however, he has not the same salt 
 of novelty, and those who savored just the novelty 
 in Spoon River will undoubtedly deem Songs and 
 Satires flat. 
 
 Mr. Masters, however, is the same Mr. Masters. 
 Different in method and varied in theme, Songs and 
 Satires is penetrated with the same quality as Spoon 
 River Anthology. And because Mr. Masters is a 
 deep poetic spirit, one of the greatest in the America 
 of our time, it would be an immense pity if the ab- 
 sence of a certain special excitement should keep the 
 readers of Songs and Satires from finding the treas- 
 ures inside. 
 
 As to the essential Mr. Masters there are various 
 opinions. Out of Loudonville, Ohio, there recently 
 came one unspoiled opinion, straight from a suffer- 
 ing heart. " Spoon River," said the Loudonvillian, 
 u is not life, it is death. It does not present life 
 truly, wholesomely. It does not satisfy the de- 
 mands of the poetic nature. It is too earthly. It 
 creeps like a reptile through slime and evil. We are 
 depressed; our imagination is destroyed, and we 
 close the book with a disgust for its vulgarity. 
 There is life in this book, say what you will. But it 
 contains none of the ' noble and profound applica- 
 tions of ideas to life.' ' 
 
 At this opinion one may imagine Mr. Masters 
 himself lightly smiling. One may imagine admirers 
 and advocates of his receiving it with wrath. But 
 why should a poet, a fine poet, so disgust and de- 
 press and perplex? Why should he seem slimy and 
 
 [ 297 ]
 
 vulgar and unwholesome? Mr. Masters is big 
 enough to make any attempt at a reasonable answer 
 worth while. 
 
 The best man to answer, so far as I know, would 
 be Thorstein Veblen. If one thinks Masters big as 
 a poet, it would be feeble not to apply that word 
 or some more eulogistic word to Veblen as a social 
 analyst. The confusions that arise about Mr. Mas- 
 ters are due to his arrival on the stage at a period 
 of economic and moral transition. For the right 
 clues to this transitional period there is no observer 
 so fertile, so brilliant, so inexorably honest as the 
 author of The Theory of Business Enterprise. 
 
 What the man from Loudonville is butting into, 
 in Spoon River and Songs and Satires, has a quite 
 terrific name. It is, in the jargon beloved of Mr. 
 Veblen, " the cultural incidence of the machine proc- 
 ess." Under the circumstances, evidently, the 
 Ohioan kept his temper remarkably well. The dif- 
 ference between him and Mr. Masters is a consider- 
 able difference. It is a difference, using another 
 catchword, in " norms of validity." The Ohioan's 
 norms rest " on conventional, ultimately sentimental 
 grounds; they are of a putative nature. Such are, 
 e.g., the principles of (primitive) blood relationship, 
 clan solidarity, paternal descent, Levitical cleanness, 
 divine guidance, allegiance, nationality." Being an 
 honest, conventional man, he argues de jure. His 
 characteristic habits of thought are " habits of re- 
 course to conventional grounds of finality or validity, 
 to anthropomorphism, to explanations of phenomena 
 in terms of human relation, discretion, authenticity, 
 and choice. The final ground of certainty in in- 
 quiry on this natural-rights plane is always a ground 
 
 [ 298 ]
 
 of authenticity, of precedent, or accepted decision." 
 He is, in short, a normal " conservative " man, and 
 his disgust and distress over Mr. Masters is due to 
 the fact that Mr. Masters is one of the first poets to 
 become really articulate in a civilization affected by 
 the machine. 
 
 " On the whole," says Mr. Veblen, " the number 
 and variety of things that are fundamentally a-nd 
 eternally true and good increase as one goes outward 
 from the modern West-European cultural centers 
 into the earlier barbarian past or into the remoter 
 barbarian present." Loudonville, in this connection, 
 stands for the remoter barbarian present; and Mr. 
 Masters for the number and variety of things that 
 are decreasingly good and true. 
 
 It is no wonder that Mr. Masters is out of touch 
 with many sincere Americans. He is breaking new 
 ground poetically, ground that " is neither ecclesi- 
 astic, dynastic, territorial, nor linguistic; it is indus- 
 trial and materialistic." One discerns all through 
 Songs and Satires that this has come to pass. Mr. 
 Masters belongs definitely to an age and sphere that 
 has new habits of thought. It is dissonant with fine 
 literary tradition. But those whose experience and 
 sympathies have been similar to Mr. Masters's, can 
 see that it is not his personality alone which gives 
 the troublous accent to his work. 
 
 " The machine process throws out anthropo- 
 morphic habits of thought." ' The machine proc- 
 ess gives no insight into questions of good and evil, 
 merit and demerit, except in point of material caus- 
 ation, nor into the foundations or the constraining 
 force of law and order, except such mechanically en- 
 forced law and order as may be stated in terms of 
 [ 299 ]
 
 pressure, temperature, velocity, tensile strength, etc. 
 The machine technology takes no cognizance of con- 
 ventionally established rules of precedence; it knows 
 neither manners nor breeding and can make no use 
 of any of the attributes of worth." ' The machine 
 is a leveler, a vulgarizer, whose end seems to be the 
 extirpation of all that is respectable, noble, and dig- 
 nified in human intercourse and ideals." " To the 
 technologist the process comes necessarily to count, 
 not simply as the interval of functioning of an initial 
 efficient cause, but as the substantial fact that engages 
 his attention. . . . The process is always complex; 
 always a delicately balanced interplay of forces that 
 work blindly, insensibly, heedlessly. . . . The prime 
 efficient cause falls, relatively, into the background 
 and yields precedence to the process as the point of 
 technological interest." 
 
 Taking these bits from Mr. Veblen, torn bleeding 
 from their context, the question is whether Songs and 
 Satires does really in any way correspond. For the 
 most part, as I see it, it does correspond. It is not 
 in one poem that Mr. Masters seems to me to repre- 
 sent that modern population which Veblen calls 
 iconoclastic and materialistic. It is in the general 
 temper and animus he has about life. That popu- 
 lation is said to be " growing more matter-of-fact in 
 their thinking, less romantic, less idealistic in their 
 aspirations, less bound by metaphysical considera- 
 tions in their view of human relations, less mannerly, 
 less devout." They have here a poet who shares 
 their habits of thought. It does not matter whether 
 Mr. Masters is writing a poem about motherhood 
 or Godhead, about Bryan or St. Francis, about mor- 
 tality or Jesus or the Loop or romantic love. He 
 
 [ 300 ]
 
 may supplicate the Lord or eulogize Simon Sur- 
 named Peter or brood over Dead Faces or sing of a 
 mistress In Michigan, but in every case his " norms 
 of validity " are the norms of a new manner of feel- 
 ing and thinking, a manner to which most of us are 
 not habituated, a manner which it is sheer delight 
 to find so beautifully sung. 
 
 If a man fail as artist one resents especially any 
 difference in his habit of thought. A machine- 
 process version of the Jesus story, in which the 
 savior is a buoyant radical fighting the Bar Associ- 
 ation and the Civic Federation, might easily be an 
 exasperation or a joke. But when one has come to 
 it after the wit of the poem on Bryan, the sense of 
 human process in So We Grew Together, the agony 
 of In the Car, the humanity of Simon Surnamed 
 Peter, " one of our flesh," one is acclimated and has 
 sympathy to spare. So it is with the conversation 
 between man and God on the subject of electrons, or 
 the Michigan Avenue mistress In a Cage. So it is 
 with the mordant Arabel and the eloquent bitterness 
 of The Helping Hand, and the portrait of William 
 Marion Reedy, unless you happen to be the person 
 the poet calls " dung." 
 
 When a man chooses to write poetry about funda- 
 mental themes, about love and God and death and 
 pain and sorrow and war and failure and desire and 
 spring, he cannot let his feelings come through those 
 poems unless he has accepted a way of taking life. 
 Mr. Masters is a man of forty or so, skeptical, un- 
 sentimental, unloyal, deharmonized. Against faith 
 in anything but a vague " radicalism " and the evi- 
 dence of his senses he reacts vigorously. He is not 
 merely rational, like poets of the eighteenth century. 
 [ 3oi ]
 
 He writes of men de facto with a strong refusal to 
 explain them or at any rate explain them away. 
 The exciting thing, however, is to discover how a 
 world so remorseless and harsh can sing to the ear 
 of this poet, how phenomena so little ameliorated 
 can be so rich in communicable feeling. There are 
 " silences," of course. Love is a Madness is a si- 
 lence. What You Will is a silence. Arabel, A 
 Study, Portrait of a Woman, bespeak inexplicable 
 processes and moods. The ballads of Launcelot 
 are archaic tapestries. St. Francis and Lady Clare 
 is more intentional but hardly more affirmative. 
 The Altar, like For a Dance, is a jeweled song. 
 But the main tenor of the volume is to affirm as 
 lyrical and beautiful in their own way the new norms 
 of validity, the only norms that this age is likely to 
 know. O Glorious France is less characteristic, 
 more obviously " noble and profound." It is a 
 paean to men not Chicagoan, " prophetic and enrap- 
 tured souls." But it stands almost alone. 
 
 A mixture of narrative and dissertation is com- 
 mon in Mr. Masters. He employs it in matter-of- 
 fact idiom in most of his longer poems, in swinging 
 verses elsewhere: 
 
 So he stepped from the Sun in robes of flame 
 As the city woke from sleep. 
 He walked the markets, he walked the squares, 
 He walked the places of sweets and snares, 
 Where men buy honor and barter shame, 
 And the weak are killed as sheep. 
 
 The shorter lyrics, of which there are many, are 
 nearly all rhymed. But there is one unrhymed lyric, 
 The Altar, with these words in it: 
 
 [ 302 ]
 
 Thy face is the apple tree in bloom ; 
 
 Thine eyes the glimpses of green water 
 
 When the tree's blossoms shake 
 
 As soft winds fan them. 
 
 Thy hair is flame blown against the sea's mist 
 
 Thou art spring. 
 
 Another use of rhyme in narrative may be illus- 
 trated from In the Cage : 
 
 For dancing you have cast 
 Veil after veil of ideals or pretense 
 With which men clothe the being feminine 
 To satisfy their lordship or their sense 
 Of ownership and hide the things of sin 
 You have thrown them aside veil after veil ; 
 And there you stand unarmored, weirdly frail, 
 Yet strong as nature, making comical 
 The poems and the tales of woman's fall . . . 
 You nod your head, you smile, I feel the air 
 Made by the closing door. I lie and stare 
 At the closed door. One, two, your tufted steps 
 Die on the velvet of the outer hall. 
 You have escaped. 
 
 " Why life hurts so " is not the male's normal 
 inquiry. But in his Portrait of a Woman, a woman 
 of whitened hair, Mr. Masters is unwontedly tender: 
 
 You seem to me the image of all women 
 Who dream and keep under smiles the grief thereof, 
 Or sew, or sit by windows, or read books 
 To hide their Secret's looks. . . . 
 Perhaps your pathos means that it is well 
 Death in his time the aspiring torch inverts, 
 And all tired flesh and haunted eyes and hands 
 Moving in pained whiteness are put under 
 The soothing earth to brighten April's wonder. 
 [ 303 ]
 
 In these forty-five poems, half of them fairly long, 
 there are not more than a dozen unrhymed verses. 
 If one can speak of technique apart from the sum 
 of a poem, Songs and Satires is technically remark- 
 able. But the supple and diversified method is only 
 a sign of the nature finding voice. 
 
 April 29, 1916. 
 
 [ 304 ]
 
 ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 \\ E seem to be getting new popular notions as to 
 rhythm. It is not so very long since Ruskin raged 
 about Wagner pretty much as he raged about 
 Whistler. It was the correct philistine performance 
 to resist the rhythm of Wagner and set him down as 
 noise. People have already forgotten this senseless 
 conservation. The conceptions of dance rhythm and 
 verse rhythm have similarly, recently, emancipated 
 themselves. For many years the dancing " master " 
 had complete charge of the thing called choreog- 
 raphy, and he cared for nothing but the most regular 
 rhythms. In poetry it was practically the same. 
 " Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow 
 jumped over the moon " the sublimations of this 
 rhythm were enjoyed as " real " music, especially 
 when achieved by the great Algernon Charles, and 
 fun was made of Walt Whitman. It was not felt 
 then so much as now that whatever the beauty 
 of Swinburne's rhythms Whitman's had their own 
 beauty, to which every ear could become attuned. 
 The wonder now is that everyone did not perceive 
 right off that the modern flexibility in verbal rhythm 
 was no more extraordinary than the flexibility in the 
 rhythm of dancer or sculptor or painter or musician. 
 The free rhythms of Mr. Carl Sandburg are a fine 
 achievement in poetry. No one who reads Chicago 
 Poems with rhythm particularly in mind can fail to 
 
 Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. Holt, New York. 
 C 305 ]
 
 recognize how much beauty he attains in this regard. 
 But the more arresting aspect of Mr. Sandburg's 
 achievement is, for myself, the so-called imagistic 
 aspect; the aspect, that is to say, which the subject- 
 matter itself reveals. The rhythm, one may insist, 
 is part of the imagism one may resent having 
 the so-called subject-matter considered separately. 
 Rhythm, however, is far from the dominant novelty 
 in Carl Sandburg, and it is convenient to assume 
 that his rhythms are delectable to many who yet do 
 not admit the beauty or originality of his way of 
 approaching the world. 
 
 The originality of the imagist approach can 
 scarcely be long disputed. Never before has there 
 been such firm seizure of the object to be presented. 
 Never before has the impression of the moment 
 been so poignantly dramatized. Make a contrast, 
 for example, between the Anacreon verse on an old 
 man and the Sandburg verse on a baby. One is a 
 brief description, the other a brief characterization. 
 The comparison is not on all fours but at least it is 
 suggestive of just that quality in the modern poet 
 which is making imagism what it is. Take the old 
 man first: 
 
 Gray are my temples long since and snowy my hair : 
 Gracious youth is departed ; old are my teeth, 
 Brief is the space of sweet life that is left to me now. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg's verse runs this way: 
 
 The child's wonder 
 At the old moon 
 Comes back nightly. 
 She points her finger 
 To the far, silent, yellow thing 
 [ 306 ]
 
 Shining through the branches 
 
 Filtering on the leaves a golden sand, 
 
 Crying with her little tongue, " See the moon ! " 
 
 And in her bed fading to sleep 
 
 With babblings of the moon on her little mouth. 
 
 Each of these poems is an epigram and each char- 
 acterizes a special period of life, but the antique 
 epigram is generalized still-life, the modern is par- 
 ticularized life in motion. Contrast in turn the 
 Greek light-house speaking, and the fire in the 
 bowels of the earth. Says the light-house : 
 
 No longer dreading the rayless night-mist, sail toward me 
 confidently, O seafarers; for all wanderers I light my far- 
 shining torch, memorial of the labors of the Asclepiadae. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg gives his conception this unity and 
 emphasis: 
 
 KIN 
 
 " Brother, I am fire 
 Surging under the ocean floor. 
 I shall never meet you, brother 
 Not for years, anyhow; 
 Maybe thousands of years, brother. 
 Then I will warm you, 
 Hold you close, wrap you in circles, 
 Use you and change you 
 Maybe thousands of years, brother." 
 
 The amazing difference, as it strikes me, is the 
 skill of the modern in concentrating attention. The 
 presenting of a figure, a picture, an image, is, as quo- 
 tation will show, a frequent consequence of the 
 imagist purpose. But Mr. Sandburg illustrates 
 above all the intensity, the momentousness, that is 
 
 [ 307 ]
 
 gained by declining to refer each object to some 
 remoter cause, by tending to treat each object as self- 
 contained, purposive in its own measure, dynamic. 
 " I am the Great White Way of the city." " In 
 western fields of corn and northern timber lands, 
 they talk about me, a saloon with a soul." " I am 
 the crumbier : to-morrow." " They offer you many 
 things, I a few." " I am the nigger, Singer of 
 songs." " Here is a tall bold slugger set vivid 
 against the little soft cities." " I am a copper wire 
 slung in the air." This is not a trick. It is simply 
 a pushing of the imagination to the centre of the 
 will. And even where there is no such unity as the 
 will provides another kind of composure is secured, 
 a visual composure. There is none of the laxity 
 that comes from splitting attention several ways. 
 Consider these envisagements of a commonplace 
 world : 
 
 FOG 
 
 The fog comes 
 on little cat feet. 
 
 It sits looking 
 over harbor and city 
 on silent haunches 
 and then moves on. 
 
 NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD 
 
 Stuff of the moon 
 Runs on the lapping sand 
 Out to the longest shadows. 
 Under the curving willows, 
 And round the creep of the wave line, 
 Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters. 
 Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night. 
 [308 ]
 
 WINDOW 
 
 Night from a railroad car window 
 
 Is a great, dark, soft thing 
 
 Broken across with slashes of light. 
 
 At first these poems may appear too innocent of 
 self-interpretation to mean anything, too impression- 
 istic to compel the name of beauty to give that 
 completion which has no shadow and knows no end 
 beyond itself. But such exquisite realization of the 
 scenes that gave Mr. Sandburg the mood of beauty 
 is in itself a creation of the beautiful. Mr. Sand- 
 burg has such art in representing these scenes and 
 the actors in them that doubt as to his capture of 
 beauty could only occur to a person filled with a 
 wrong expectation. If expectation is unfulfilled, in- 
 deed, it can almost certainly be deemed wrong, for 
 these imagist verses are as good as any of their kind. 
 
 But this is not to say that all of Mr. Sandburg's 
 poems are inspired. I am not much impressed by 
 his vision of Chicago. This is not because Chicago 
 fails of poetry. In some ways Chicago is hideous. 
 It is noisy and harsh as a construction camp, chaotic 
 as a collision, raw as a wound. It is fringed by a 
 dirty rim of railroad track. It is gathered up into a 
 centre for the apparent purpose of being suffocated 
 with an iron " loop." Even inside its girdle the 
 streets are narrow and savagely paved and the alleys 
 obscene. Outside the loop the city sprawls for miles 
 and miles, desolate in stretches half-occupied, con- 
 gested in manufacturing districts and baleful slums. 
 Beneath a tarnished sky it fumes on its busy way, 
 bleak in winter, sweltering in summer, without gra- 
 ciousness, dignity, pride. But for all this ugliness 
 
 [ 309 ]
 
 there is something about Chicago not like the im- 
 bruted employer of children and leech of factory 
 girls and general blusterer and roustabout that Mr. 
 Sandburg concocts for us. Mr. Sandburg is quite 
 right that children work, " broken and smothered, 
 for bread and wages," but Chicago is not legitimate- 
 ly " haunted with shadows of hunger-hands." No 
 more is it a laughing giant. It is a work-shop, but 
 largely a work-shop for business enterprise, a waste- 
 ful, inundated, scrambling, shoddy, manufacturing 
 city, a city irradiated to a marvelous degree by hope, 
 by faith, by charity, careless, generous, inefficient, as 
 well as coarse, husky, cunning, strong. 
 
 October 28, 1916. 
 
 [ 310 ]
 
 THE WAR
 
 BELGIUM 
 
 IT is easier to be wise about Belgium now. It is 
 easier to see now that the people of Belgium were 
 wrong to trust their safety to a feeble international 
 pledge. They were wrong to live unsuspecting on 
 the brim of an imperial volcano. But going back 
 to July, 1914, and putting oneself in the place of a 
 small Belgian professional man, a doctor or a lawyer 
 or a school-teacher, putting oneself even in the place 
 of M. Maeterlinck, it is difficult to imagine what he 
 personally could have been doing for security. The 
 Belgian was born without consultation into one of 
 those small sovereignties that really exist on the suf- 
 ferance of more extensively organized sovereignties. 
 He was born in literal mortal danger on this account. 
 But the major part of politics in most countries is 
 ordinary party politics, ward politics. The thing 
 that most occupied the Belgian schoolmaster was 
 probably the row with the local priest and the 
 flagrant illiteracy of his district; that and his interne- 
 cine racial quarrel. He had little to do with inter- 
 national relations and their contingencies. He was 
 not thinking of Uhlans, machine guns, abdominal 
 wounds, franc-tireurs, indemnities, ambulances, rape, 
 mutilation, soup-kitchens, flight, any more than peo- 
 ple in New London or Old London were thinking 
 of them. He was probably thinking, in July, 1914, 
 
 The Wrack of the Storm, by Maurice Maeterlinck. Dodd Mead, 
 New York. 
 
 313 ]
 
 of strawberries, Charlie Chaplin and picnics. And 
 then, up in Olympia, the Old Guard of Germany 
 decided to let him have it full in the face. 
 
 Waiving for a moment the unwarrantable weak- 
 ness of Belgium, which Belgium did not realize, the 
 temper of the German invasion has to be imagined. 
 It was not malignant. It was, to start with, merely 
 roughshod. When the Germans were mobilized in 
 their gray-green myriads, so formidable, so efficient, 
 they undoubtedly had a collective fear of Russia and 
 her ally France and a collective sense of an inimical 
 England. As they marched to their mobilization 
 trains, roses in their rifle-barrels, women by their 
 side, they were thinking grimly of Russian and 
 French mobilization. They had less than nothing 
 against Belgium. But once the ruler of Germany 
 and his agents had ordered the invasion of Belgium 
 there was nothing for the German army to do but 
 invade Belgium. So the German schoolmaster and 
 doctor and lawyer went forward, quite aware that 
 the maneuvre contemplated for many years was about 
 to be carried out, but not at all translating that 
 maneuvre, or wishing to translate it, into terms of 
 Belgian misfortune. 
 
 There is something so hideous about such an im- 
 position of force that one seeks to blame it on the 
 man higher up. One seeks to agree with pro-Ger- 
 mans of one's acquaintance that Belgium was in- 
 evitably chosen in the line of callous military neces- 
 sity. These " inevitables " are, however, too easy. 
 It is quite appropriate for M. Maeterlinck to say 
 toward the end of his book: " If our enemies prove 
 that they were deceived and corrupted by their mas- 
 ters, they prove, at the same time, that they are less
 
 intelligent, less firmly attached to justice, honor and 
 humanity, less civilized, in a word, than those whom 
 they claimed the right to enslave in the name of a 
 superiority which they themselves have proved not 
 to exist; and, unless they can establish that their 
 errors, perfidies and cruelties, which can no longer 
 be denied, should be imputed only to those masters, 
 then they themselves must bear the pitiless weight." 
 This is profoundly true. If it could be inevitable 
 that the German people had to join an army that 
 in turn was obliged to invade Belgium, what sort of 
 .people can they be deemed? 
 
 Much is possible, of course, in a great nation 
 where the people defer to the high control of their 
 rulers and military chiefs and have little to say as 
 to their journalists, their clerics, their educators. In 
 such a nation public opinion is so nurtured that it is 
 hard to imagine the people's temper and will. It is 
 mere sentimentalism, however, to assume that the 
 German public made no assents to war. It is, in 
 fact, inconceivable that the European war could have 
 been launched even by rulers with their hands on the 
 lever of universal military service unless there was 
 a state of mind receptive to it in Germany. That 
 receptiveness was not all due to the will to war. It 
 was not all due to premeditation. There was much 
 warranted righteousness in Germany's attitude to- 
 ward Russia and England. She had more than once 
 seen their maps of diplomacy on which the mountains 
 bristled like bayonets and the rivers gleamed like 
 swords. But these maps bristled and gleamed all 
 the more intensely because there was in the German 
 patriotic heart the self-assurance, the animosity, the 
 deeply inculcated nationalism, the narrow interpreta- 
 
 [ 3i5 ]
 
 tion of foreign relations, the reciprocation to war, 
 for which any Zabernist might hope. It is incon- 
 clusive to assert that individual Germans did not 
 realize or proclaim these things. One must judge 
 by massed Germans. A glass of water looks color- 
 less, the sea is green. 
 
 The guilt of the invasion of Belgium lies deep on 
 the German people. How deep the guilt is, books 
 like M. Maeterlinck's make known. It is a curious 
 thing that German public opinion did not so reject 
 in advance the infamy of invading Belgium as to 
 keep the general staff from incurring it. The day 
 had passed when a national misunderstanding with 
 France could be availed of, even by a calculated lie 
 similar to Bismarck's, but Russia and England re- 
 mained as enemies whom the world might conceiv- 
 ably have come to side against. On the day of mo- 
 bilization millions of fair German heads must have 
 been lifted proudly at the thought of engaging a 
 blunderingly brutal power like Russia, of laying low 
 a rival craftily respectable like England. But such 
 brave pride loses its glamour when one thinks of a 
 squalidly hideous entrance into European warfare 
 by a half-protected back-door. It is the dirtiest act 
 of a dirty predatory tradition common to England, 
 Russia, France, Italy, Belgium, as well as Germany 
 itself. 
 
 For many years M. Maeterlinck lived apart from 
 Belgium. He spent his time in France, an artist in 
 sensibility, in pensive and decorative sadnesses, gen- 
 tle metaphysic. The Belgium of those days was not 
 the obvious dependent of to-day. It had, indeed, no 
 genuine security. It held nothing but a valueless 
 note at sight on a supposititious international con-
 
 science, but it was apparently a successful prosperous 
 semi-industrial land, the Belgium of Leopold and the 
 Congo. The Congo! When Germany began to 
 treat the poor Belgians as if they were as little 
 human as the Congoese, M. Maeterlinck's imagina- 
 tion inflamed. He became, by virtue of his literary 
 reputation, the voice of his nation's tragedy. He 
 went to Milan in November, 1914, and to Rome 
 in March, 1915, to appeal to Italy; and in London 
 in July, 1915, he addressed an audience of sympa- 
 thizers at the Queen's Hall. These addresses, to- 
 gether with all the essays he published in any way 
 relating to the war, and a sketch written in 1886 
 called The Massacre of the Innocents, are collected 
 in this volume. And in its pages there is the echo 
 of horror, anguish, despair, hatred. He is, in truth, 
 the spokesman of a ruined country, a country which 
 it is beyond the power of man to compensate or 
 restore. A new Belgium, indeed, will succeed to 
 the Belgium known to M. Maeterlinck and ourselves. 
 The earth will fructify again. But the Belgium of 
 which he now writes as a patriot has been destroyed 
 in spirit and in flesh. 
 
 Nothing the Germans required for their develop- 
 ment can be held to justify this sacrifice, and no 
 philosophy but the basest predatory philosophy can 
 excuse them. Belgium remains, and ought to re- 
 main, the inescapable accusatory witness in the pres- 
 ent war. Belgium is not a witness to the virtue of 
 France or Russia. It is only slightly a witness to 
 the enlistment of England in the war. But it is 
 definitely, helplessly, immovably, a proof that the 
 German military authorities could count on the Ger- 
 man people, could formulate a filthy code and secure 
 
 [ 3i7 ]
 
 its application, could disregard world-wide presump- 
 tions as to honor and responsibility. When all this 
 is said, however, even with the eloquence and lofti- 
 ness of M. Maeterlinck, there is no wisdom in it but 
 the wisdom of recrimination and punishment. It 
 ties dead Belgium around the neck of living Belgium. 
 It declares for remorseless vengeance. " In reject- 
 ing hatred I shall have shown myself a traitor to 
 love." 
 
 Hatred is as fruitless as love to restore the Bel- 
 gium that the Germans destroyed. The German 
 people should not escape the practical consequence 
 of taking to the sword. They should not emerge 
 from the war in shining armor. They should emerge 
 after conclusive defeat. But this defeat, which is 
 now probable, should not be greeted exultantly by 
 the friends of Belgium, any more than the friends 
 of the Congo should rejoice to have seen Belgium 
 seared. M. Maeterlinck sees Germany as intrin- 
 sically base. He sanctifies the duty of punishment. 
 He demands an eye for an eye. It is the spiritual 
 blindness of all men agonized. If the prostration, 
 of Germany could secure international peace there 
 might be some purpose in M. Maeterlinck's tenor. 
 No such purpose really exists. In dealing with crim- 
 inals there is no value in the doctrine, an eye for an 
 eye. As M. Maeterlinck indicts the Germans they 
 are criminals, but something beside hatred must be 
 brought to the case. 
 
 The whole world is involved in the case of Bel- 
 gium. M. Maeterlinck would have had the whole 
 world join in punishing Germany, and that is under- 
 standable. But quite as important as the lesson 
 from reprisal is the establishment of Belgium and
 
 states like Belgium on a basis that makes violation 
 a breach of organized union rather than a breach of 
 treaty diplomatically private, suspicious, insincere. 
 The best way to hate the Germans that ruined Bel- 
 gium is to hate the nationalistic anarchy that made 
 the invasion of Belgium an irresistible short-cut in 
 the game. 
 
 It is perhaps this issue, not clear in M. Maeter- 
 linck's volume, that begins to develop for the re- 
 flective mind. Not the kind of mind represented by 
 timid neutrality, nor yet the kind of mind represented 
 by a solicitude for the German vote. Belgium was 
 not once mentioned at the Republican National Con- 
 vention, and it seems to have sunk out of American 
 electioneering consciousness. It remains, however, 
 the symbol of the detestable international system 
 which gave birth to the European war. Those who 
 question that system will be sympathetic to M. Mae- 
 terlinck but not satisfied by him. 
 
 October 14, 1916. 
 
 [ 319 3!
 
 PATRONIZING THE WAR 
 
 MAX EASTMAN does not pretend to reach his 
 " understanding " of Germany through any prefer- 
 ence for things German. His understanding is the 
 outcome of his general mode of thinking and merely 
 part of his theory for the war. If an ordinary par- 
 tisan spoke of " understanding Germany " it would 
 mean only one thing, it would mean he excused and 
 favored Germany. In Max Eastman's case it means 
 that he declines to see Germany as the agent of 
 trouble in an international system otherwise prac- 
 ticable. It means that he sees Germany quite clear- 
 ly as the first European " part " that buckled in a 
 system that was bound to end in trouble ; and there- 
 fore, regarding the system as questionable, he feels 
 it idle to blame the faulty German part in particular. 
 The thing to do is not to recriminate. What is the 
 use of getting angry with a defective mechanism? 
 The subject is to be approached in the manner of 
 the psychologist, the diagnostician. The only pos- 
 sible service is to prescribe against its recurrence. 
 
 In no place does Max Eastman use any such trite 
 mechanistic phrase as " system," but that remains the 
 interpretation one has to put on Understanding Ger- 
 many. It is not merely that he pleads that the Ger- 
 mans are human. He implies that their behavior 
 his been inevitable. You are indignant about Bel- 
 Understanding Germany, by Max Eastman. Kennerley, New 
 York. 
 
 [ 320 ]
 
 gium? he asks. You ought to be indignant about 
 " the causes of war." You resent the raw and brutal 
 frankness as to the violation of Belgium. How 
 about the refined and tactful casuistry as to the vio- 
 lation of Greece? You are inflamed over the atroci- 
 ties. How about the " atrocities committed by Eng- 
 lish, French, Russian, Serbian soldiers? " You hate 
 " German " militarism. There is no such thing as 
 German militarism. The Germans are not a dif- 
 ferent kind of people from the English. They are 
 the same kind of people placed in different circum- 
 stances. F. S. Oliver and Lord Roberts talked 
 " militarism " just as the Germans did. So does 
 General O'Ryan in New York. If you hate militar- 
 ism, " do not delude yourself into imagining it is 
 Germany that you hate. It is yourselves as you will 
 become, if the dreams of your munition-makers and 
 gold-braid patriots are realized." 
 
 There is, of course, a purpose in this mode of 
 thinking about the war, ?his mechanistic talk about 
 the same people in different circumstances. It is 
 revealed with Max Eastman's suggestion of a super- 
 society, of patriotism and the way to manage it, of 
 supra-nationalism and the way to end war. Like so 
 many men whose temperateness seems almost a cause 
 for reproach, who appear unconcerned in the face 
 of struggle and agony, Max Eastman discloses him- 
 self as outside partisanship not because he is in- 
 human but because he sees no hope for humanity in 
 making militancy the helmsman, sees hope for it only 
 in directing that pugnacious energy inherent in man- 
 kind against mindless opponents incorrigibly un- 
 friendly and lawless. He believes that an insep- 
 arable condition of the present war is nationalisnij
 
 that if people thought and felt supra-nationally, wars 
 like the present one could not happen. Patriotism 
 is egoism, we ought to hate it as a cause of war. 
 Like other egoism, it is incurable. It inheres in 
 human nature and comes out in the pseudo-organism 
 of the nation. But it can be attached to a new unit, 
 and we can alter the environment so as to remove 
 the " occasions " of international war. " Offer that 
 instinct of self-identification a larger group to which 
 it may cling." You cannot root out patriotism but 
 you ought to fix the " habit of loyalty " to a league, 
 a union, a greater state. That state, drawn out of 
 the disorder of nations to-day as the smaller state 
 was drawn out of tribes and clans, is as yet only a 
 promise and a hope. In spite of that, the abolition 
 of war, the federation of the world, is " a matter of 
 Christianity and good business." The wiser inter- 
 nationalist capitalists see it as such. And when they 
 abolish war, with the aid of the socialist, " we can 
 the more assiduously attend to our gentle crime of 
 abolishing capitalism." 
 
 This is not inhuman. Compared with the intem- 
 perateness about Germany among the leisure class 
 in America, it is the acme of humanity. It is, never- 
 theless, extraordinarily smug and condescending and 
 bland. What one seeks in Max Eastman is not par- 
 tisanship with either set of belligerents, much less an 
 advocacy of fighting. Every one deplores the waste- 
 fulness of pugnacity. But one does seek an imagina- 
 tive realization of the national beings and the human 
 beings involved. The war is a hellish thing to have 
 happen in Europe, a mad thing, a culpable, an atro- 
 cious. No one knows what will be the outcome for 
 future international relations, so savage are the pas- 
 
 [ 322 ]
 
 sions now seething. But the situation having arisen, 
 whatever the selfish and sinister causes, it cannot be 
 imaginatively conceived by an internationalist as if 
 it were happening on Jupiter. 
 
 Max Eastman takes the attitude that the war is 
 a sort of delirium tremens, a debauch, and " uninter- 
 esting." If man were born for socialism alone, to 
 behave according to the presumptions of the social- 
 ists, that might be a pardonable way of taking the 
 war. But however egregious the war may seem 
 from the standpoint of systematization, it is not 
 egregious so far as Frenchmen and Germans and 
 Russians and Belgians and Austrians and Turks and 
 Englishmen and seven other combatant governments 
 are concerned. And as this fight is fought, self-iden- 
 tifications for the future will be decided. By the ce- 
 ment of blood men will establish many new political 
 arrangements. To stand aside, therefore, and pat- 
 ronize the war, talk of it smoothly and smugly, is 
 about as insufferable as it is for the ruling class to 
 patronize poverty. If a man has any pretensions to 
 public spirit he has not only to theorize for society. 
 He has to take the public as it finds itself, not as he 
 would prefer to have it. He cannot refuse to deal 
 with it unless it behaves like a Little Lord Fauntle- 
 roy. It is a pose, of course, to say the war is unin- 
 teresting, but underneath the pose there is a sincere 
 impatience with actuality, a contempt of facts for 
 falling out as they do. To be in love with love is 
 the sophomore's characteristic, to fail of love the 
 moment the human object falls below one's expecta- 
 tion. Something of the same trait is exhibited in 
 Max Eastman's relations to society. Because the 
 is distasteful he regards it as inconsequential. 
 [ 323 1
 
 He discusses it without genuine appreciation of its 
 immediate throbbing problem and pain. 
 
 It comes, I suppose, from the excessive simplifi- 
 cations to which Max Eastman is prone. Knowing, 
 as his note on Nietzsche shows, that it is silly to be 
 too simple about egoism in human beings, he himself 
 underestimates the difficulty of adjustment between 
 national beings, though the Civil War in this coun- 
 try is such a terrific commentary on the prescription 
 of a new " habit of loyalty." There is no system 
 that can ensure the perfect relations of personalities, 
 and nations are personalities as well as mechanisms, 
 with " causes of war " on every side. To distribute 
 the blame equally in the present instance, on the 
 ground that both sides are human, is also too dam- 
 nably simple. Germany is not a figment, neither is 
 Russia, neither is England. Once before Germany 
 had her individual will of Frenchmen, to the point 
 of taxing them, and very nearly succeeded this sec- 
 ond time. Such things are consequential for gen- 
 erations. They are, if you like, unpleasant un- 
 pleasant as smallpox in the next street. But they 
 aren't uninteresting. Only a pathologist who saw 
 human beings exclusively as guinea pigs and had be- 
 come bored with smallpox could afford to take that 
 view. , The pathologist, one may retort, appears in- 
 human merely because, like Max Eastman, he is 
 curative by the wholesale rather than the retail. 
 But there are symptoms in Max Eastman of the 
 intellectualist who thinks that man exists for his 
 theory rather than the theory for man. 
 
 Such intellectualism can be given an illustration. 
 Only a while ago it was the fashion of socialists to 
 
 [324]
 
 pooh-pooh patriotism. It did not fit in with the 
 theory of the international solidarity of labor, and 
 for that reason it was conveniently said and felt to 
 be negligible. That fashion has passed. It is in. 
 line with a new maneuvre that Max Eastman should 
 take patriotism with the seriousness already indi- 
 cated. Patriotism is now one of the unalterable 
 facts of human nature. The motive of patriotic 
 fighting is now a native impulse of our constitutions. 
 The backbone of the sentiment of patriotism is hered- 
 itary. Patriotism is incurable. It " is a fighting 
 self-identification with the gang, the tribe, the nation. 
 It is there in our human hearts forever." And so 
 on. '' This fact has been ignored by those immersed 
 in the economic interpretation, because the instinctive 
 nature of man was not discovered until after eco- 
 nomics got well under way. But we might as well 
 acknowledge it now." 
 
 Having authorized the " instinctive nature of 
 man," Max Eastman explains the war with all too 
 little trouble ("I have brought to the task the equip- 
 ment of a psychologist ") . 
 
 The causes of war are innumerable, but the underlying 
 condition without which, no matter what causes arose, wars 
 could neither begin nor continue, is that egregious fighting 
 identification of self with a nation which is neither German 
 nor English (nor even Irish) but a general human attribute. 
 This is the thing we ought to be hating ; instead we are cul- 
 tivating it in ourselves by hating another nation. 
 
 If one had refused to defer to the " solidarity of 
 labor," when it was in fashion, why should one now 
 defer to this new psychological interpretation, equally 
 
 [ 325 ]
 
 complete and equally bland? The " causes of war," 
 in point of fact, are no easy matter to diagnose. The 
 sublimation of nationalism may meet some of the 
 causes, difficult as that sublimation will be to accom- 
 plish. But the problem is not simple, when one race 
 can quite frankly profit by exterminating another, as 
 the white race profited by exterminating the red, and 
 when one government can quite frankly plot to betray 
 another into war, as Bismarck's Germany plotted to 
 " do up " France. These things do not fit into for- 
 mulas. They ought not to be glibly explained. 
 
 There is this, however, to be said in favor of Max 
 Eastman's Understanding Germany; an extreme ra- 
 tionalism about Germany is serviceable in an Amer- 
 ica that is filled with empty cant about the war. 
 
 There is a kind of human being who anatomically 
 resembles a sausage, all meat and very thin as to the 
 skin. That is the kind of human being who most 
 of all wants the Japanese hustled to the trenches 
 and the United States to declare war on Hoboken, 
 who is willing to have the war last forever so that 
 he can retain his peace of body. He sits in gloom 
 because Germany is not yet beaten. Germany af- 
 flicts him as something indigestible might afflict him, 
 something that upsets the place where he really lives. 
 
 When you consider that the world is full of such 
 people as this, the German and the English world as 
 well as the American, you hesitate to criticize any- 
 one who has the clean, amazing temperateness of 
 Max Eastman. You realize that such antiseptic 
 thinking as Max Eastman's has fineness and rare- 
 ness, that it is beyond the capacity of most people 
 even to initiate, and beyond all but a very few to 
 sustain. The world in which Max Eastman lives is 
 
 [ 326 ]
 
 so different from the blind forest of grunting and 
 rooting vitalities that the mere reminder of it is a 
 final criticism of lives which proceed without vision. 
 You have to dissociate your own criticism of Max 
 Eastman from those criticisms that would be the re- 
 sult of enragement. Once you do it, however, you 
 may say that his vision of the war is, like most 
 visions, open to certain objections. To put those 
 objections intelligently is not easy. It is not easy 
 to discriminate against any man who aims at detach- 
 ment without feeding the base prejudices that pick 
 up every partisan word. But there are too few Max 
 Eastmans in the United States to have his vision of 
 the war presented without venturing one's estimate 
 of it, whatever the risk of pleasing the obtuse. 
 
 January 13, 1917* 
 
 I 327 ]
 
 BEYOND PATRIOTISM 
 
 AMERICANS have known for some time that the 
 English philosopher Bertrand Russell came into con- 
 flict with his government because of his lectures and 
 has been repudiated by his university and restricted 
 in his civil liberties. What this has meant not many 
 Americans have inquired. Some have said: Eng- 
 land is at war. Bertrand Russell is in conflict with 
 the authorities. The authorities may not know 
 much about philosophy, but they probably know what 
 is best. If they don't, it is too bad, but Bertrand 
 Russell must put up with it. You can't expect such 
 luxuries as " freedom of speech " in time of war. 
 
 The most famous of stories deals with a lofty im- 
 perial judge who exhibited the inadequacy of the law. 
 The inadequacy of the law is a twice-told tale. But 
 no one, not the clerks of sacred legend or the mas- 
 ters of corrective comedy, not Rabelais or Swift or 
 Voltaire or Heine or Ibsen or Shaw or Anatole 
 France, has ever done complete justice to the gift 
 of humanity for misunderstanding, to the irony of 
 smallness in power. Authority insists on reverence. 
 Authority in the person of some frantic abortioner 
 asks for universal humble acquiescence as he pro- 
 ceeds to his act of abortion. This is the bitter ex- 
 travaganza to which generation after generation has 
 been invited, for which docility is inculcated and eti- 
 quette arranged. As if authority had never robed 
 
 Why Men Fight, by Bertrand Russell. Century Co., New York. 
 [328]
 
 itself to embody hate and fear, men who would never 
 stoop to infamy themselves readily align themselves 
 with legalized infamy. And they do not even sus- 
 pect their own dishonor. 
 
 It is a good deal to ask of anyone in wartime, even 
 of an American who is three thousand miles from 
 the slaughter, to employ his sense of justice. But 
 the sense of humor, if not the sense of justice, is 
 absolutely required in Bertrand Russell's case. Here 
 is a human being who has brought to the considera- 
 tion of the war an intellect of extraordinary scrupu- 
 lousness, an imagination penetrated with conscious- 
 ness of human values, a broad and serious sense of 
 responsibility, a complete emancipation from per- 
 sonal motives and a complete independence of class 
 and party and creed. He is not a person of any 
 dubious ethnic origin. He is not an unstable Celt 
 or materialist Jew or lamentable Hindu. If a man's 
 pedigree as an Englishman had to be tattooed on 
 him, Bertrand Russell's could have been tattooed 
 from memory by any one of a hundred country-house 
 beldames. He is as English as cricket. He did 
 not care foj his country, it is true, the way Lord 
 Northcliffe cares for it, the way William Randolph 
 Hearst cares for this country. Nor did he propose 
 to give free rein to his beloved country, leaving it 
 to its dear devices, the way New Englanders gave 
 free rein to their indulged New York, New Haven 
 and Hartford. Bertrand Russell loved his country 
 but not as if it were a Joss, a thing of profit, or a 
 slut. He did not accept the same relation to it that 
 inquisitors once accepted to their religion, that moun- 
 taineers do to their moonshining, that peasants do 
 to their Black Hand. In the hour when many sim- 
 
 [ 329 ]
 
 pier men flung themselves under the Juggernaut of 
 patriotism, Bertrand Russell felt true patriotism to 
 be the control, the guidance, the sublimation of that 
 tremendous sacrificial impulse. He saw his country- 
 men go to war and he knew it was for their common 
 country. That he could not prevent. But the con- 
 sequences of their blind heroic impulse, its bearing 
 on the world in which his country would have to con- 
 tinue to function, he was bound by every law of his 
 nature to estimate, for very love of England if for 
 nothing else. 
 
 It is possible that all the lectures to which the 
 British government took exception are not contained 
 in Why Men Fight. Considering the nature of those 
 that are included, however, and the quality of man 
 they exemplify, the official misunderstanding is estab- 
 lished. It is easy to see what a wartime government, 
 any wartime government, requires. It requires its 
 philosophers to fall in with the tribe, to bellow when 
 the ringleader bellows, to shout " atrocity " or " bar- 
 barian " or " democracy " in chorus, to wear war- 
 paint and dance around the ring. It is not merely 
 the Haeckels and the Euckens of whom this is ex- 
 pected, it is expected of French and of English philos- 
 ophers in a similar spirit. And if, to the honor of 
 England, a philosopher refuses to abandon the reali- 
 ties that he deems ultimate not only for himself but 
 for his nation, there is a howl of anger from the 
 mob, subservient clamor from every perjured intel- 
 lectual, a decree by government that gives to silly 
 prejudice the intonation of high loyalty, the intona- 
 tion of the voice of God. 
 
 Those who are out of the melee may sympathize 
 with the trials of officialdom. The crisis is harrow- 
 
 [ 330]
 
 ing. About the merits of Bertrand Russell's atti- 
 tude, however, it would be final delinquency to close 
 one's mind. It matters a good deal that the British 
 government should not be unnecessarily hampered 
 during the conduct of a merciless war. But every- 
 thing depends upon what one means by " hampered." 
 There are Germans who demand that in the conduct 
 of a merciless war they should not be hampered by 
 neutrals, should not be hampered by any sort of cri- 
 terion normally deemed " human." When, on this 
 frantically patriotic principle, the Germans sank the 
 Lusitania, few disinterested people agreed with them. 
 Yet when another kind of logicality is resisted by 
 Bertrand Russell, the logicality of blind submission 
 to the state, of reciprocal animosity, of national ego- 
 ism, of war-fever and destructiveness and cynicism, 
 he is confronted by the argument that he is " ham- 
 pering " his country, and he is muzzled like a dog. 
 And just because certain Americans want England 
 to win, at any cost, this intellectual von Tirpitzism 
 does not shock them. They have arrived at the 
 stage where any fool who cries " victory " or " patri- 
 otism " or " loyalty " seems wiser than the sage who 
 cannot take such slag as his nation's spiritual fuel. 
 
 To read Why Men Fight with any sympathy is to 
 be entranced by the honesty, the concentration, the 
 intelligence, the equilibrium of its author. He is 
 the kind of man, I have no doubt, in whom the war 
 disclosed to himself a whole set of false presump- 
 tions about the nature of human character and the 
 possibilities of reasonableness and the chance of 
 avoidance of conflict and giving pain. " It would 
 be better a hundredfold," he was driven to exclaim 
 even recently, " to forego material comfort, power, 
 
 [ 33i ]
 
 pomp, and outward glory than to kill and be killed, 
 to hate and be hated, to throw away in a mad mo- 
 ment of fury the bright heritage of ages." That is 
 a bias of his nature which it would be dishonest not 
 to recognize. But it is not a bias that decides the 
 character of his thinking. That thinking has made 
 a place for everything the war has had to offer him. 
 It has made a place for the obvious aggressiveness 
 of Germany, for the reasonableness of preparing to 
 meet that aggressiveness, for the exaltation of pa- 
 triotism, for the impossibility of passive pacificism. 
 Everything spiritual in him may have been crucified 
 by the war. One supposes this to be the case by 
 reason of the tensions of his thinking. But he has 
 had such vigor and health of mind that he could 
 meet this terrific spiritual crisis without quailing, 
 without shirking, without recanting. If one were 
 looking for a truth-lover in the present crisis, in- 
 deed, one could find few as great as Bertrand Rus- 
 sell. " Men fear thought," he says in his chapter 
 on education, " as they fear nothing else on earth 
 more than ruin, more even than death. Thought 
 is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and ter- 
 rible; thought is merciless to privilege, established 
 institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is 
 anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, care- 
 less of the well tried wisdom of the ages. Thought 
 looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees 
 man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable 
 depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as un- 
 moved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought 
 is great and swift and free, the light of the world, 
 and the chief glory of man." One imagines that 
 this paean burst from him after his own experience 
 
 [ 332 ]
 
 in the pit of hell, after he fought through to some 
 understanding of the war. 
 
 In order to understand the war Bertrand Russell 
 had to overhaul his universe. He might have chosen 
 between his country and Germany, and called that 
 " understanding " the war. He might have taken 
 a Henry Ford view, child-like pity for the " boys " 
 in the trenches. He might have attempted realistic 
 politics. He might have remained a sheer pacifist, 
 blaming a mysterious " system " and standing aside. 
 Any one of a hundred schemes of explanation might 
 have sustained him, but all his life he had gone back 
 of the ostensible, gone into the hinterland of human 
 nature, to see if something that did not ask him to 
 shut off candor and speculation could be summoned 
 for his guidance about life. And by examining the 
 springs of men's preferences during this struggle, 
 the sources of action, the bases of behavior, he picked 
 up clue after clue to the passions that were wheeling 
 around him and spinning his senses with every turn. 
 He picked up clues that enabled him not merely to 
 revise but to reckon, to bring the reeling panorama 
 into focus, to attain a comprehension that meant 
 neither starvation for his tribal loyalties nor suffoca- 
 tion in the squalors of partisanship. 
 
 It is this comprehension that Mr. Russell's col- 
 leagues of Cambridge University and the small- 
 brained censorship were afraid of. They were 
 afraid to see their cause taken out of the hothouse 
 of propaganda and exposed to fresh air. And yet 
 what had they to fear? It is true that Mr. Russell 
 believes in the principle of growth. He does not 
 think that private landlordism is good for the 
 citizenship as a whole. He thinks that conscientious 
 
 [ 333 ]
 
 parents find it very expensive to bring up babies, 
 and that they will go on exercising birth-control until 
 the state faces this economic factor in population. 
 He thinks that the monarchical organization of in- 
 dustry must be swept away. He thinks the present 
 systems of education in Germany and France and 
 America are subservient to privilege and narrow pa- 
 triotism. He thinks that many women find mother- 
 hood unsatisfying, that the romantic movement was 
 bad in putting too much emphasis on personal love 
 and that some sort of " infinite purpose " must be 
 shared by people in marriage if they are to develop. 
 He thinks illicit love is unsatisfactory. He does not 
 entirely agree with the socialists or the pragmatists 
 or the labor leaders or the imperialists or the bishops. 
 He does not regard the diminution of poverty as 
 anything more than a preface to politics. He sees 
 danger in labor's attitude toward thought. He criti- 
 cizes religion and marriage and war and property 
 and education in their character as political institu- 
 tions, and he criticizes the great state for the multiple 
 opportunities it offers to corrupt and ambitious and 
 ruthless men, and its disadvantages for democracy. 
 But while many of his criticisms are unsparing, none 
 of them is devious or poisoned. The principles of 
 democracy and liberty are frankly and utterly his 
 principles. And nothing but a barren conception of 
 these quite insistent questions, a tremulous regard 
 for property and the church and every other estab- 
 lishment, could have led England to restrict and 
 handicap him. 
 
 It is not that Bertrand Russell is an impossiblist. 
 " In spite of all the destruction which is wrought by 
 the impulses that lead to war," he avows, " there is 
 
 [ 334 ]
 
 more hope for a nation which has these impulses than 
 for a nation in which all impulse is dead." Mr. 
 Russell is not Chinafied. Nor is he a person of mere 
 intellect, a fish. " Mind, in its dealings with instinct, 
 is merely critical: so far as instinct is concerned, the 
 unchecked activity of the mind is apt to be destructive 
 and to generate cynicism. Spirit is an antidote to 
 the cynicism of the mind: it universalizes the emo- 
 tions that spring from instinct, and by universalizing 
 them makes them impervious to mental criticism." 
 The claims of the spirit have Mr. Russell's full and 
 free acknowledgment. Where he differs from the 
 partisan is simply in the price he is willing to pay 
 to keep men from going to the shambles, in the 
 accent he lays on such words as honor and self- 
 respect and national pride. He understands per- 
 fectly well that the enemy has to be fought, as the 
 fighting insect has to be crushed. But he knows that 
 to exterminate that insect he must eventually drain 
 marshes, not use lotions and build screens. 
 
 Many passages in Why Men Fight indicate that 
 Mr. Russell is neither omniscient nor entirely con- 
 sistent. He seems to dispose of incompatibilities 
 easily, and yet to demand radical changes, " if the 
 world is to be saved." He is aware of diplomatic 
 iniquities such as occurred in Persia, and yet he has 
 great hope of super-legal arrangements based on the 
 claimants' force. Granted that he is vulnerable, if 
 not in these in other respects, the fact remains that he 
 has reached the height for large survey of this war. 
 It is not an altitude of rhetoric or evangelical spirit. 
 It is the angle for penetrating vision. He accepts 
 man as he is, nationalism, industrialism, civilization. 
 On that basis, candidly, searchingly, commodiously, 
 
 [ 335 ]
 
 he entertains the problem of the war. If he declines 
 to believe that blind patriotic impulses give the an- 
 swer it is not because he is unpatriotic. There are 
 in himself the deep sources of patriotism. But he 
 cares too much for his country not to remind it of 
 mankind. 
 
 February 3 
 
 [ 336]
 
 DOMESTICATING MARS 
 
 ONE ought to be a Rip Van Winkle to get the full 
 effect of Mr. Perry's book. It marks a change in 
 American attitude which only one who could exclude 
 recent events might properly estimate. Ten years 
 ago there was about as much sentiment in this coun- 
 try for compulsory military service as there is at this 
 moment for compulsory child-bearing. Compulsory 
 military service was an expedient that simply did not 
 enter the calculations of the ordinary American. 
 Great hopes could be entertained of the Swiss initia- 
 tive and the Swiss referendum, but the Swiss army 
 scheme seemed as little appropriate to the United 
 States as the United States navy scheme would be 
 to Switzerland. Conscription was a specialty of con- 
 tinental Europe as remote from this country as mon- 
 archy itself. There was not so much a sentiment 
 against it as a general assumption that it was alien, 
 archaic, illiberal, inconceivable. And now, out of 
 the thick of a sophisticated society, a Harvard pro- 
 fessor argues " universal " military service with 
 every indication of representing a definite body of 
 American opinion. It is the kind of change for 
 which only a huge subversive experience can account. 
 Why does Mr. Perry support the cause of con- 
 scription? To read his articles innocently, one might 
 suppose that universal military duty recommended 
 
 The Free Man and the Soldier, by Ralph Barton Perry. Scrib- 
 ners, New York. 
 
 [ 337 ]
 
 itself to him on the ground that it was the " demo- 
 cratic " method of providing security for the country. 
 He argues the case for it on this plausible score, as 
 also on the score of its educational and social advan- 
 tages. But the merits of universal military service, 
 precisely the same ten years ago as they are to-day, 
 are necessarily Mr. Perry's afterthoughts. If it 
 were not for the European war, and for one special 
 circumstance of it, it is practically certain that he 
 would no more ask for compulsory soldiering than 
 for compulsory road-making or scavenging or butch- 
 ering or fire-extinguishing. A " democracy implies 
 that there shall be neither privilege nor immunity," 
 he urges earnestly. But privilege and immunity are 
 saving most of us from the uglier chores every day. 
 It is not reasoning like this that led Mr. Perry to 
 come to a belief in compulsory service. He came 
 to it above all, one seems to see, because he accepted 
 America's " genuine peril," the " hazard of war." 
 The upset of the balance of power in Europe has torn 
 most American minds from their moorings. What 
 security can there be in a world where such a thing 
 can happen? And what is the good of living in a 
 world where things can be so insecure? The be- 
 havior of the Germans, in particular, seems to con- 
 vince Mr. Perry of the necessity for being prepared. 
 !He usually couches his phrases this way: " The scale 
 and the method of modern warfare make universal 
 training not only an appropriate means, but an indis- 
 pensable means." But he is really apprehending 
 wanton invasion. The Germans deliberately let hell 
 loose in Europe and it is through the light of this 
 appalling and infamous fact that Mr. Perry sees mil- 
 itary possibilities and calculates international affairs. 
 
 [ 338 ]
 
 He does not say so directly but all through his book, 
 on pp. 12, 34, 56, 62, 65, 136, 145, he betrays the 
 shock that the Germans dealt to his universe, and 
 he infers from their action a definite hateful danger. 
 It is a condition, he seems to say, and not a theory 
 that confronts us : we are dealing here with the kind 
 of evil willfulness that we must either obey or de- 
 stroy. There are forces of destruction in the world 
 which " must be met, each according to its kind, by 
 the forces of deliverance." And he seems only sorry 
 that the United States had not its forces of deliver- 
 ance available in 1914 to enter the European war. 
 " We cannot afford to cherish any ideal whatsoever 
 unless at the same time we are willing to put forth 
 the effort that is commensurate with its realization." 
 And that effort may well be military. " There is no 
 fair escape from the tragic paradox that man must 
 destroy in order to save." 
 
 The neutralism and non-resistance of pacifists im- 
 pels Mr. Perry to emphasize the role of force. 
 Force is justifiable in its war on lawlessness. " It 
 is provident and constructive in its ulterior effect." 
 " With this principle in mind," he continues, " we 
 may now take a further step and justify offensive 
 war, when undertaken in the interest of an inter- 
 national system or league of humanity." " Strength 
 without high purpose is soulless and brutal; purpose 
 without strength is unreal and impotent." For the 
 accomplishment of civilization, in fact, " it becomes 
 necessary to use the harsh and dangerous instruments 
 by which things are done in this world. Civilization 
 is not saved by the mere purging of one's heart, but 
 by the work of one's hands." 
 
 Once Mr. Perry conceives of war by his own coun- 
 [ 339 ]
 
 try as inevitably war on lawlessness he can easily 
 wave aside the foible of " conscientiousness." In 
 wartime a citizen who does not approve of the war 
 must bide his time. 
 
 If his conscience is offended, so much the worse for his 
 conscience. What he needs is a new conscience which will 
 teach him to keep the faith with his fellows until such time 
 as their common understanding and their controlling policy 
 shall have been modified. The man who refuses to obey the 
 law or play the game because he has been outvoted is more 
 likely to be afflicted with peevishness or egotism than exalted 
 by heroism. 
 
 Granted the peril of war and the virtue of one's 
 country, this is clearly the way to talk. One must 
 emphasize, however, that it is exactly the way Ger- 
 mans have talked, and created terror by doing so. 
 They have said to Liebknecht: " So much the worse 
 for your conscience ! " How is it that a brave and 
 patriotic Harvard professor should so simply follow 
 the German example, so simply dwell on the problem 
 of asserting righteousness, so little dwell on the an- 
 terior problem of ascertaining it? He does not 
 mention an " iron ring " that threatens to choke us, 
 but he does insist on " lawlessness " in other nations, 
 and, with an extraordinary faith in the efficacy of 
 force, does think of it as our means our chief 
 means of furthering high international purposes. 
 A sainthood on our side, a dragon on the other, he 
 nerves our sainthood to the need of gouging the 
 dragon. For that purpose he wants us universally 
 trained to kill. 
 
 At base it is a fine impulse that forces Mr. Perry 
 to consider war as an American possibility. The 
 
 [ 340 ]
 
 phenomenon of the jingo has nothing to do with him 
 and indeed the jingo, the undeveloped man who 
 wants his country to bully other countries, is too 
 scared to peep at present. Mr. Perry is neither 
 maudlin nor melodramatic. He is simply resolute 
 about facing what he conceives to be a newly condi- 
 tioned world, a world in which hateful facts present 
 themselves, regardless of the facts we prefer. Life, 
 as he sees it, contains an unsuspected range of inimi- 
 cal possibilities, unsuspected threats to security. He 
 is prepared to accept those threats and to pay a price 
 for insuring against them. 
 
 A man must be brave to counter Mr. Perry by 
 minimizing the practical danger of war. He is 
 bound, in the first place, to be sure he is not evasive 
 in circumstances where it is supremely natural to 
 evade. At the end of Hedda Gabler Brack is ac- 
 tually in the room when Hedda shoots herself, but 
 so unforeseen, so unwelcome, is her act, he exclaims 
 that these things don't happen. Thus works the dia- 
 phragm of habit. When the doctor says, " You 
 have cancer," you do not believe him. You want to 
 close your eyes and then wake up out of your dream 
 into a world still humane. When the man near you 
 shouts, " The boat is going down," you want to hit 
 him. The awful, unescapable fact provides such un- 
 merited suffering that you feel entitled to deny it. 
 The notion of justice persists in the teeth of every- 
 thing, even resorts to a theory of " compensation " 
 and poses a mysterious Handicapper who has a " be- 
 nign " intention at the bottom of it all. To ward 
 anguish from our nerves is automatic. It is there- 
 fore all too easy to substitute preference for observa- 
 tion, or to act the ostrich. And only those who are 
 
 [ 34i ]
 
 born with a noble capacity for reality can let anguish 
 touch their nerves without sealing their minds. 
 
 Something of this capaciousness for unwelcome ex- 
 perience, I believe, and something of transfiguring 
 patriotism, inform Mr. Ralph Barton Perry's atti- 
 tude toward the war. The readjustment of Ameri- 
 can society which he proposes is so great, however, 
 that before assenting to it one must be sure that nor- 
 mal pacific experience has really been subverted, and 
 that compulsory service is the price to pay for peace. 
 Such, certainly, does not seem to me to be the case. 
 And one seeks in vain in Mr. Perry's book for two 
 essential points. First, a demonstration that it is 
 not Mr. Perry's own inexperience in the ways of 
 foreign policy and European states that causes the 
 German act to look so monstrous. Second, a demon- 
 stration that Mr. Perry has considered the army and 
 navy establishment in relation to geography and the 
 rest. Unless a man is informed on these points, he 
 is in danger of making false analogies, perhaps the 
 greatest danger that partial sophistication involves. 
 
 It is as a philosopher, however, that Mr. Perry 
 is most to be criticized. He can best be criticized 
 in his own words. Because his patriotism has been 
 violently stimulated by Germany's aggression, he con- 
 cludes that we must be expedient. Perhaps he sus- 
 pects himself of a squeamishness that might endanger 
 his country. He will not flabbily vacillate, procras- 
 tinate, contemplate. He will lift his eyes from his 
 navel. Grim business is afoot. A condition, not a 
 theory, has arisen and he will hold himself ready to 
 lend a hand. But " the practical man," he says him- 
 self, " is always confronted by a condition. I shall 
 suggest presently that every condition does in truth 
 
 [ 342 ]
 
 involve a theory; but if so, the practical man ignores 
 it. ... His problem is the comparatively narrow 
 and simple problem of finding the instrument to fit 
 the occasion and achieve the result." 
 
 This is just the point about war. It is a platitude 
 that inoffensiveness cannot solve life, and most of 
 us will agree to destroy rather than be destroyed. 
 But it is mad to say, " to be effective in this world 
 is to hazard a judgment and to commit oneself to 
 it." When men tremble on the brink of a bestial 
 wastefulness like warfare men who on both sides 
 possess impulses, as Mr. Perry says, but are not pos- 
 sessed by them the determining fact may be, and 
 ought to be, their estimate of the savagery and dis- 
 pensability of war. A philistine may not feel this. 
 He may insist that " the work of civilization is to 
 make the right also mighty, so that it may obtain 
 among men and prevail." But there are such ob- 
 jections to war in itself, to the temper preceding it, 
 the brutality it releases, the " butcher's bills," the 
 wounds it poisons, that a philosopher's position 
 should much rather be one that keeps these things 
 in mind than one that gilds with " higher purposes " 
 and " qualities of idealism " mankind's most obvious 
 of hideous lapses. It takes two to keep the peace, 
 but the peace is a basic desideratum, and Mr. Perry 
 is far too much concerned about America's direct 
 interests as against enemies than about her working 
 for the terms on which the world can keep friends. 
 
 Short-range practicality, says Mr. Perry, " means 
 a readiness to meet the immediate occasion as is dic- 
 tated by the momentary desire. Such practicality 
 is a perpetual meeting of emergencies. It is a sort 
 of living from hand to mouth, an uninspired and 
 
 [ 343 ]
 
 unillumined opportunism. That which is ordi- 
 narily condemned as unpractical, and which is un- 
 practical from this narrow standpoint, may now be 
 called long-range practicality. That is to say, it is 
 that prevision, that thorough intellectual equipment, 
 that wisdom as to the ultimate and comparative 
 worth of things, without which there can be no 
 security nor any confirming sense of genuine achieve- 
 ment. It is that which makes the difference between 
 making a fool of oneself, however, earnestly and 
 even successfully, and living in a manner which would 
 be able to endure the test of time." 
 
 These words of Mr. Perry are severe, but they 
 apply with astonishing directness to The Free Man 
 and the Soldier. It is a courageous and loyal book, 
 but it is marred by short-range practicality. Death 
 is beyond words preferable to losing liberty, honor 
 or self-respect. This Mr. Perry is valiant enough to 
 see. What he fails to see is the loss of liberty, honor 
 and self-respect involved in every war that could be 
 avoided. If he saw this more clearly, he might plan 
 more for security by ways of understanding rather 
 than ways of force. 
 
 September 9, 1916. 
 
 [ 344 ]
 
 THE COST OF PEACE 
 
 COMPARATIVELY few people know the work 
 of Thorstein Veblen. Some thousands have read 
 his best-known book, the brilliant, drastic Theory of 
 the Leisure Class; but only a few hundred have read 
 his Theory of Business Enterprise, his Instinct of 
 Workmanship and his Imperial Germany. So little 
 is he known that a pretentious man the other day met 
 my mention of The Nature of Peace by saying: 
 " Ah, of course, a new translation." He did not 
 know that Thorstein Veblen was an American, was 
 graduated from an American university, in the 
 eighties, and has been teaching in American uni- 
 versities ever since. Mr. Veblen is an American 
 writer but the kind of American writer whose merit 
 is rather more clearly recognized abroad than at 
 home, an American who ought to have been a for- 
 eigner to be appreciated in America. 
 
 To read Mr. Veblen is not and cannot be an enter- 
 tainment. There is a kind of fashionable lady who 
 knows precisely when a literary Paquin has ceased 
 to be the thing, and who twitters as unfailingly as 
 any bird at the first breath of another master's 
 dawn. For all this turn for novelty, few ladies have 
 twittered much or are ever going to twitter much 
 about Mr. Veblen's performance. He is too diffi- 
 cult to understand. It is hard intellectual labor to 
 
 An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Pei> 
 petuation, by Thorstein Veblen. Macmillan, New York, 
 
 [ 345 ]
 
 read any of his books, and to skim him is impossible. 
 He is not a luxurious valley of easy reading, a philo- 
 sophic Tennyson. He is a mountain stubborn, 
 forbidding, purgatorial. There is no funicular to 
 bring him under subjection of the indolent, and some- 
 times there is barely a foothold even for the hardy 
 amid the tortuosities of his style. But the reward 
 for those who do persist in reading him is com- 
 mensurate with the effort. No mountain pierces to 
 heaven, not even Mr. Veblen's, but the area that he 
 unrolls is strategically chosen and significantly in- 
 clusive. Part of the reward of reading him may be 
 like the reward of mountain-climbing itself, the value 
 of tough exercise for its own sake, but unless Mr. 
 Veblen created the conviction that his large purposes 
 did reasonably necessitate intricate and laborious 
 processes of thought and that such processes had to 
 be followed in detail in order that his argument might 
 be mastered, no one would be quite satisfied to take 
 the pains he exacts. The greatest justification of 
 such pains is the final sense conveyed by him that 
 he has had a singular contribution to make, and has 
 made it with complete regard to the formidable re- 
 quirements of responsible unconventional utterance. 
 The responsible unconventionality of Mr. Veblen 
 has never been better exemplified than in this new 
 book of his, finished February, 1917, on the nature 
 of peace. It is, so far as I know, the most momen- 
 tous work in English on the encompassment of last- 
 ing peace. There are many books that aim to give 
 geographic domicile to the kind of tinkered peace 
 that is likely to come out of this war, but I know of 
 no book that gives so plain and positive account of 
 the terms " on which peace at large may be hopefully 
 
 [ 346 ]
 
 installed and maintained," and I know of no discus- 
 sion so searching as to " what if anything there is in 
 the present situation that visibly makes for a realiza- 
 tion of these necessary terms within a calculable 
 future." Those who are acquainted with Mr. Veb- 
 len's work are aware of the ironic inscrutability of 
 his manner, the detachment that is at once an evi- 
 dence of his impartiality and an intimation of his 
 corrosive skepticism. It may no longer be said, with 
 The Nature of Peace under examination, that either 
 impartiality or skepticism induces Mr. Veblen to 
 withhold his preference, to conceal his bias, in the 
 present contingency. That bias, however, does not 
 lead him into any of the current patriotic extrava- 
 gances. If critical acid can corrode the patriotic 
 conceptions of " democracy " and " liberty " that are 
 now so familiar, Mr. Veblen makes no attempt to 
 keep such fancies from being eaten into. What is 
 left, however, is sufficiently substantial to give him 
 the issue that abides in the war, and its bearing on 
 peace, and it provides him with his clue to the great 
 eventuality, " the consequences presumably due to 
 follow." ' 
 
 It would be wrong in any review of Mr. Veblen 
 to give a mere bald outline of the work that is so full 
 of his manifold mind. There are so many " patent 
 imbecilities" (like the protective tariff), so many 
 current egregious practices (like business men's sabot- 
 age), that receive characteristic illumination in tran- 
 sit, the bare colorless statement of his conclusions 
 would completely leave out the poignancy that ac- 
 cumulates as he proceeds. His conclusions are, on 
 the other hand, impressive enough to indicate the 
 importance of the argument back of them, and if 
 [ 347 ]
 
 only for their suggestion of the massive argument 
 they need to be reported. Defeat for the German- 
 Imperial coalition, not victory for the Entente bel- 
 ligerents, is the first step toward lasting peace that 
 he recognizes, because of the decisive difference " be- 
 tween those people whose patriotic affections centre 
 about the fortunes of an impersonal commonwealth 
 and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration 
 for dynastic ascendancy." Peace on terms of Ger- 
 many's unconditional surrender is not discussed by 
 Mr. Veblen on the basis of likelihood but on the 
 basis of its desirability in relation to the chances for 
 peace, and the unlikelihood of lasting peace in its ab- 
 sence. But this is not the ordinary orgiastic con- 
 templation of an enemy destroyed. The elements 
 in Germany that conspire against lasting peace are 
 carefully computed, and the terms of their disintegra- 
 tion discussed in every detail. It is by no means for- 
 gotten that if the victorious side is not " shorn over 
 the comb of neutralization and democracy " there 
 can in any event be no prospect of perpetuating peace. 
 The present unfitness of Germany (or Japan) for 
 lasting peace is ascribed by Mr. Veblen to the essen- 
 tial dynastic need for warlike enterprise, but he has 
 no hesitation whatever in declaring in regard to the 
 Allied Powers that peace in general demands the 
 " relinquishment of all those undemocratic institu- 
 tional survivals out of which international grievances 
 are wont to arise." This is not the customary em- 
 phasis of good-will pacifists. They are fain to pro- 
 pose peace on the present basis of " national jeal- 
 ousies and discriminations " and what Mr. Veblen 
 in his highly personal jargon calls "discrepancies." 
 Mr. Veblen alludes to the League to Enforce Peace 
 
 [ 348 ]
 
 as a movement for the " collusive safeguarding of 
 national discrepancies for force of arms." This tol- 
 eration of existing nationalisms Mr. Veblen plainly 
 regards as an insuperable obstacle to peace. He ex- 
 poses in every detail the predisposition to war that 
 inheres in nationalisms. " What the peace-makers 
 might logically be expected to concern themselves 
 about would be the elimination of these discrepancies 
 that make for embroilment." 
 
 The military defeat of Germany seems to the 
 author a requisite step on the direct path to peace. 
 This is only because Germany is dynastic, however, 
 and the German people subservient to the dynasty. 
 One of the issues most thoroughly debated by Mr. 
 Veblen is the pregnant issue of German democratiza- 
 tion, and while he lays great stress on the necessity 
 for military defeat as a first requirement of democ- 
 ratization he does not believe the disintegrating 
 of Germany's dynastic " second nature " is of so 
 hopeless a character as its historic persistence might 
 imply. There is no complacency in the attitude that 
 leads him to regard imperial Germany (or imperial 
 Japan) as a stumbling-block in the road to lasting 
 peace. It is an attitude founded on a strict and even 
 solicitous estimate of the patent German and Jap- 
 anese aims. And in so far as a peace policy involves 
 treatment of the German people Mr. Veblen is quite 
 certain that no trade discrimination against them, 
 necessarily bound to recoil on the common people, 
 would be pacifically effective or justifiable. The 
 persecution of the German common people could 
 take no form that would conceivably advance the 
 cause of peace, and Mr. Veblen is careful to disso- 
 ciate his belief that Germany should be beaten from 
 
 [ 349 ]
 
 the belief that the people of Germany should be made 
 to suffer for their differentiation after the war. 
 
 Where The Nature of Peace seems to me to rise 
 far and away above the current discussions of super- 
 nationalism is in its comparative freedom from un- 
 analyzed conceptions. There is nothing sacred to 
 Mr. Veblen in the conception of patriotism, of prop- 
 erty, of success, of manliness, of good breeding, of 
 national honor, of prestige. The notion of non- 
 resistance has no terrors for him he writes a chap- 
 ter on its merits. But so dry is he that it is only one 
 reading him attentively who will gather his extraor- 
 dinarily subversive character, his invincible mind. 
 The blessedness of this unsparing intelligence is so 
 great that one has a constant acute pleasure in pur- 
 suing Mr. Veblen's argument. If one had long per- 
 ceived for oneself, for example, that " business " 
 means waste and inefficiency, it is pleasant to have 
 Mr. Veblen introduce the same perceptions, but when 
 he proceeds to locate them in his spacious under- 
 standing of the whole international problem, and to 
 reveal their unquestionable bearing on the alterna- 
 tives of war and peace, one has a happy conscious- 
 ness of coming honestly to a wider and deeper view 
 of realities. This is the supreme gift of Mr. Veb- 
 len's disinterested inquiry. 
 
 The notion that a lasting peace is compatible with 
 the established patriotic order of things, with the 
 status of the gentleman in England or the business 
 man in the United States, is not entertained for one 
 moment by Mr. Veblen, and regardless of the 
 " maggoty conceit of national domination " which 
 demands " the virtual erasure of the Imperial dyn- 
 asty," he sees an impediment to peace in the dear 
 
 [ 350 J
 
 establishments of " upperclass and pecuniary con- 
 trol " in the allied commonwealths. Chief and 
 foremost in the pacific arrangement must come " a 
 considerable degree of neutralization, extending to 
 virtually all national interests and pretensions, but 
 more particularly to all material and commercial in- 
 terests of the federated peoples; and, indispensably 
 and especially, such neutralization would have to 
 extend to the nations from whom aggression is now 
 apprehended, as, e.g., the German people." All 
 manner of trade discrimination has to be abolished 
 " import, export and excise tariff, harbor and reg- 
 istry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade 
 mark, tax exemption whether partial or exclusive, 
 investment preferences at home and abroad." Be- 
 sides this prescription for " the elimination of dis- 
 crepancies that make for embroilment," a neutraliza- 
 tion of citizenship is also indicated, the common man 
 standing to lose nothing by these revisions. But 
 Mr. Veblen is frank to say that " this prospect of 
 consequences " points to a general revolution. 
 
 It has appeared in the course of the argument that the 
 preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, with 
 all its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible 
 with an unwarlike state of peace and security. This current 
 scheme of investment, business, and sabotage, should have an 
 appreciably better chance of survival in the long run if the 
 present conditions of warlike preparation and national inse- 
 curity were maintained, or if the projected peace were left 
 in a somewhat problematical state, sufficiently precarious to 
 keep national animosities alert, and thereby to the neglect 
 of domestic interests, particularly of such interests as touch 
 the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also 
 appeared that the cause of peace and its perpetuation might 
 be materially advanced if precautions were taken beforehand 
 
 [351 ]
 
 to put out of the way as much as may be of those discrepan- 
 cies of interest and sentiment between nations and between 
 classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities. 
 
 The weight of these phrases it is not easy to catch 
 in passing, but nothing more significant has been 
 written since the outbreak of the war. One has only 
 to go back to The Theory of Business Enterprise, 
 published in 1903, to learn how Mr. Veblen fore- 
 saw this war, and America's participation in it. 
 The same rigor of intellectual standard that gave 
 him a command of the situation at that time is dis- 
 cernible in this present volume, and gives him domi- 
 nance now. Such severity of mind as Mr. Veblen 
 exhibits is not likely to win him many readers, but 
 the recommendation of Mr. Veblen is not merely the 
 recommendation of a great philosopher of industrial- 
 ism. It is not his relentless logic alone that elevates 
 him. It is the democratic bias which The Nature 
 of Peace indicates. 
 
 May 26, 
 
 [352]
 
 UNDER FIRE 
 
 I N the presence of this book one is in the presence 
 of the fact. It is known to all of us that where hu- 
 manity is at grips with its own destiny it is the habit 
 of men to lie. The great finalities are always con- 
 cealed from us in their full gravity and terror 
 the finalities of birth, of love, of death. And be- 
 cause they are concealed from us, with the zeal of 
 the frightened savage that is in all of us, we go from 
 catastrophe to catastrophe as numb as fools. Only 
 occasionally, against the instinct of the savage that 
 bids us sprinkle holy water and burn incense and 
 heap flowers, does a man arrive who accepts his 
 naked destiny and insists on its actual nature against 
 every kind of incantation. Such a man, confronted 
 by war, is Henri Barbusse, the Parisian journalist 
 who incorporates his whole experience in this book. 
 It is unnecessary to have been at the front to judge 
 of M. Barbusse's veracity. One does not need to 
 have killed a woman to accept Crime and Punish- 
 ment. Under Fire, as the sensitive translation is 
 called, impresses its veracity in revealing its satura- 
 tion with the war. There are other experiences of 
 the war, as there are other men, but this is invincibly 
 complete. It is a book that is no more to be ques- 
 tioned than the diary of Captain Scott or the death- 
 less pages of Tolstoy. It composes the war for our 
 
 Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse. Translated by Fitzwater Wray. 
 Dutton, New York 
 
 [ 353 ]
 
 understanding, making us familiar at the beginning 
 with the men who are going to die, initiating us into 
 trench life before the charge is launched over the 
 top, ending the book in a supreme symbolism. But 
 the wise composition that unites Under Fire is no 
 more artificial than the due supervision of words as 
 they stream from one's own brain to the pen-point. 
 The facts have been disposed, even as a pointillist 
 disposes colors, only to keep them true. 
 
 Against the tale that M. Barbusse has told there 
 is the conspiracy of a thousand conventions. He is 
 a Frenchman fighting for France, la belle France, in 
 what many consider the last extremity of her effort 
 to remain a " first-class " power. To sustain that 
 effort it is vital, even if untruth is required, to give 
 a good account of the organization of the army and 
 its esprit. Not only should he define favorably the 
 motives that inspire the soldier but he should show 
 the happy democratic relations that exist between 
 soldier and officer, the satisfaction of the soldier with 
 the general staff and his comprehension of the plans 
 of the army, the joyous reception that awaits him 
 on leave of absence, the self-immolation of the civil- 
 ians in touch with the army, the honesty of contrac- 
 tors, the sad reluctance of brilliant young men not 
 permitted to fight in the trenches, the evil behavior 
 of the enemy, the heroism of the war. Of the more 
 obvious conventions these are a few, but more subtle 
 conventions abound as to personal attitude. A good 
 patriot is not supposed to tell the world of filth, of 
 lice, of corpses in ridiculous attitudes, of bad food, 
 of muck in language, of bloodshed sought and en- 
 joyed. If a man tells these things or breathes a 
 word contrary to the unanimity of national purpose, 
 
 [354]
 
 he is treasonable. The facts are of no consequence. 
 The impossibility of keeping them suppressed is of 
 no consequence. If the sun rises on a national de- 
 linquency or ineptitude, it is the sun that is treason- 
 able. From the guns of such a conspiracy M. Bar- 
 busse is also under fire. 
 
 But when one has faced machine-guns, it appears, 
 it is not impossible to face machine-minds. One can 
 feel in M. Barbusse a disdain for those feeble men 
 of Europe who, within boundaries insisted upon by 
 themselves, brought about a war that is the crashing 
 bankruptcy of all their theories, all their pretensions, 
 their idols, their sanctity. With demonology their 
 last resource in order to strengthen once again the 
 political boundaries that intensify differences in lan- 
 guage and custom, they ask M. Barbusse to take his 
 mind from the actuality he has experienced, and dis- 
 regard the war as a harvest of their statesmanship. 
 But the author of Under Fire is too sure of war not 
 to be sure of something about peace which is more 
 than non-war. He is for peace, not a peace that 
 will save his own skin now but a peace that will be 
 embodied in the plans of a society which takes full 
 stock of its own bestiality, its own madness. 
 
 It is not the picturesque beginning of this book 
 that lets one see M. Barbusse the accusant of war. 
 He is content at the beginning to give us the mucky 
 trench, the rag-bag cave-dwellers who are his com- 
 rades, the Falstaffian humor of their masculinity, the 
 jocularity that is the jewel in the toad. The first 
 chapter is called In the Earth; it is properly named. 
 It is earthy in its jests at the old territorials who 
 straggle by, " worn-out and trench-foul veterans " ; 
 earthy in its grim silence at the passing Africans, 
 
 [ 355 ]
 
 eyes "like balls of ivory or onyx"; earthy in its 
 sneers for the penmen who visit the trench. The 
 first glimmerings of the seriousness of battle are not 
 utterly somber. " The smell of fresh blood was 
 enough to bring your heart up," but that is from 
 glad men " whom the depths of horror have given 
 back." The impression is allowed to accumulate 
 fairly and steadily. There is Eudoxie, the ethereal 
 girl pursued by an oaf. There is the dizzying com- 
 plexity of a great army entraining. There is the 
 little soldier bereft, by an accident of the mails, from 
 his week's reunion with his wife. The misery of 
 cold Fouillade, imprisoned by his pennilessness in a 
 wet barn, dreaming of his scented Pyrenees this 
 is one episode of those remissions from fighting 
 which are described in keen detail. The most elo- 
 quent tells of that stolen journey into occupied terri- 
 tory on which Poterloo got home to see Clotilde 
 through the window, smiling by the side of a Boche 
 officer, " not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, 
 non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave." 
 It is on an adventure with Poterloo, to seek some- 
 where for a trace of his house in the eviscerated 
 countryside, that the tocsin begins to sound. Just 
 as at lovely seaside places one sometimes, a little 
 inland, comes on a spot made foul by the heaped 
 refuse of the settlement, so Poterloo and the nar- 
 rator pass through the spot where is heaped the 
 human refuse of the fight. There are pages here, 
 honorable pages, nobly painful, that it would be 
 sacrilege to quote. It is at this point, perhaps, with 
 the disaster to Poterloo, that one is gripped by the 
 inhuman remorselessness of all too human device. 
 No description of bombardment surpasses M. 
 [ 356 ]
 
 Barbusse's, even in translation. And no description 
 of going forward, so it seems to me, can equal his 
 chapter Under Fire. To quote from it is unfair. 
 It is like giving one stilled picture of a terrific move- 
 ment. But there is a glimpse of the author's total 
 attitude in the following passage that demands its 
 inclusion : 
 
 " What are they doing, those chaps? " " It's to climb 
 up by." 
 
 We are ready. The men marshal themselves, still silently, 
 their blankets crosswise, the helmet-straps on the chin, lean- 
 ing on their rifles. I look at their pale, contracted, and re- 
 flective faces. They are not soldiers, they are men. They 
 are not adventurers, or warriors, or made for human slaugh- 
 ter, neither butchers nor cattle. They are laborers and arti- 
 sans whom one recognizes in their uniforms. They are 
 civilians uprooted, and they are ready. They await the 
 signal for death or murder; but you may see, looking at 
 their faces between the vertical gleams of their bayonets, 
 that they are simply men. 
 
 Each one knows that he is going to take his head, his 
 chest, his belly, his whole body, and all naked, up to the 
 rifles pointed forward, to the shells, to the bombs piled and 
 ready, and above all to the methodical and almost infallible 
 machine-guns to all that is waiting for him yonder and 
 is now so frightfully silent before he reaches the other 
 soldiers that he must kill. They are not careless of their 
 lives, like brigands, nor blinded by passion like savages. In 
 spite of the doctrines with which they have been cultivated 
 they are not inflamed. They are above instinctive excesses. 
 They are not drunk, either physically or morally. It is in 
 full consciousness, as in full health and full strength, that 
 they are massed there to hurl themselves once more into 
 that sort of madman's part imposed on all men by the mad- 
 ness of the human race. One sees the thought and the 
 fear and the farewell that there is in their silence, their still- 
 
 [ 357 ]
 
 nss, in the mask of tranquillity which unnaturally grips their 
 faces. They are not the kind of hero one thinks of, but their 
 sacrifice has greater worth than they who have not seen 
 them will ever be able to understand. 
 
 Only by such profound acceptance of his comrades 
 is M. Barbusse enabled to speak as he does in the 
 concluding chapter, and also in that moment of su- 
 perb magnanimity at the end of the advance when 
 the dignified Bertrand permits himself to say, " It 
 was necessary," and adds that immaculate tribute, 
 " There is one figure that has risen above the war 
 and will blaze with the beauty and strength of his 
 courage. . . ." 
 
 It was necessary! One does not doubt that M. 
 Barbusse has himself said so, in the face of all it 
 means. But in the domicile that his mind gives this 
 war there is no mysticism, no patriotism, no acqui- 
 escence. He knows that the war is evil. He has 
 accepted it as the lesser of two evils. His book is 
 great because it is able to encompass everything, 
 even the necessity of living by dying. 
 
 October 27, 1917. 
 
 [358]
 
 A CLOUD of almost indescribable feeling is 
 aroused by this memorial of T. M. Kettle. If it is 
 by symbols that men are most greatly influenced, the 
 death of Kettle at Guillamont, a lieutenant in the 
 Dublin Fusiliers, is a symbol of more than Irish sig- 
 nificance in the war. A death in itself, what is it? 
 One of the most casual and commonplace accidents 
 in the field a wound, a cough of blood, the ebb of 
 everything, the end. No countryman of Bernard, 
 Shaw's needs to be told how unheroic the disaster is, 
 how unlike the fifth act of a play. Rupert Brooke 
 gives his life to his country. How? By meningitis 
 following a carbuncle on his upper lip. That has 
 more the accent of piteous circumstance than the gal- 
 lantry of a charge. But the most sensitive human 
 being escapes cynicism by remembering the selection, 
 the intention, which preceded the indignity of battle. 
 In childbirth there is also considerable indignity for 
 those who limit themselves to the facts. 
 
 What makes Kettle's death significant, with that 
 significance we so bravely borrow for mortality, is 
 the place from which he came to it out of the social 
 and political world. Had any one said to Kettle 
 in July, 1914, that he would die a lieutenant in the 
 Dublin Fusiliers, the irony would have seemed inor- 
 dinate. In July, 1914, he was busy buying rifles in 
 Belgium for the National Volunteers. Mock-heroic 
 
 The Ways of War, by T. M. Kettle. Scribners, New York. 
 [ 359 ]
 
 as that mission was, in the militaristic sense, it was 
 at any rate the mission of a man who had made so 
 important a choice for his country as to take the risks 
 of the contraband traffic in arms. The son of a 
 leading Parnellite Nationalist, himself a Catholic 
 Nationalist who had quite normally taken his place 
 as a member of parliament before he had become a 
 professor of economics in the new state-aided Roman 
 Catholic university, there was nothing about him to 
 indicate the degree of sympathy with the British 
 empire that a commission in the army suggests. It 
 was not so much that Kettle was out of sympathy 
 with the empire. He was, to put it bluntly, out of 
 the empire. And the strange paradox of the war, 
 the paradox of his death in a British uniform, was 
 that a climax in political feeling should have com- 
 pletely brought him in. 
 
 Ireland out of the empire that may seem a fan- 
 tastic account of his position. To debate it were 
 impossible without lighting up every old political 
 cicatrix in every Catholic Nationalist's heart. It is 
 enough to say that religious and national prejudice 
 builds a mountain between peoples, and at the steep 
 side of that slowly eroding mountain T. M. Kettle 
 dwelt. " One of the most brilliant figures in the 
 Young Ireland and the Young Europe of his time," 
 as the prefatory note describes him, he still identi- 
 fied himself with the majority of his people, a people 
 unsatisfactorily ruled, not yet allowed to rule them- 
 selves. A Catholic Irishman, there was no function 
 for him within the imperial economy which would 
 not impoverish his national present and estrange him 
 from his past. " One of the most brilliant figures 
 in Young Ireland," yes, but not seriously in Europe. 
 
 [ 36o]
 
 The pathos and heroism of his nationalism, as 
 against such nationalism as Shaw's, was its vindica- 
 tion in the not unimportant realm of conduct, involv- 
 ing a costly exile from the intellectual Europe in 
 which he properly belonged. In Dublin, as the 
 memoir so frankly states, he was only half himself. 
 And his writing shows well enough that, favorably 
 environed, he would have had a development very 
 different, would have been one of the moving and 
 witty and superb writers of his age. 
 
 Yet when the tug came Kettle promptly enlisted 
 and went recruiting for England, learned soldiering, 
 did his stint in the France that he had known and 
 appreciated, stuck to his regiment in spite of staff 
 opportunities, saw action, led bravely, and died. 
 Outside the glory of it, which throbs in Mrs. Ket- 
 tle's admirable memoir, there is the poignant expo- 
 sition of it in these articles; the quick extension of 
 nationalism to Belgium, the valiant heady Catholi- 
 cism, the romance of selflessness, the sumptuous elo- 
 quence of partisanship, the penetrating hatred of 
 war's infidelity to humanism, the devoted tribute to 
 common soldiers, the growing alarm that politicians 
 could manipulate consecrated causes, the words writ- 
 ten on the eve of death " If I live I mean to spend 
 the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I 
 have seen war, and faced modern artillery, and I 
 know what an outrage it is against simple men." 
 
 ' To be above passion is to be below humanity." 
 With these words, and words like them, Kettle em- 
 braced the cause of the Allies. " The Great War 
 was in its origin a Great Crime, and the documents 
 are there to prove it." " The unchallengeable fact 
 remains that while democracy was seeking a solution
 
 in terms of peace, ' the old German God ' forced it 
 in terms of war." " Russia has her vile tyrannies. 
 But from all Russian literature there comes an im- 
 mense and desolating sob of humility and self-re- 
 proach. Great Britain has not yet liquidated her ac- 
 count with Ireland, nor altogether purified her rela- 
 tions with India and Egypt. But Great Britain does 
 not, at any rate, throw aside all plain, pedestrian 
 Christian standards as rubbish. In the Rhineland, 
 too . . . But all the central thought of Germany 
 has been for a generation corrupt. It has been foul 
 with the odor of desired shambles/' And the last 
 sentences of a dispatch from Brussels, August fth, 
 1914, 
 
 It is impossible not to be with Belgium in the struggle. 
 It is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has 
 thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the deepest 
 forces of our civilization. War is hell, but is only a hell 
 of suffering, not a hell of dishonor. And through it, over 
 its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet. 
 
 So much of statecraft is cynical and diabolic, from 
 the standpoint of human decency, that many fine men 
 become simply anthropomorphic about it and hate 
 the state. The best of Irishmen, " agin' the gov- 
 er'ment," have inclined to this view. Since time be- 
 gan, if evolution means anything, the resistance of 
 order to liberty has been resolute, with order ever 
 tending to make liberty glamourous, to handicap le- 
 gitimate growth and change, to skim power from the 
 men who create it, to levy tribute as a toll on mere 
 existence, to cheat the bees of their honey. There 
 is nothing diabolic in statecraft, I suppose, that isn't 
 as old as the hills. If the conditions of " the great 
 
 [362 ]
 
 society" are new, requiring a new outfit of political 
 devices for stimulating loyalty, the game of stimu- 
 lating loyalty must still be a very old one, as old as 
 any so-called " voluntary " movement on the part 
 of any great mass. But once the mass becomes very 
 vast and heterogeneous, very extended and loose, 
 the artificiality of political devices shows up horri- 
 bly, especially if their end is warfare and their means 
 a wholesale employment of patriotically conscripted 
 youth. 
 
 To die for a " tradition," a " principle," a " group 
 of ideas," when your next-door neighbors have ob- 
 viously different traditions and principles and groups 
 of ideas it is a requirement that goes astonishingly 
 and absurdly contrary to the whole private tendency 
 of modern times. Perhaps that tendency, which I 
 take to be individuation, has only been superficial 
 a matter of numbered seats instead of a scramble, 
 individual newspapers instead of a bellman, multiple 
 forks and knives, personal books, personal rooms, 
 personal bath-tubs, personal locomotives, personal 
 inflections in everything physical, rather than a genu- 
 ine intimate and scrupulous consultation of personal 
 natures and wills. Whether superficial or deep, it 
 has been the dominant note of free communities in 
 our generation a note, from the standpoint of the 
 recruiting sergeant, that cannot too soon be quelled. 
 To subdue personality and personal preference is 
 the function of the recruiting sergeant. To produce 
 a regiment is his object. And if the " noble cause " 
 is not conspicuous when he starts on his mission 
 well, as General O'Ryan of New York so wittily ob- 
 serves, a " noble cause " can be produced by any 
 government at any time. The individual may have 
 
 [ 363 ]
 
 been pursuing " liberty," detesting regimentation. 
 Suddenly, in the presence of an enemy, he is called 
 upon to recognize the entity dictated by statecraft, 
 to enlist or be flayed. His " noble cause " may, 
 actually, be declared the very individuation and lib- 
 erty he has striven for. His first obligation, for all 
 that, is to defer his dividend of self. He has to 
 commit himself, body and bones, to the statecraft 
 that has so often betrayed him, and to give up that 
 precious protestantism which made him feel a sol- 
 dier of life. He has to espouse self-sacrifice, to ad- 
 mit solidarity, to pool his preferences. He has, in 
 other words, to come in and be good. 
 
 With this surrender, this mighty abnegation, in 
 mind, there is a weight of import in the last words 
 that Kettle speaks before the veil descends. The 
 scourge of war he characterizes. 
 
 When the time comes to write down in every country 
 a plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and 
 flesh-stabbing, and bone-pulverizing, and lunatics, and rats 
 and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of 
 battlefields, two landmarks in human progress will be 
 reached. The world will for the first time understand the 
 nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will under- 
 stand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who com- 
 pel them into war. 
 
 But the bond of war he emphasizes. " The New 
 Army attested to die, if need be, for the public law of 
 Europe." And he speaks the last word on war aims. 
 
 Either this is on our part a war into which we were 
 forced by aggressive militarism ... or else it is a mere 
 struggle for domination between greedy Powers. . . . The 
 inner disruption of the Central Alliance is never very far 
 
 [ 364]
 
 from practical politics. . . . But consent to the substitution 
 of " trade " for " honor " as our device, and mark the malign 
 transformation. . . . The armies, to whatever new deflec- 
 tion their inspiration be submitted, will fight their un- 
 wavering way to victory. But it will be a victory tainted 
 with ambiguous and selfish ends. History will write of us 
 that we began nobly, but that our purpose corrupted. The 
 Great War for freedom will not, indeed, have been waged 
 in vain; that is already decided: but it will have but half 
 kept its promises. Blood and iron will have been once 
 more established as the veritable masters of men, and noth- 
 ing will open before the world but a vista of new wars. 
 
 I received a letter from France this week that 
 said, " Raymond Asquith lies buried at Guillamont 
 on the Somme on the bloodstained road to Bapaume, 
 being killed August or September about the same 
 time and place as Tommy Kettle whose grave I 
 searched for but did not find." From that unknown 
 grave I am glad that Kettle speaks in the end not of 
 Belgium, nor of Ireland, but of the power of the 
 state, the treacheries of statecraft, the invincible sig- 
 nificance of war aims. His blood is a pledge to de- 
 mocracy against " the terrorists of ' patriotism,' " 
 his last courage a moral courage in the name of the 
 great liberalism for which he died. 
 
 December 29, 
 
 [ 365 1
 
 THE BOOKS AND PLAYS 
 
 STUART P. SHERMAN: On Contemporary Literature 
 ALEXANDER HARVEY: William Dean Howells 
 EDITH WHARTON: Xingu and other stories 
 
 Summer 
 WINSTON CHURCHILL: The Dwelling Place of 
 
 Light 
 SHERWOOD ANDERSON : Windy McPherson's Son. 
 
 Marching Men 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH : Celt and Saxon 
 HENRY JAMES: The Finer Grain 
 
 The American Scene 
 SAMUEL BUTLER: The Way of All Flesh 
 
 The Note Books 
 H. G. WELLS: Tono-Bungay 
 
 The New Machiavelli 
 The Research Magnificent 
 Mr. Britl'mg Sees it Through 
 The Soul of a Bishop 
 ARNOLD BENNETT: The Old Wives' Tale 
 Clayhanger 
 These Twain 
 JAMES JOYCE: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
 
 Man 
 
 LEO TOLSTOY: War and Peace 
 FEDOR DOSTOEVSKY: Crime and Punishment 
 JOHN SYNGE : Poems and Translations 
 
 [ 366 ]
 
 'G. B. SHAW: Getting Married 
 
 Misalliance 
 J. M. BARRIE : A Kiss for Cinderella 
 
 Short Plays 
 
 RACHEL CROTHERS: Old Lady 31 
 O'HiGGiNS AND FORD : Mr. Lazarus 
 CLARE KUMMER: Good Gracious Annabelle 
 RIDGELY TORRENCE : Negro Plays 
 RUPERT BROOKE : Letters from America 
 
 Collected Poems 
 
 VACHEL LINDSAY : A Handy Guide to Beggars 
 EDGAR LEE MASTERS : Songs and Satires 
 CARL SANDBURG : Chicago Poems 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK : The Wrack of the Storm 
 MAX EASTMAN : Understanding Germany 
 BERTRAND RUSSELL: Why Men Fight 
 RALPH BARTON PERRY: The Free Man and the 
 
 Soldier 
 
 THORSTEIN VEBLEN : The Nature of Peace 
 HENRI BARBUSSE : Under Fire 
 T. M. KETTLE: The Ways of War
 
 I am indebted to Mr. Herbert Croly of The New 
 Republic and Mr. Julian Mason of The Chicago Eve- 
 ning Post for their kind permission to reprint these 
 articles; and to Mr. John Macrae of E. P. Button 
 & Co., for letting me use my introduction to Samuel 
 Butler's Note-Books. 
 
 [368]
 

 
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