;-NRLF 
 
 
; BERKELEY 
 JBRARY 
 JNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 

 
 S I L I 
 
 HJALA^ 
 
Literary and Social 
 
 SILHOUETTES 
 
 BY 
 HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER AND BROTHERS 
 
 MDCCCXCIV 
 
o?97 
 
 Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TYPES OF AMERICAN WOMEN i 
 
 GERMAN AND AMERICAN WOMEN 24 
 
 THE AMERICAN NOVELIST AND HIS PUBLIC . . 41 
 THE PROGRESSIVE REALISM OF AMERICAN FIC 
 TION 58 
 
 THE HERO IN FICTION 79 
 
 AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM 97 
 
 AMERICA IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE 117 
 
 THE ETHICS OF ROBERT BROWNING 131 
 
 MARS vs. APOLLO 147 
 
 PHILISTINISM 163 
 
 SOME STRAY NOTES ON ALPHONSE DAUDET . 178 
 
 MY LOST SELF 194 
 
 THE MERIDIAN OF LIFE , . 2 <x 
 
 464 
 
TYPES OF AMERICAN WOMEN 
 
 ERBERT SPENCER insinu 
 ates in one of his sociological 
 works that the indirection, 
 the coquetry, \hzfinesse, nay, 
 all the arts which we find 
 so adorable in women, are modified forms 
 of hypocrisy. Before the advent of civil 
 ization, woman had in pure self-defence 
 to practise an elaborate deception. In 
 order to please her brutal lord and secure 
 predominance among dangerous rivals, 
 she had to disguise her natural senti 
 ments, and return caresses for blows and 
 smiles for discourtesy. As she could 
 not accomplish her purposes by force, she 
 became an expert in domestic diplomacy. 
 The craftier, the -more guileful, she was, 
 the better were her chances of survival. 
 And thus it has come to pass that, though 
 the necessity for intricate behavior is now 
 
much lessened, women practise to-day, in 
 a more elusive and refined way, the arts 
 which the instinct of self-preservation im 
 posed upon their barbarous ancestresses. 
 This is, as all will admit, an unpoetical 
 theory, and a revolting one to a chival 
 rous mind. I, therefore, purposely shield 
 myself behind the great name of Herbert 
 Spencer in reproducing it. Though I do 
 not vouch for it as true, I hold it to be 
 not improbable. A number of unpleasant 
 things will be found in the ancestry of 
 every one of us, if we pursue our researches 
 far enough back ; but, in my opinion, they 
 redound to our credit, rather than the con 
 trary, if we convert them into something 
 useful and agreeable. When we consider 
 what malodorous things may have been 
 distilled into the fragrance of the rose 
 and the lily, it is scarcely worth while to 
 regret a remote grandmother s mendacity 
 which in the granddaughter is evaporat 
 ed into an archness and witchery, lending 
 charm to her speech and a more exquisite 
 flavor to her personality. I feel in such 
 a case positively grateful to the grand 
 mother for having hoodwinked her lord, 
 
and do not question the ability of the fair 
 descendant to do the same, though with 
 out coming into conflict with a single 
 commandment of the Decalogue. The 
 blunt command, " Thou shalt not," was, I 
 suspect, meant for men rather than for 
 women ; for I have known some highly- 
 developed members of the sex who have 
 been able to wind in and out among the 
 ten fatal prohibitions, coming dangerous 
 ly near some of them, but without getting 
 entangled in any. There is to them a 
 rare pleasure in this hazardous play 
 which again hints at an inherited com 
 plexity of character, never wholly com 
 prehensible to men. 
 
 I have remarked that the necessity for 
 duplicity of the cruder sort has lessened 
 and is constantly lessening. But it has not 
 altogether vanished. So long as marriage 
 remains the normal fate of women, the 
 vast majority of them will and must en 
 deavor to make themselves pleasing to 
 men. They must consider primarily, not 
 what they would like to be, but what men 
 would like them to be. Because the 
 feminine ideal for the average man is an 
 
unindividualized or but faintly individual 
 ized creature a mere personification of 
 the sex, as it were the majority of girls 
 pay homage to this unworthy ideal by 
 simulating a clinging dependence and a 
 featureless blankness of character. They 
 repress their real selves, or-consciously or 
 unconsciously disguise them. Their ed 
 ucation, which, in this country as else 
 where, trains them in seeming rather than 
 in being, does not aim to make pronounced 
 and capable individuals of them (as in the 
 case of boys), but to develop them into 
 the accepted, traditional type of woman 
 hood which is supposed to have the sanc 
 tion of the Bible and of the experience of 
 the ages. As to the wisdom of this I do 
 not wish at present to express an opinion. 
 There is no doubt that when women do 
 break away from this traditional standard, 
 as more and more of them do, they be 
 come more outrees, more revolutionary in 
 speech and conduct than men similarly in 
 clined. There is a good reason for this, or 
 several good reasons. If a woman lias the 
 courage to aspire to anything beyond the 
 common lot, the world puts her on the de- 
 
fcnsive, and by its hostile criticism forces 
 her to account for herself, and drives her 
 then by degrees into a more extreme po 
 sition than she had at first thought of 
 occupying. For the sake of a consistency 
 which we do not demand of others, she 
 is obliged to antagonize doctrines and 
 institutions which she had never before 
 thought of antagonizing, and to define her 
 attitude towards everything under the 
 sun, until she becomes unwholesomely 
 conscious in every breath she draws. 
 
 In the countries of Europe there is 
 scarcely an exception to this rule. The 
 woman who is not content to be a mere 
 embodiment of her sex, and who there 
 fore by individual aspiration strives to 
 differentiate herself, is tabooed by the 
 best society and made the target of cheap 
 ridicule. She may, like Florence Nightin 
 gale or Sister Dora, be permitted to bear 
 more than her part of the world s bur 
 dens, but she is not permitted to aspire 
 for more than her allotted share of its 
 privileges. It is not so very long since 
 similar conditions prevailed in the United 
 States ; nay, they do to a certain extent 
 
yet prevail. But that a very substantial 
 progress has been made here is neverthe 
 less certain. Our social conditions afford 
 a wider scope for individual development 
 than do those of Europe. One of the first 
 observations which the English or Ger 
 man traveller is apt to make after landing 
 in New York, is that American women 
 have more vivacity, more character, more 
 freedom of speech and manners than the 
 women of England or Germany. That is 
 but another way of saying that they are 
 more individualized. They have a more 
 distinct, and as a rule a more piquant, 
 flavor of personality. They are not mere 
 ly specimens of the feminine gender more 
 or less attractive, and labelled for the sake 
 of convenience Minnie, Jennie, or Fannie, 
 but they are primarily Minnie and Jennie 
 and Fannie (though I could wish they had 
 nobler and more dignified appellations), 
 endowed with and modified by their fem 
 inine gender. It follows from this that 
 the types of women are here more varied 
 and more pronounced than in Europe ; 
 and if an experience of twenty-five years, 
 devoted to discreet observation and sym- 
 
pathetic study, gives me a right to judge, 
 I should like to disburden my note-books 
 of some more or less pretentious sketches 
 which are beginning to rebel against their 
 obscurity. 
 
 The first woman whose acquaintance I 
 made in the United States (in 1869) was 
 a very pretty Western girl, who took a 
 peculiar pleasure in saying and doing 
 things which she knew would shock my 
 European notions of propriety. She was 
 slangy in her speech, careless in her pro 
 nunciation, and bent upon " having a good 
 time " without reference to the prohi 
 bitions which are framed for the special 
 purpose of annoying women. I was some 
 times in danger of misinterpreting her 
 conduct, but soon came to the conclusion 
 that there was no harm in her. She ruled 
 her father and her mother, who some 
 times interposed feeble objections to her 
 plans for her own and my amusement ; 
 but the end invariably was that a puz 
 zled assent was yielded to all her pro 
 ceedings. She had about as much idea 
 of propriety (in the European sense) as a 
 cat has of mathematics. She recognized 
 
no law except her own sovereign will, 
 and her demands were usually so em 
 phatic that no one could disagree with 
 her without the risk of quarrelling. Patri 
 otic she was bristling with combative- 
 ness if a criticism was made which implied 
 disrespect of American manners or insti 
 tutions. She was good-natured, generous 
 to a fault, and brimming with energy. 
 
 This young girl is the type of American 
 womanhood which has become domes 
 ticated in European fiction. She is to 
 French, English, and German authors the 
 American type par excellence. She is a 
 familiar figure in the French drama, and 
 her pistol-firing and her amusing rowdy 
 ism relieve the monotony of many a dull 
 novel. Ouida has caricatured her in Moths 
 and Sardou in LOncle Sam. Henry James 
 ventured some years ago to publish a 
 mild edition of her in Daisy Miller, and 
 outraged patriotism denounced him as a 
 slanderer of his country, declaring that he 
 had libelled American womanhood. I, too, 
 in a recent novel, was tempted to make a 
 little literary capital out of my early ac 
 quaintance with this personification. of the 
 
Declaration of Independence.* I was told 
 by a chorus of reviewers (and I suspected 
 the soprano note in most of them) that the 
 type was one of my own invention ; that it 
 did not exist except in my jaundiced eye; 
 that, if it did exist, I had outrageously 
 caricatured it ; and that I had conclusive 
 ly proved myself an alien, devoid of sym 
 pathy with the American character. Now, 
 I had prided myself on having avoided 
 the farcical exaggerations of my Euro 
 pean confreres. I had imagined that my 
 "emancipated young woman " was strict 
 ly true to life, and that no single trait of 
 her vivacious personality had been set 
 down in malice or for the sake of effect. 
 
 It would seem odd indeed, considering 
 the fact that the novelists of all foreign 
 countries have pounced upon this type 
 as being peculiarly American, if the type 
 had no existence. Such unanimity in 
 misrepresentation would scarcely be con 
 ceivable, unless they had come together 
 with malice aforethought and agreed 
 among themselves as to how they were 
 
 * Delia Saunders in The Light of Her Cormtenance. 
 
to blacken the character of cisatlantic 
 womanhood. But if I had been a party 
 to such a dastardly plot, I dare say I 
 should have forfeited my domestic peace 
 long ago ; for I have furnished the most 
 incontestable proof possible that I am a 
 stranger to the sentiments which animate 
 these wretched traducers. I may, there 
 fore, perhaps, be permitted to remark that 
 it need not argue disloyalty to the Consti 
 tution if a novelist refuses to depict cou- 
 leur de rose everything he sees. The in 
 dependent young Americaine who pleases 
 herself without reference to the tastes of 
 others, is not a wholly agreeable phenom 
 enon ; but it is of no use to deny her ex 
 istence. She is very prevalent in Europe ; 
 and though she rarely invades the so- 
 called best society of our seaboard cities, 
 you need only go abroad or sufficiently 
 far west to find her in all her glory. 
 
 The best society, it may be observed in 
 parenthesis, is not the best place to study 
 American types. The highest civilization 
 is hostile to types. It tends towards uni 
 formity of manners, rubs off angularities 
 of conduct, obliterates glaring character- 
 
istics. At first glance, a New York after 
 noon tea does not differ strikingly from 
 a London afternoon tea. In both places 
 people go to show themselves, half out of 
 vanity, half as a matter of duty. They 
 have no expectation of being amused, 
 nor are they amused ; but they depart 
 with the amiable fiction upon their lips 
 that they have had " such a delightful 
 time." A certain well-bred hypocrisy is 
 absolutely necessary to make social inter 
 course smooth and agreeable. It is one 
 of the last results of civilization. The 
 blunt sincerity of the frontiersman stamps 
 him as a barbarian. Women of the Sarah 
 Althea Hill variety flourish yet in the ex 
 treme West, and are typical of a semi- 
 barbarous social condition. They are 
 glaring illustrations of our social history 
 which reveal more than would a hun 
 dred pages of eloquent text. But even in 
 California that type of woman has ceased 
 to excite admiration ; and when it is no 
 longer admired it will soon become ex 
 tinct. I have heard Californians declare 
 that it never had any existence except in 
 the newspapers ; and of course I meekly 
 
acquiesced, knowing that Californians car 
 ry an incontrovertible argument in their 
 hip pockets. But leaving that question 
 an open one, it is safe to assert that the 
 standard of conduct which demands self- 
 restraint and repression of picturesque 
 eccentricities is slowly travelling west 
 ward, and will ere long make us sigh for 
 the dear old days of romance immortal 
 ized by Bret Harte and by the dime novel. 
 There is, however, a type of American 
 womanhood, by no means devoid of cis 
 atlantic flavor, which has nothing to fear 
 from the march of civilization. She is in 
 deed an agent of civilization and a most 
 powerful one. I met her for the first 
 time in 1869, and have been meeting her 
 daily ever since. Though she may ob 
 ject to the name, I shall call her the As 
 piring Woman. As a rule she is not 
 handsome, and she is not conspicuous for 
 taste in dress. She regards dress and all 
 other things which have no bearing upon 
 her intellectual development as being of 
 slight consequence. It would be impos 
 sible to arouse her enthusiasm for a 
 French bonnet, and the shrill little ejacu- 
 
lations of rapture in which other women 
 compass a world of meaning (or the op 
 posite) are not found in her vocabulary. 
 She rebukes you with a glance of mild 
 reprobation if you indulge in " frivolous 
 talk " or refer to any physical traits in a 
 member of her sex. There is no affecta 
 tion in this ; it is rather the result of a 
 long puritanic descent, and amounts to a 
 second conscience. She knows the flesh 
 only as something to be mortified, and 
 though she may have abandoned the 
 scriptural grounds for the mortification, 
 she is, in the midst of her consciousness 
 of evil, so good as almost to be able to 
 dispense with the commandments. I have 
 known her skeptical and I have known 
 her religious ; but skepticism sat lightly 
 upon her, like a divestible garment, and 
 could not conceal her innate goodness. 
 She is frequently anaemic, and in New 
 England inclines to be flat-chested. The 
 vigor of her physical life usually leaves 
 much to be desired ; the poverty of diet 
 in ascetic ancestors has often reduced her 
 vitality, making her undervalue the con 
 cerns of the flesh, and overvalue the rel- 
 
ative importance of the things of the 
 spirit. I purposely qualify these state 
 ments, and do not represent them as be 
 ing invariably true. The aspiring woman 
 is so extensive and numerous a species 
 that it naturally embraces many varieties. 
 The variety I have described is a con 
 spicuous one, but it is not the only one. 
 There is one trait, however, which they 
 all have in common : they are all bent 
 upon improving themselves, in season 
 and out of season. When they indulge 
 in anything frivolous, it is always from 
 a utilitarian motive. Thus I remember 
 once dancing a waltz with an aspiring 
 young woman. It was at the Cornell 
 University, at the season when the all- 
 absorbing topic is the graduating thesis. 
 Just as we swung out upon the floor she 
 exploded this query in my ears : " Now, 
 won t you be kind enough to give me, just 
 in a few words, the gist of Spinoza s Eth 
 ics ?" It did not surprise me afterwards to 
 learn that she danced because it was good 
 for the digestion. And her dancing was 
 what might have been expected ; it was a 
 conscientious exercise. At every bar of the 
 
music she emphasized the time with a jerk, 
 as if she were trying to help me along. 
 
 If there is any single trait which radi 
 cally distinguishes American society, as 
 a whole, from European society, it is 
 a universal hopefulness and aspiration. 
 The European Philistine, though he may 
 not be content with his lot, rarely thinks 
 of rising above the station to which he 
 was born. Society appears so fixed and 
 unyielding that it seems like presump 
 tion on his part to defy its prejudice. 
 It requires a very exceptional courage, 
 therefore, and talents of a high order, to 
 aspire successfully. But in the United 
 States aspiration is the rule, not the ex 
 ception. The man who is content to re 
 main what he is, who does not expect to 
 rise to some dizzy height of wealth or of 
 fame, was until recently a rara avis in 
 the Western States. And as for the young 
 women, they were animated by an am 
 bition which in many cases was pathetic. 
 I met, during my sojourn in Ohio and 
 Illinois, daughters of farmers and me 
 chanics who were cultivating themselves 
 in secret, groping their way most piti- 
 
fully, without help or guidance, and often 
 gulping the most abominable stuff under 
 the impression that they were being in 
 tellectually nourished. 
 
 The young woman who cultivates poet 
 ry under the most distressing circumstan 
 ces, and perhaps finally publishes a pitiful 
 little volume at her own expense, is a butt 
 for newspaper ridicule ; but to me she is a 
 pathetic character. If there were not in 
 her a spark of the Promethean fire, she 
 would not expend so much vital energy 
 and deluded hope, in the face of many 
 discouragements, on her clumsy or in 
 sipid rhymes. She may, indeed, be a con 
 ceited pretender; but the probabilities 
 are nine to one that she is something 
 better. Having had no opportunities for 
 culture beyond such as the district school 
 offers, she has, of course, no chance of 
 succeeding. A utilitarian would advise 
 her to throw her verses into the fire, to 
 tuck up her skirts, and to help her mother 
 scrub, darn, and wash dishes. Such a 
 counsellor would be worthy of attention. 
 But, in the first place, he would find that 
 the mother would object to the help (for 
 
she is, as a rule, proud of her daughter s 
 unusual accomplishments); and, second 
 ly, something valuable would vanish out 
 of American life, if all the misguided and 
 largely futile aspiration were lost which 
 constitutes the tragedy and the dignity 
 of thousands of narrow, toilsome lives. 
 When the failure is, at last, tacitly ac 
 knowledged and the hope of success aban 
 doned, something yet remains, which is 
 beyond the reach of hostile critics and an 
 indifferent public. This may be a mere 
 heightened self-respect, with a touch of 
 defiance, or it may be the lifting of the 
 character to a higher plane than it would 
 have reached without the futile aspira 
 tion. Women who have passed through 
 an experience of this sort transfer, when 
 they become mothers, their ambition to 
 their children, and will make any sacrifice 
 in the hope of enabling their sons to at 
 tain what they missed. It is a priceless 
 blessing to a man to have had such a 
 mother; and all over this country they 
 are scattered in log-huts and farm-houses, 
 in tenements and in brown-stone fronts. 
 I have often endeavored, after each 
 
return from a European pilgrimage, to 
 make clear to myself wherein the charm 
 of American women consists. I do not 
 mean the mere charm of womanhood, 
 for that is universal ; but something su- 
 peradded, depending upon climate and 
 social conditions, which lends to it a 
 heightened flavor, a more exquisite bou 
 quet. I have always sympathized with 
 the perverter of Pope who declared that 
 the noblest study of mankind is woman ; 
 and of all womankind no variety better 
 repays sympathetic and discriminating 
 study than the American. For the pur 
 poses of the sociologist no less than those 
 of the novelist, women are unquestion 
 ably more interesting than men ; and in 
 particular, American women are more 
 interesting than American men. As a 
 leisured class (comparatively speaking), 
 they have more time to cultivate the 
 amenities of life than have their hus 
 bands and brothers. They read more ; 
 and a larger proportion than will be found 
 anywhere else in the world have inter 
 ests beyond dress and social tittle-tattle. 
 Some few have vigorous, well-trained in- 
 
tellects, and naturally feel their superior 
 ity to the majority of men with whom 
 they associate. They then rashly con 
 clude that women, as a rule, are the intel 
 lectual superiors of men, or would be if 
 the same opportunities of education were 
 afforded them ; and presently we find 
 them in woman-suffrage conventions, pe 
 titioning legislatures and agitating for 
 social reform. Far be it from me to throw 
 ridicule upon these heroic protagonists, 
 or to underestimate the value of their 
 labors. Though I do not sympathize 
 with some of their aims, I cannot but 
 admire their intrepidity, their fortitude, 
 their noble enthusiasm. The influence 
 of their work is good, and we could ill 
 afford to dispense with it. It is not to be 
 denied, however, that they forfeit much 
 of that charm which, in the present con 
 dition of the world, constitutes to the be 
 nighted male the chief attraction of the 
 sex. 
 
 I believe there is inherent in all women 
 what may be called, without any invidious 
 inference, a yearning for the common 
 place for the normal lot. Those who 
 
protest most strenuously against the in 
 justice of society to their sex, are as a rule 
 willing to exchange their uncomfortable 
 prominence for the contented obscurity 
 of a domestic hearth. If it were possible 
 to explore their innermost hearts, I be 
 lieve it would be found that they have an 
 underlying respect, not to say fondness, 
 for the tyranny which they justly de 
 nounce. Madame de Stael s willingness 
 to exchange all her fame and intellectual 
 superiority for Madame de Recamier s 
 gift of pleasing, is the most profoundly 
 womanly trait recorded of that brilliant 
 amazon. In the correspondence of George 
 Eliot, too, there is a regretful acceptance 
 of the eminence that is thrust upon her; 
 and in her personal life a kind of re 
 versed aspiration is perceptible, a yearn 
 ing for the ordinary ties of ordinary wom 
 en for love, dependence, self-surrender. 
 The apparent aberrations of her career 
 are easily accounted for on this hypoth 
 esis. 
 
 As regards this fundamental character 
 istic, American women do not differ from 
 their sisters the world over. The point 
 
in which they do differ is chiefly a certain 
 intellectual alertness, an adaptability, a 
 readiness to apply their minds quickly 
 to any new topic, a mental resonance 
 which responds promptly to a deft touch. 
 This accounts largely for the charm 
 they exercise over foreigners. The pro 
 portion of truly delightful women, well- 
 bred, sympathetic, and intelligent, is 
 larger in the best society of our great 
 cities than in society of a corresponding 
 grade in England, France, or Germany. 
 In stateliness, dignity, and finish of man 
 ner, the aristocracy of the old world nat 
 urally excel them ; but it is marvellous to 
 observe the readiness with which, when 
 they marry noblemen, they adapt them 
 selves to their new surroundings and beat 
 "the daughters of a hundred earls" on 
 their own ground. They become grandes 
 dames in an incredibly short time,yet with 
 out losing their American cleverness, deli 
 cacy, and piquancy of style. Some of the 
 grandest ladies one meets inVienna, Paris, 
 Berlin, and London, the sight of whom 
 awakens a sneaking admiration for feu 
 dalism and a dim disloyalty to the Declara- 
 
tion of Independence, turn out, on inquiry, 
 to be transplanted American heiresses. 
 And yet no one would have believed, 
 without proof to the contrary, that this 
 combination of graciousness and dignity, 
 these delicate gradations of cordiality and 
 reserve, this consummate skill in dealing 
 with nice questions of etiquette, could 
 have sprung from the soil of democracy. 
 American ladies at home, though their 
 native tact usually comes to their rescue, 
 rarely possess in the same degree this 
 adroitness. We have not yet gotten 
 through the imitative stage in our social 
 customs and observances, and no one 
 who has an alien model in view can be 
 have with perfect naturalness and secur 
 ity. The English yoke sits heavily upon 
 that part of New York society which 
 claims to be "the best," and upon the 
 girls in particular. That distressing hand 
 shake, with the elbow raised at an angle 
 of ninety degrees, is one of the recent im 
 portations. The rule not to introduce, for 
 which we are also indebted to London, 
 is another heavy incubus, which strangles 
 conversation and produces awkwardness 
 
23 
 
 and misery. But the women who make it 
 a point to be abreast of London in all these 
 more or less arbitrary observances are ap 
 parently unaware that they are robbing 
 themselves of their highest charm when 
 they are no longer frankly American. It 
 is their national flavor, refined by intelli 
 gence and culture, which makes them a 
 power both at home and abroad ; and 
 they should have the courage to be proud 
 of this nationality, and to show their 
 pride in it by abandoning their attitude 
 of social dependence upon Great Britain. 
 1890 
 
GERMAN AND AMERICAN 
 WOMEN 
 
 CYNICAL friend of mine, 
 who is a bachelor, once made 
 an observation which clings 
 like a burr to my memory. It 
 had always appeared a sig 
 nificant circumstance to him, he said, that 
 God, when "he saw all that he had made, 
 and, behold, it was very good," had not yet 
 created woman. After her appearance 
 upon the scene, the goodness of creation 
 might be rationally questioned. At all 
 events, the Bible is silent on the subject. 
 I ought, perhaps, to add that my cynical 
 friend is a German, and that, if he had 
 been an American, he would well, he 
 would not have had the courage of his 
 conviction. He would never have dared 
 to utter so heterodox an opinion. The 
 United States, as we all know, is the 
 
women s paradise, and they have a thou 
 sand ingenious ways of making life a bur 
 den to the man who has the audacity not 
 to admire them. I would rather that a 
 millstone were tied about my neck, and 
 that I were sunk in the depths of the sea, 
 than court the terrors of such a fate. 
 Therefore I shield myself judiciously be 
 hind the back of my cynical friend, with 
 whose opinions, I beg to state, 1 have not 
 the remotest sympathy. I dare say he 
 had been jilted, which, to the feminine 
 mind, is a sufficient cause for all vagaries 
 of conduct and sentiment. However, it 
 may be urged as an ameliorating circum 
 stance, that (though a German-American) 
 he had known chiefly his own country 
 women, and the few specimens of the 
 American woman with whom he had 
 come in contact had been of that no 
 madic species which one meets in second- 
 class family hotels and boarding-houses. 
 I don t blame any man for questioning the 
 rationality of creation after having been 
 doomed, for four years, to such compan 
 ionship. But, of course, I was too chival 
 rous to make such an admission to this 
 
26 
 
 Teutonic traducer of American woman 
 hood ; and accordingly I found myself 
 launched, before long, in a hot debate on 
 the comparative merits of German and 
 American women. To quote it verbatim 
 would be an endless task ; but. it had the 
 effect of stimulating my mind to grapple 
 with this subject and it is terrible what 
 an amount of reflection may be expended 
 upon it without the least palpable result. 
 I shall, however, venture to present a few 
 vague and extremely shadowy conclusions, 
 from which I shall instantly recede, if any 
 fair reader objects to them. And she the 
 fair reader will kindly bear in mind that 
 all that is uncomplimentary to her sex in 
 the following dissertation is due to the 
 jaundiced cynicism of my crude Teutonic 
 friend ; while all of which she may be 
 pleased to approve is due solely and ex 
 clusively to my own genial and intelli 
 gent observation. 
 
 Well, then, the American society girl 
 (cym cus loquitur) is brought up without 
 any adequate sense of duty. She is made 
 to believe or to infer from the attitude of 
 her environment, that the chief business 
 
of life is to amuse one s self ; and that the 
 day is to be counted as lost which does 
 not afford some new pleasurable excite 
 ment. Mothers, who have themselves 
 known the inestimable discipline of hard 
 ship and toil, have a natural desire to 
 make their daughters youth brighter and 
 happier than was their own ; and by this 
 generous motive they are impelled to in 
 troduce a ruinous laxity into their rela 
 tions with their children. The dear girls 
 must have a good time, at all hazards ; 
 and their pleasure and convenience must 
 be consulted above all else. The father 
 and the mother sacrifice themselves to 
 this end, and fondly imagine that they 
 are furthering their daughters welfare by 
 removing every stone out of their path. 
 As a consequence, they rear beautiful 
 little monsters of selfishness and con 
 ceit, who at the proper age trip sweet 
 ly into matrimony with a thousand de 
 mands, and without the least conception 
 of the serious duties which that relation 
 imposes upon them. When the husband 
 fails to subordinate himself (as he is very 
 apt to do) with the same willingness as 
 
papa and mamma did, to the whims and 
 caprices of his young wife particularly 
 if he fails to provide amusements enough, 
 regardless of expense then follow weep 
 ing and wailing and possibly also gnashing 
 of teeth ; little scenes are enacted (in strict 
 privacy at first) in which neither party is 
 apt to appear to advantage ; and trouble 
 rises, like a great blood-red moon, with an 
 ominous face, on the matrimonial horizon. 
 The postulate that women should be in 
 dependent and the equals of men sounds 
 eminently fair. But when two such in 
 dependents marry, they are sure to get 
 into collision. One or the other must 
 surrender a portion of his independence, 
 or retire from the partnership. It is a 
 most deplorable fact that so many choose 
 the latter alternative, and thereby do their 
 share towards undermining the founda 
 tions of society. Men and women are no 
 less fit, by nature, for the married state 
 here than elsewhere ; but the utterly lax 
 and slipshod education, more particularly 
 of young women, is responsible for the 
 ruin which overtakes so large a percent 
 age of American households. I am 
 
that is to say, my German friend was old- 
 fashioned enough to believe that there 
 are no privileges which do not also in 
 volve duties; and that it is far more im 
 portant to impress a young person, of 
 either sex, with a consciousness of the 
 latter than of the former. I never knew 
 any one, breathing the air of our democ 
 racy, who did not, without much guid 
 ance, discover what society owed to him ; 
 but I have known a great many who had 
 only the dimmest notions of their own 
 obligations towards society. 
 
 Now, in Germany, the situation is, in 
 some respects, exactly the opposite. 
 There women have the acutest percep 
 tion of the very things which American 
 women largely lack. They are trained 
 from childhood in ideas which we regard 
 as mediaeval, and from which we emanci 
 pated ourselves in 1789 or thereabouts. 
 First, the German maidens regard wife- 
 hood and motherhood as their legitimate 
 vocation ; and they have a veritable hor 
 ror of anything that savors of " woman s 
 rights." They do not ask for the omis 
 sion of the " obey " from the marriage 
 
service (as a fair friend of mine did); nor 
 do they interpret it in a Pickwickian 
 sense, as another charming damsel of my 
 acquaintance professed to have done, 
 when she was reminded of the odious 
 little verbs which she had been beguiled 
 into uttering. Ah, but the German wom 
 en what else can you expect of them ? 
 They are so palpably inferior to their 
 husbands ; and moreover, they dress atro 
 ciously, remarks a soprano voice at my 
 elbow. Granted. They are far less com 
 plex than their American sisters ; they 
 are less highly developed ; they have not 
 (unless they are very high up in the so 
 cial scale) half the alertness of mind, 
 facility of address, or independence of 
 thought. They are bound by a rigid so 
 cial tradition, which our women repudi 
 ate. They glory in their domestic martyr 
 dom, their sacrifice of self, their loving 
 and conscientious performance of their 
 duties to husband and children. But, al 
 though one may admit that they are not 
 individually as charming as American 
 women in the corresponding social po 
 sition, it is a question which admits of 
 
different replies, whether they do not, 
 other things being equal, make better 
 wives and better mothers than than 
 the ladies on the planet Jupiter. The 
 sentiment of home, which is chiefly fos 
 tered by the mother, certainly exists in a 
 higher and intenser degree in Germany 
 than it does here ; the domestic ties mean 
 more, and are regarded with a deeper re 
 spect. Look at Kaulbach s illustrations 
 to Schiller s Song of the Bell, and you will 
 see how they are permeated with this sen 
 timent of the sanctity of home, and what 
 a tender poetic afflatus dignifies and en 
 nobles all the typical incidents of family 
 life. What can be lovelier than the car 
 toon entitled " The Mother s Instruction," 
 which exhales a breath of all that is sweet 
 est and best in the German Fatherland ? 
 I wish it were natural to exclaim, at the 
 sight of such a scene, " How American !" 
 instead of being obliged to say, " How 
 German !" 
 
 The fundamental trait of German wom 
 anhood is not intellectual brilliancy, not 
 readiness of resource or practical sense, 
 but self-sacrificing goodness of heart. 
 
We who are accustomed to more high 
 ly-flavored peculiarities are inclined to 
 misjudge this kind of quiet, unobtrusive 
 goodness, and so undervalue the sterling 
 virtues which it conceals. But what alien 
 ates us still more is a certain sentimen 
 tal effusiveness and exuberance of feeling, 
 which lie as remote as possible from the 
 Anglo-Saxon temperament. What we 
 fear above all things is to make ourselves 
 ridiculous; and every exhibition of emo 
 tion has to us, unhappily, a lurking sug 
 gestion of the ridiculous. We, therefore, 
 repress ourselves until we are in danger 
 of becoming insincere and unnatural from 
 sheer dread of compromising our pre 
 cious dignity. Now, the Germans, and 
 particularly the German women, are never 
 in the least troubled with this question of 
 the ridiculous. They have, I verily be 
 lieve, a depression in their craniums 
 where the bump of humor ought to have 
 been situated ; which, of course, saves a 
 deal of discomfort. But, as a compensa 
 tion, they possess the correlative virtue 
 in which our society women, both old and 
 young, are conspicuously lacking. I mean 
 
33 
 
 a capacity for seriousness. What can be 
 more distressing to a man, who has out 
 grown his first, callow youth, than the 
 perpetual chaff and banter in which he 
 is expected to indulge in his intercourse 
 with ladies ? I have felt positively mur 
 derous at times, after having spent an 
 evening in the company of fair enchant 
 resses, who insisted upon being funny and 
 seeing a lurking joke in every remark 
 which I uttered. Now, I dare say I en 
 joy a good joke as much as any one ; but 
 humor, which affords a delightful season 
 ing to conversation, becomes distaste 
 ful and unwholesome as a steady diet. 
 Forced jesting, coupled with that ner 
 vous, half- hysterical vivacity which we 
 all know so well, serves but to disguise 
 poverty of thought. It is either because 
 our young women have no capacity for 
 serious thinking, or because they distrust 
 the capacity which they possess, that they 
 seek refuge in this imbecile jocularity. 
 
 I am speaking, of course, of society 
 women ; for I am well aware that, in 
 the strata below, the humorous aspect 
 of life is in no danger of predominating. 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 Nor am I blind to the fact that, within 
 the society which I am criticising, there 
 are many lovely and brilliant women, who 
 incline me to thank God daily for the 
 privilege of having been born their con 
 temporary. But these are radiant excep 
 tions which prove the rule. An over 
 whelming majority of the women who 
 figure at routs, dinners, and balls seem 
 shallow in heart and brain ; and they 
 lack, moreover, that supreme charm of 
 womanly dignity which covers all minor 
 imperfections with a mantle of grace. 
 They dress extremely well ; far better 
 than a similar assemblage would be like 
 ly to do in any other part of the world. 
 They are superficially clever, and adapt 
 themselves with great readiness to any 
 situation. But you will find, if you pene 
 trate beneath their outer armor of con 
 ventionality, a certain dryness and pov 
 erty of nature, a comparative absence 
 of those warm, sweet, fundamentally 
 womanly qualities which are the strength 
 and the glory of womanhood ; and in their 
 stead a host of petty and obtrusive little 
 vanities ; a grim, hard-headed selfishness 
 
and worldly calculation, which is deter 
 mined to get the most out of life with 
 the least possible sacrifice ; and an essen 
 tial flimsiness of character which makes 
 them incapable of noble motives and dis 
 interested actions. This is the sort of 
 women whose lives are filled with so- 
 called social duties ; t. e., visiting, person 
 al gossip, strife for precedence, snubs to 
 supposed inferiors, flattering attention to 
 superiors, and vain and mean ambitions 
 that would scarcely seem worth the ex 
 penditure of one -tenth of the energy 
 which they demand. They go to church, 
 too, chiefly as a matter of form, and fig 
 ure conspicuously among the patrons of 
 fashionable charities. But the spirit which 
 should sanctify the deed is so glaringly 
 absent, that the deed itself loses whatever 
 virtue it might otherwise possess. 
 
 It is the system of education to which 
 I have alluded, or rather the lack of sys 
 tem, which is responsible for the preva 
 lence of this type. It is the combination 
 of lax indulgence and neglect on the part 
 of the parents indulgence as regards 
 material comforts, and neglect as regards 
 
spiritual guidance and the training of 
 character which produces these fair, 
 heartless sirens, whom we meet at New 
 port, Bar Harbor, and Narragansett Pier, 
 whose shrill song is, however, apt to 
 allure to perdition only men of their own 
 species, unless indeed they be very young. 
 Now, my cynical friend (whose opin 
 ions I have been quoting) has the audacity 
 to maintain that the women in the upper 
 strata of German society are finer and 
 nobler specimens of their sex than Amer 
 ican women of the corresponding posi 
 tion. (I have long been pondering wheth 
 er I ought to challenge him to fight with 
 pistols or with swords, unless he consents 
 to withdraw this offensive remark; and 
 as I shoot better than I fence, I am slowly 
 gravitating towards the more deadly weap 
 on. In the meanwhile, I am in hopes 
 that he will repent of his rudeness and 
 recant.) But, as I was saying, he has the 
 hardihood to insinuate that the German 
 girls of to-day, themselves the result of 
 conscientious education and often of stern 
 discipline, are more impressive phenom 
 ena in their blonde innocence and Spar- 
 
37 
 
 tan simplicity of life than our pretty, flim 
 sy, pampered, and self-willed daughters 
 of wealth and enervating luxury. These 
 girls, he says, will make noble mothers, 
 and happy are the sons whom they shall 
 tenderly guide with affectionate severity 
 and far-seeing love to a pure and vigor 
 ous manhood. Of course, distance has 
 lent its enchantment to this picture and 
 is, in part, responsible for its poetic tint. 
 There is this to be said, on the other 
 side, that a man has to make his choice 
 among these girls largely on trust ; for, 
 with all their virtues, they are a trifle 
 insipid, until wifehood and motherhood 
 have awakened their latent character 
 istics. They are distressingly alike, both 
 in their outward type and in their senti 
 ments ; and they rarely develop an inter 
 esting individuality until after marriage, 
 or after they have given up the expecta 
 tion of marriage. For the male species 
 as we all know, are afraid of anything of 
 definite complexion, preferring a mere 
 personification of the venerable and tra 
 ditional qualities which are supposed to 
 be inherent in the sex. The German 
 
male would even count it a gain if he 
 could arrest all individual development 
 in his wife for an indefinite period. And 
 it is inevitable that this ideal of blank- 
 ness, feebly tinted by a few traditional 
 virtues, will be reflected in the mind and 
 demeanor of German girlhood. For when 
 the penalty of not conforming to this 
 ideal is celibacy, women will strive to ap 
 pear what men want them to be. But, in 
 spite of this effort at self -obliteration, 
 there are women in Germany who are as 
 pronounced personalities as Bismarck or 
 Von Moltke. I recall one, the wife of a 
 celebrated professor and political leader, 
 with whose acquaintance I would not 
 have dispensed for a small fortune. To 
 see her sit at her table, tall, blond, and 
 stately, surrounded by her sons and 
 daughters, who loved and almost revered 
 her, was a picture never to be forgotten. 
 The father, though he was a man of ex 
 ceptional gifts and absorbed in public af 
 fairs, seemed to me almost dwarfed by his 
 wife. Her sweet, maternal dignity, her 
 innate courtesy, her easy flow of interest 
 ing conversation, made her seem to me 
 
the noblest type of a matron I had ever 
 beheld, and she revealed to me, incident 
 ally, an ideal of family life which remains 
 to this day something unattainable. 
 Though she was the dominant force in 
 the household, she deferred to her hus 
 band with a loving delight in submission 
 which was beautiful to witness. She was 
 proud of him and missed no opportunity 
 to make her children proud of him. And 
 she seemed utterly unconscious that she 
 was herself exceptional, unless it were for 
 her good-fortune in being the wife of such 
 a husband and the mother of so many 
 fine children. Let me add that she was 
 intensely Prussian in sentiment, loyal to 
 the core, and an admirer of Bismarck. If 
 she had been a contemporary of Plutarch, 
 he would have included her eventless life 
 among his heroic biographies. 
 
 My domestic critic, to whom I have 
 read the above, declares her disapproba 
 tion in general, and calls my attention to 
 the fact that all generalizations must con 
 tain a modicum of error. It is because I 
 cheerfully grant this proposition that I 
 finish this study of odious comparisons, 
 
40 
 
 not with a generalization, but with a por 
 trait. Whether I have succeeded in hold 
 ing the scales of international justice even 
 I do not know; nor do I pretend to 
 be wholly unbiassed. But my prejudice 
 (though you may find it hard to believe) 
 is in favor of America and whatever is 
 American. 
 1891 
 
THE AMERICAN NOVELIST 
 AND HIS PUBLIC 
 
 is said that poets are born, 
 not made. The same asser 
 tion might be hazarded, with 
 equal truth, of lawyers, engi 
 neers, doctors, and clergy 
 men ; in fact, of any man eminent in his 
 profession. The great ones are born, the 
 little ones are only made. Marked in 
 herited ability in a definite direction is, 
 however, no sure guarantee of greatness. 
 Circumstances must do the rest. The 
 man is the resultant of his environment 
 and his heredity; if they impel him in the 
 same direction, he will get far ; if they 
 push in opposite directions and counter 
 act each other, he may not get anywhere. 
 The one is as important as the other. A 
 man s heredity he has to accept as an un 
 alterable fact; he can do nothing to im- 
 
prove or modify it; though I believe the 
 time will come when society will awake 
 to a sense of its responsibility and pre 
 vent unions which must result in vicious 
 or diseased offspring. As regards en 
 vironment, we have already accepted the 
 responsibility. In our power to change 
 and modify it so as to serve a definite 
 purpose, we have, if not our own fates, at 
 least those of our children, partly in our 
 hands. Much is, of course, yet beyond 
 our power of calculation ; but much, also, 
 within it. The late Anthony Trollope s 
 idea, that a young man could be trained 
 to be a novelist, as he might for the legal 
 or medical profession, is, therefore, not 
 so absurd as it has been represented to 
 be. Supposing the young man to be of 
 a little more than average cleverness, he 
 would have as good a chance of success 
 in that field as in that of law or medicine. 
 He could not, perhaps, go to work de 
 liberately accumulating experience, but 
 he could, by a process similar to that 
 which Goethe employed in his own con 
 scious self-development, educate himself 
 by travel and study, and sharpen his fac- 
 
43 
 
 ulties of observation. He might not be 
 come great by this process, but if success 
 were conditioned by greatness, how many 
 of us would indeed achieve it? That 
 greatness may even be a barrier to success 
 is demonstrated by the posthumous ce 
 lebrity of many an author, who asked for 
 bread and received a stone. 
 
 The public makes its authors in its 
 own image and likeness. It demands a 
 certain article and it gets it. The man 
 who suits the average taste is the suc 
 cessful man. There is, to be sure, such a 
 thing as educating your public; but the 
 process is slow and expensive. The pub 
 lic which is capable of being educated 
 is never very large, though it is apt to 
 make up in devotion for what it lacks in 
 numbers. The authors, however, who are 
 satisfied with this limited renown are ex 
 ceptional ; the great majority of them 
 hunger for popularity. For the attain 
 ment of this a benevolent chorus is an 
 important aid. The journalistic friends 
 of the novelist conspire to advertise him, 
 in season and out of season, and treat his 
 greatness as an article of faith ; and he, 
 
in return, pushes their fortunes when 
 ever the chance presents itself. 
 
 If this were, however, the severest symp 
 tom of the hunger for popularity, it would 
 be no serious matter ; the influence of 
 these little cliques is, after all, limited ; 
 and there are plenty of reputations among 
 us which have grown healthily without 
 such artificial tending. But there are 
 other forces at work, in our literature, 
 which are more permanently injurious. 
 Chief among these I hold to be the fact 
 that the American public, as far as the 
 novelist is concerned, is the female half 
 of it. The readers of novels are chiefly 
 young girls, and a popular novel is a 
 novel which pleases them. If an Ameri 
 can author should attempt to write fiction 
 for men, his books would share the fate 
 of Rousseau s " Ode to Posterity," which 
 never reached its address. The average 
 American has no time to read anything 
 but newspapers, while his daughters have 
 an abundance of time at their disposal, 
 and a general disposition to employ it in 
 anything that is amusing. The novelist 
 who has begun to realize that these young 
 
persons constitute his public, naturally 
 endeavors to amuse them. He knows, in 
 a general way, what ladies like, and as 
 the success of his work depends upon his 
 hitting their taste, he makes a series of 
 small concessions to it, which, in the end, 
 determines the character of his book. He 
 feels that he is conversing with ladies and 
 not with men, and his whole attitude, his 
 style, and the topics he selects for dis 
 cussion, surfer the change which is im 
 plied in this circumstance. He discusses 
 dress with elaborate minuteness, and en 
 ters, with a truly feminine enthusiasm, 
 into the mysteries of the toilet. He shuns 
 large questions and problems because his 
 audience is chiefly interested in small 
 questions and problems. He avoids 
 everything which requires thought, be 
 cause, rightly or wrongly, thought is not 
 supposed to be the ladies forte. Their 
 education has not trained them for inde 
 pendent reflection. They are by nature 
 conservative, and have been told by their 
 pastors and teachers that the so-called 
 modern ideas are dangerous and improper 
 to discuss. Accordingly, the novelist who 
 
4 6 
 
 aspires for their favor becomes, also, con 
 servative, and refrains from discussing 
 what, according to the boarding-school 
 standard, is unsafe or improper. 
 
 This silence concerning all the vital 
 things of life, and the elaborate attention 
 paid to things of small consequence, I be 
 lieve to be the most serious defect in the 
 present American fiction. The strong 
 forces which are visibly and invisibly at 
 work in our society, fashioning our desti 
 nies as a nation, are to a great extent ig 
 nored by our novelists. Politics, for in 
 stance, which, outside of the great cities, 
 plays so large a part in the lives of our 
 people, is, out of deference to the ladies, 
 rarely allowed to invade our novels. In 
 all the tales of Howells and James, which 
 are typical of the tendencies of the time, 
 I do not remember a single political inci 
 dent unless, indeed, the flirtations of 
 the capricious Christina with the little 
 socialistic bookbinder in Princess Casa- 
 massima may be termed a political inci 
 dent. Mr. Marion Crawford had, to be 
 sure, once the hardihood to advertise his 
 misinformation concerning the politics of 
 
47 
 
 his native land in a book entitled An 
 American Politician, but I doubt if he 
 expected any one to take such a perform 
 ance seriously. J. W. De Forest pub 
 lished, some ten or twelve years ago, an 
 excellent political novel, showing abun 
 dant insight; but Honest John Vane can 
 scarcely have reaped the success it de 
 served, since the author soon afterwards 
 abandoned the field of fiction, and has, 
 as far as I know, never since been heard 
 from. In Edward Eggleston s Roxy there 
 are admirable episodes from the Harri 
 son and Tyler campaign of 1840, and in 
 The Hoosier Schoolmaster politics also 
 holds its due proportion of space and 
 interest. But these exceptions are suf 
 ficiently rare to prove the rule, that the 
 novelist of to-day avoids politics. Of the 
 anonymous novel, Democracy, I have not 
 spoken, because it was not what it pur 
 ported to be a characterization of life 
 at our national capital but a distorting 
 and malevolent satire on it ; and Albion 
 J. Tourgee s A Fool s Errand and Bricks 
 Without Straw were so strongly colored 
 by vindictive partisanship as to be cam- 
 
paign documents rather than contribu 
 tions to literature. 
 
 I am aware that it is ungracious, on the 
 part of a man who has written novels, to 
 find fault with those who have had the 
 kindness to read his productions. It 
 would be perfectly fair if they should an 
 swer him : " If we had not been your 
 public you would have had none; if we 
 had not bought your books they would 
 have remained on the shelves of your 
 publisher. Whatever you are, or pretend 
 to be, in a literary capacity, you owe to 
 us." As I have said, I am painfully 
 aware that such a reply would be in or 
 der, and I scarcely know what to say to 
 clear myself of the charge of ingratitude. 
 My only plea is that I care more for 
 American literature than for the small 
 figure I may happen to cut in it. I con 
 fess I have never written a book without 
 helplessly deploring the fact that young 
 ladies were to be the arbiters of its fate; 
 that young persons whose opinions on 
 any other subject, involving the need of 
 thought or experience, we should proba 
 bly hold in light esteem, constitute col- 
 
lectively an Areopagus from whose judg 
 ments, in matters relating to fiction, there 
 is no appeal. To be a purveyor of amuse 
 ment (especially if one suspects that he 
 has the stuff in him for something better) 
 is not at all amusing. To be obliged to 
 repress that which is best in him, and 
 offer that which is of slight consequence, 
 is the plight to which many a novelist, 
 in this paradise of women, is reduced. 
 Nothing less is demanded of him by that 
 inexorable force called public taste, as 
 embodied in the editors of the paying 
 magazines, behind whom sits, arrayed in 
 stern and bewildering loveliness, his final 
 judge, the young American girl. She is 
 the Iron Madonna who strangles in her 
 fond embrace the American novelist ; the 
 Moloch upon whose altar he sacrifices, 
 willingly or unwillingly, his chances of 
 greatness. In the vast majority of cases 
 in which the chances do not exist, there 
 is, of course, no sacrifice. But in the 
 cases where they do exist there is a dis 
 tinct half-unconscious lowering of stand 
 ard, a distinct descent to a lower plane 
 of thought or thoughtlessness. A weak 
 
5 
 
 lemonade mixture, harmless and mildly 
 exhilarating, adapted for the palates of 
 ingenues, is poured out in a steady stream 
 from our presses, and we all drink it, and, 
 from patriotic motives, declare it to be 
 good. When, however, we read a novel 
 like Tolstoi s Anna Karcnina or Daudet s 
 Le Nabab we appreciate, perhaps, the dif 
 ference between a literature addressed to 
 girls and a literature intended for men 
 and women. 
 
 I am by no means blind to the fact that 
 we have among us the beginning of what 
 promises to be a sounder and more se 
 rious school of fiction. Mr. Howells de 
 serves, in my opinion, the thanks of all 
 lovers of literature for his frank and fear^ 
 less attacks, both by precept and example, 
 upon the worn-out romantic ideals. As 
 long as it is expected of the novelist that 
 he shall spin ingenious and entertaining 
 yarns, his art is not bound by the laws of 
 reality, and is free to degenerate into all 
 sorts of license. As long as a crude pub 
 lic taste found more pleasure in the ab 
 normal than the normal, the popular 
 novelist was forced, like Wilkie Collins 
 
and Gaboriau, to ransack the records of 
 police courts and lunatic asylums in 
 search of startling incidents ; and the 
 novel swarmed with villains and their 
 victims. As a picture of life, such fiction 
 was worse than worthless. It exists, of 
 course, yet, and has a large public ; but 
 it is, in great part, due to Mr. Howells 
 that readers who lay claim to literary cult 
 ure are now beginning to repudiate it. 
 His long series of novels in the Atlantic, 
 the Century, and Harper s Magazine, have 
 dealt uniformly with American themes, 
 and have drawn within the domain of 
 fiction hitherto unexplored types and 
 phases of our national life. In A Hazard 
 of New Fortunes and The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham he has penetrated more deeply 
 into the heart of reality, as it manifests 
 itself on this side of the Atlantic, than 
 any previous novelist, and has made it 
 easier for those who shall follow after him 
 to rely upon insight, style, and knowl 
 edge of the world for success, and to 
 dispense with the crude devices of the 
 sensationalist. If he has not, like Zola 
 and Claretie in France, and Spielhagen 
 
and Freytag in Germany, undertaken to 
 grapple with the social problems of the 
 day, this may be in part due to a tem 
 peramental aversion for polemics, and 
 partly to the training which the month 
 ly magazine gives to all its contribu 
 tors, keeping them in the safe track of un- 
 contested generalities.* The editor, being 
 anxious to keep all his old subscribers 
 and secure new ones, requires of his con 
 tributor that he shall offend no one. He 
 must not expose a social or religious 
 sham, because there are hundreds, if not 
 thousands, of subscribers who believe in 
 this sham, and would stop the magazine 
 if it were attacked. If he takes up a par 
 ticular phase of life, he must steer care 
 fully, so as to step on nobody s toes, and 
 if he has extreme beliefs and convictions, 
 take good care to keep them in proper 
 restraint. I am not applying this to Mr. 
 Howells, who is sufficiently outspoken 
 in his convictions, but to every novelist 
 
 * Since the above was written Mr. Howells has pub 
 lished Letters from Altruria, in which he does show 
 the keenest appreciation of the problems of American 
 society. 
 
ss 
 
 who reaches his public through the me 
 dium of the monthly magazines. How 
 ever much he may rebel against it, he is 
 forced to chew the cud of old ideas, and 
 avoid espousing any cause which lacks 
 the element of popularity. If he is of an 
 ardent temperament, he must curb his 
 ardor, except in the love-scenes, where he 
 is permitted to be discreetly passionate. 
 If, like so many of the world s best poets, 
 he is in advance of his time ; if he is a 
 non-conformist in respect to any com 
 monly accepted practice or belief, he has 
 but the choice of suppressing his convic 
 tions or remaining silent. He must offer 
 that part of himself which he believes to 
 be of small consequence, and conceal that 
 which he believes to be important and 
 vital. 
 
 In all the countries of Europe, except 
 England, the literary conditions are, in 
 this respect, very different. There the 
 monthly magazine (without which Ameri 
 can authorship scarcely could exist) has 
 not attained the prominence or the devel 
 opment that it has reached in our pros 
 perous democracy. The majority of the 
 
54 
 
 German periodicals appeal to a definite 
 class of readers, and are not afraid of 
 proclaiming (in signed articles) the most 
 tremendous social and religious here 
 sies. Publications like the Gartenlaubc 
 and Westermanns Deutsche Monatshefte, 
 which are especially addressed to the 
 prosperous bourgeoisie, exact the same 
 conservatism of their contributors as do 
 our magazines; but the Deutsche Rund 
 schau obviously emulates the l\evue des 
 Deux Mondes in the scope it gives to 
 radical opinions, as long as the literary 
 excellence is sufficient to keep the tale or 
 discussion on a high intellectual plane. 
 The consequence is that the Gartenlaube 
 has developed a peculiar kind of female 
 novelist, of which Marlitt, Werner, and 
 Fanny Lewald were the most conspicu 
 ous representatives. They are safe, con 
 servative, and romantic ; and, according 
 ly, very popular in translation with the 
 patrons of our circulating libraries. Writ 
 ers like Spielhagen, Freytag, Wildenbruch, 
 and Sudermann, on the other hand, pre 
 fer to seek their first publicity in the 
 feuilletons of the daily papers, which im- 
 
pose no restraints upon them in the in, 
 terest of tender readers. Accordingly, 
 \ve have in Spielhagen a most vigorous 
 discussion of the great social questions 
 from the point of view of a bold and 
 original thinker ; fearless expositions of 
 the influence of the aristocracy upon the 
 State at large and the lower classes ; in 
 imitable satires on the official orthodoxy 
 and its exponents, the Lutheran clergy. 
 Everywhere there are vigor, originality, a 
 fresh and contagious radicalism. 
 
 In France the supply of excellent fic 
 tion so far exceeds the capacity of the 
 few good magazines that the editorial 
 opinion of the latter exerts but a very 
 slight influence upon the novelist, and 
 the daily papers like Le Temps, Le Journal 
 des Debats, etc., which regularly print fic 
 tion in their feuilletons, allow a man of 
 recognized ability to say whatever he 
 likes, if he only says it well. The Revue 
 des Deux Mondes, indeed, exacts few but 
 literary qualifications of its writers of fic 
 tion ; and even George Sand, the most 
 gifted and most erratic of social revo 
 lutionists, was for five years its most 
 
valued contributor. She quarrelled, to 
 be sure, with the Revue t started, succes 
 sively, two periodicals of her own, and 
 found, finally, her sphere in the absolute 
 and congenial unrestraint of \\izfeiiillcton. 
 Daudet, Zola, and Claretie likewise revel 
 in the liberty which the daily press allows 
 them, and develop there, for good or for 
 ill, to the full limit of their individualities. 
 The recent literary history of the Scan 
 dinavian countries, where the magazine 
 only exists in a primitive stage of de 
 velopment, shows the same tendency to 
 make the novel the vehicle of advanced 
 thought. All the vital questions of the day, 
 in religion, politics, and society, are be 
 ing vigorously expounded and debated in 
 works of fiction. Bjornson, who launches 
 his books upon the market without the 
 intervention of any paper or periodical, 
 has published a novel (Flags are Flying 
 in Harbor and City*) in which he intro 
 duces successively four generations of 
 the same family, for the purpose of illus 
 trating the psychological and physiologi- 
 
 * The English translation is entitled The Heritage of 
 the Kurts. 
 
57 
 
 cal laws of heredity in their mutual in 
 ter-dependence, and enforcing the moral 
 lessons which are involved therein. Alex 
 ander Kielland diagnoses with dispassion 
 ate serenity and truth the hidden diseases 
 of the body social, and by his keen and bit 
 ing satire arouses against himself a storm 
 of denunciation. So far from suffering 
 by thus being made the battle-field of 
 warring thought, the novel gains thereby 
 a breadth and dignity which it never can 
 attain where it is constructed with a sole 
 view to entertainment. The old maxim, 
 I art pour I art art for art s sake origi 
 nated with the romanticists, and is losing 
 whatever validity it ever had. Art can 
 engage in no better pursuit than to stimu 
 late noble and healthful thought on all 
 matters of human concern, and thereby 
 clear the prejudiced mind and raise the 
 average of human happiness. 
 1886 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE REALISM 
 OF AMERICAN FICTION 
 
 )N a letter to his friend Zelter 
 (Vol. IV., p. 343), Goethe, in 
 his disgust at the extrava 
 gances of the Romantic 
 School, quotes a verse, which 
 he has just written, prophetic of the fut 
 ure of American literature. Although 
 it makes no claim to poetic merit, the 
 sentiment which it expresses is sufficient 
 ly remarkable to deserve translation : 
 
 America, thy happy lot 
 
 Above old Europe s I exalt: 
 
 Thou hast no castle ruin hoar 
 
 No giant columns of basalt. 
 
 Thy soul is not troubled 
 
 In living light of clay 
 
 By useless traditions, 
 
 Vain strife and affray. 
 
 Grasp but the present that is thine, 
 
 And when thy children take to writing, 
 
 May kindly Fate preserve their tales 
 
 From robbers, knights, and ghosts affrighting. 
 
I fancy Goethe must have been aware 
 when he wrote this verse (June 21, 1827) 
 that the Americans had already taken to 
 writing, and that their famous novelist, 
 James Fenimore Cooper, was treading 
 this very path from which he hoped that 
 kindly Fate would preserve him. Knights 
 and ruined castles he was, to be sure, by 
 the necessities of the case, forced to es 
 chew ; but I doubt not that he regarded 
 it as a dire deprivation. Robbers, red 
 and white, are his stock characters, and, 
 if I remember rightly, he also dealt in 
 ghosts. Edgar Allan Poe revelled in 
 horrors, and our other pioneer novelist, 
 Charles Brockden Brown, of Philadelphia, 
 had all the qualities which would have 
 recommended him to Goethe s particular 
 detestation, being slipshod in style and 
 exhibiting a sovereign disregard of reality. 
 His works abound in psychological curi 
 osities and superingenious mysteries, ex 
 ulting, like those of his romantic com 
 peers, in all the calamities from which 
 in the Prayer Book we ask God to de 
 liver us. 
 
 From the romanticism of Brown and 
 
6o 
 
 Poe to that of Hawthorne, who chrono 
 logically follows the latter as the next 
 notable dispenser of American fiction, we 
 take a long stride forward. Brown s 
 productions belonged to the family of 
 Mrs. Radcliffe and Goodwin, and owned 
 only the airiest allegiance to American 
 soil and climate. Hawthorne, on the 
 other hand, was so distinctly a product 
 of New England blood and environment, 
 that he would have been absolutely in 
 conceivable in any other setting. As he 
 disclaims, however, the title of novelist, 
 preferring that of romancer, it would be 
 unfair to measure him by any standard 
 of mere fidelity to fact. 
 
 He says, in the preface to The House of 
 the Seven Gables : 
 
 " When a writer calls his work a Ro 
 mance, it need hardly be observed that 
 he wishes to claim a certain latitude, 
 both as to its fashion and material, which 
 he would not have felt entitled to assume 
 had he professed to be writing a novel." 
 
 This very romance, however, has, with 
 all its fanciful psychology, so unmistak 
 able a New England flavor as almost to 
 
6i 
 
 make the disclaimer of the preface super 
 fluous. Though the human conscience, 
 with its mysterious heritage of sin and 
 woe, was his theme, the spiritual climate 
 in which his strange blossoms unfolded 
 their hectic beauty was that of the New 
 World ; and with their singular delicacy 
 of form and texture they could never 
 have grown anywhere else. The disad 
 vantages under which he labored as a 
 romancer in a world ostensibly devoid of 
 romance, are strongly, almost amusingly, 
 insisted upon in his preface to The Mar 
 ble Faun : 
 
 " No author without a trial can conceive 
 of the difficulty of writing a romance 
 about a country where there is no shadow, 
 no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque 
 and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a 
 commonplace prosperity, in broad and 
 simple daylight, as is happily the case 
 with my dear native land. Romance and 
 poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need 
 ruin to make them grow." 
 
 That he was by no means lacking in 
 the sense of the reality is shown by the 
 exquisite delicacy with which he repro- 
 
duces the atmospheric tone and color of 
 any locality which forms the setting of 
 his more important scenes; and if further 
 testimony is needed, his note-books will 
 furnish it in abundance. 
 
 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 
 popularity reached further than that of 
 any of her predecessors, had no intellect 
 ual affinity to Hawthorne ; but her kinship 
 with her greater contemporary, Charles 
 Dickens, is unmistakable. Eva, in Uncle 
 Toms Cabin, belongs to the same lachry 
 mose family as Little Nell, and they both 
 die (one might almost say) with the same 
 emotional extravagance. The inimitable 
 drollery and genial satire of Dickens are 
 absent in Mrs. Stowe; but the tearful 
 sentimentalism which exhibits itself in a 
 kind of hysterical pathos they both have 
 in common. The notion I had formed of 
 the negroes from my first perusal of Uncle 
 Toms Cafo ?i"was that they were a kind of 
 archangels in black, hounded, tortured, 
 and abused by the fiendish whites on ac 
 count of their moral superiority. It took 
 me some time and cost me not a little 
 money to correct this impression after 
 
my arrival in the United States. Though 
 in all Mrs. Stowe s romances the tendency 
 is perceptible, she has, as she grew older, 
 abandoned much of her early extrava 
 gance, which was defensible enough in 
 the cause of reform, and has steered closer 
 and closer to the shores of reality. In 
 Oldtown Folks, and particularly in the 
 Sam Lawson sketches, she betrays a pow 
 er of minute observation and an apprecia 
 tion of local color which might almost en 
 title her to the name of a realist. 
 
 Another conspicuous representative of 
 the school of Dickens is Bret Harte, 
 who, however, in Gabriel Conroy, plays at 
 ducks and drakes with probability in a 
 way that would have given even Dickens 
 a qualm. 
 
 It is the first chapter of Bleak Hoiise 
 which contains the famous description of 
 a London fog, worked up, as it appears 
 to me, to a strained, tensely quivering 
 pitch, when a single more wrench at the 
 screw would snap the string. Where 
 Dickens has fog everywhere, Bret Harte 
 substitutes "snow everywhere," as the 
 season demands, and proceeds to describe 
 
it, not with the same words, but in the 
 same key as Dickens, with the same dithy- 
 rambic vehemence. The rhetorical ca 
 dence of the two passages is so strikingly 
 similar that I cannot forbear to quote. 
 Here is Dickens: 
 
 " Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, 
 where it flows among green aits and 
 meadows; fog down the river, where it 
 rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, 
 and the water-side pollutions of a great 
 and dirty city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, 
 fog on the Kentish Heights. Fog creep 
 ing into the cabooses of collier brigs ; fog 
 lying out on the yards, and hovering in 
 the rigging of great ships; fog drooping 
 on the gunwales of barges and small 
 boats," etc., etc. 
 
 Gabriel Conroy opens as follows : 
 
 " Snow everywhere as far as the eye 
 could reach fifty miles looking south 
 ward from the highest peak filling ra 
 vines and gulches, and dropping from the 
 walls of canons in white, shroud-like drifts, 
 fashioning the dividing line into the like- 
 
ness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases 
 of giant pines, completely covering young 
 trees and larches, rimming with porcelain 
 the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, un 
 dulating in motionless white billows to the 
 edge of the distant horizon. Snow every 
 where over the California Sierras on the 
 1 5th of March, 1884, and still falling." 
 
 The travelling earthquake and all the 
 stage machinery of romantic melodrama, 
 which Mr. Harte brings into action in Ga 
 briel Conroy point, however, not to Dick 
 ens, but rather to Eugene Sue s Wander 
 ing Jew. The ancestry of his noble 
 villains, the magnanimous gamblers with 
 seraphic tenor voices, the chivalrous mur 
 derers, the generous strumpets, may be 
 traced to that high-priest of romanticism, 
 Victor Hugo, who delighted in the same 
 sort of violent antitheses, defying proba 
 bility and straining our credulity beyond 
 endurance. The general attitude towards 
 life, however lawless, exhibited in his 
 early California tales, his disposition to 
 find virtue in the vicious, to exalt the 
 lowly at the expense, perhaps, of those 
 
66 
 
 who regard themselves as their superiors, 
 shows the direct influence of the author 
 of Bleak House and The Christmas Carols. 
 But Harte is, to my mind, the last 
 American novelist of any eminence who 
 can be classed as a romanticist. All our 
 contemporary authors, with a few nota 
 ble exceptions, such as Marion Crawford 
 and Amelie Rives Chanler, deal frankly 
 and honestly with American life, as they 
 know it and see it; and though there are 
 varying degrees in their power to grasp 
 and vividly present what they see, I can 
 not think of one who does not aim to 
 chronicle the particular phases of Ameri 
 can life with which he is most intimately 
 acquainted. While Mr. W. D. Howells 
 (who in point of rank is facile princeps) 
 preached his entertaining gospel of real 
 ism in the " Editor s Study " of Harper s 
 Monthly, the critics (who as a rule are far 
 behind the time) railed at him and pro 
 fessed to regard his postulate, that the 
 novelist had to be true to the logic of 
 life, as a piece of amusing eccentricity. 
 He was, in their opinion, merely trying to 
 justify his own practice. But in spite of 
 
6 7 
 
 all ridicule this proposition has, outside 
 of England, come to be pretty generally 
 accepted ; and though the witty and ge 
 nial Andrew Lang and that brilliant an 
 tediluvian, Robert Louis Stevenson, may 
 be terribly shocked at his disrespect for 
 Walter Scott, Mr. Howells has a valuable 
 ally in what is called the spirit of the age, 
 and he is bound in the end to prevail. 
 For, as P. G. Hamerton happily puts it : 
 
 "The important service it [literature] 
 renders to mankind is the perpetual reg 
 istering of the experiences of the race. . . . 
 Without a literature to record it, the ex 
 periences of dead generations could never 
 be fully available for the living one." 
 
 Whether the majority of our contem 
 porary novelists would subscribe to this 
 view of their calling I do not know ; but, 
 whether they would or not, their practice 
 sustains it. If we have an American Hag 
 gard or an American Stevenson among 
 us, where is he? and what rank does he 
 hold within the guild of letters ? I am 
 aware that Mr. Julian Hawthorne some 
 
years ago, entered into partnership with 
 Inspector Byrnes and wrote some grew- 
 some detective stories in the style of 
 Gaboriau; and I have also seen recent 
 tales of his in the New York Ledger 
 which in blood-curdling horror rivalled 
 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. 
 Hyde. But I cannot be persuaded to be 
 lieve that either he or any one else re 
 gards them as serious contributions to 
 literature. I do not question that Mr. 
 Hawthorne is by conviction, as by inheri 
 tance, a romanticist ; but there is a wide 
 distance between the romanticism of 
 Bressant, and Beatrix Randolph and that 
 of A Tragic Mystery and Section jjc?, or 
 the Fatal Letter. 
 
 If besides the versatile Amelie Rives 
 we have another adherent of the defunct 
 school among us, it is probably Mr. Har 
 ry Harland (Sydney Luska), whose first 
 books, As it is Written and Mrs. Peix- 
 ada, certainly dealt with abnormal and 
 exceptional phases of life, and sometimes 
 made heavy drafts upon our credulity. 
 But if we are to judge from Mr. Harland s 
 later works, he is rapidly shedding his 
 
romantic plumage and assuming his per 
 manent colors among the serious chroni 
 clers of contemporary life and manners. 
 At all events, one will have to look very 
 far for a more delightful bit of realism 
 than The Land of Love (a study of life in 
 the Latin Quarter in Paris) ; and as re 
 gards Grandison Mather, depicting the 
 struggles of a young man of letters and his 
 wife in New York, it is only less charming, 
 but not less realistic. I have been told 
 bv those who are anxious to acquit a 
 novelist of the charge of fidelity (they 
 usually say " sordid fidelity ") to the hum 
 drum prose of life that Mr. Edgar Faw- 
 cett is a romancer. In order to convince 
 myself on this point, and correct previous 
 impressions which might prove to be er 
 roneous, I recently re-read three or four 
 of Mr. Fawcett s books; and I must con 
 fess that if he is to be judged by his best, 
 [ am not for a moment in doubt as to 
 where he properly belongs. In his ad 
 mirable novel, An Ambitious Woman, he 
 has given a picture of New York life 
 which in delicate veracity and vividness 
 is as yet unsurpassed. Mr. Fawcett knows 
 
his New York (both its upper and its 
 nether side) as does no other American 
 novelist, unless it be Mr. H. C. Bunner; 
 and if it were not for the breathless haste 
 he displays in his prolific productivity he 
 could scarcely fail to be recognized as the 
 brilliant and faithful chronicler of metro 
 politan manners that he undoubtedly is. 
 Take such a book as The Evil That Men 
 Do, which no one can read without being 
 impressed with the enormous amount of 
 accurate local knowledge which it im 
 plies. I take it to be no mean achieve 
 ment to have painted in such striking 
 colors the physiognomy of lower New 
 York the Bowery, Great Jones Street, 
 and all the labyrinthine tangle of malo 
 dorous streets and lanes, inhabited by the 
 tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian, the 
 wily Chinaman, and all the other alien 
 hordes from all the corners of the earth. 
 The man who can do this, and whose im 
 pulse leads him to explore with so minute 
 an interest that terra incognita of polite 
 fiction, is, whatever his friends may say 
 to the contrary, a realist. Let them judge 
 him by Rutherford and Salarion. I shall 
 
still persist in judging him by An Ambi 
 tious Woman and The Evil That Men Do. 
 To Mr. Howells more than to any one 
 else are we indebted for the ultimate 
 triumph of realism in American fiction. 
 For that realism has triumphed or is tri 
 umphing no one will seriously deny who 
 has kept track of American literature 
 during the last quarter of a century. I 
 do not mean by realism, of course, merely 
 the practice of that extreme wing of the 
 school which believes only that to be true 
 which is disagreeable, and conscientiously 
 omits all cheerful phenomena. Nor do I 
 confine my definition to that minute in 
 sistence upon wearisome detail which, 
 ignoring the relation of artistic values, fan 
 cies that a mere agglomeration of incon 
 testable facts constitutes a truthful pict 
 ure. Broadly speaking, a realist is a 
 writer who adheres strictly to the logic 
 of reality, as he sees it; who, aiming to 
 portray the manners of his time, deals by 
 preference with the normal rather than 
 the exceptional phases of life, and, to use 
 Henry James s felicitous phrase, arouses 
 not the pleasure of surprise, but that of 
 
recognition. I would, therefore, include 
 in my pantheon of realists George Eliot, 
 Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Thom 
 as Hardy ; while I exclude Dickens, Wilkie 
 Collins, Stevenson, and Haggard. I am 
 aware that I am not in full agreement 
 with Mr. Howells in this classification. In 
 his recent book, Criticism and Fiction, he 
 is disposed to draw the lines rather more 
 narrowly. He puts not only Walter Scott 
 and Dickens, but the genial biographer of 
 Pendennisand Becky Sharp, into the out 
 er darkness. It is, therefore, conceivable 
 that he might also disagree with my clas 
 sification of American authors, and label 
 not only Marion Crawford and Amelie 
 Rives, but G. W. Cable, Harold Frederic, 
 and the late admirable Miss Woolson, 
 with the opprobrious epithet " romantic." 
 My space does not permit me to defend 
 them here, but only to remark that they 
 all have chronicled certain phases of 
 American life with a brilliancy, delicacy, 
 and truthfulness which no one will ques 
 tion. I admit that both Frederic and Miss 
 Woolson have a lingering romantic strain 
 which displays itself in fondness for mur- 
 
73 
 
 ders; but their treatment of these sen 
 sational incidents is as realistic as that of 
 Inspector Byrnes (in his official, not in 
 his literary capacity). Murder in Anne 
 is somehow divested of its sensational 
 character by this insistence upon verisi 
 militude, which compels our credulity to 
 keep pace with the author s invention. 
 
 Mr. Frederic has in Settis Brother s 
 Wife made the same concession to ro 
 manticism in a novel which, to those who 
 know rural New York, is charged from 
 beginning to end with an authenticity 
 which enforces belief. This book, as well 
 as The Lawton Girl (the scene of which is 
 also a rural town in Central New York), 
 has a closeness of texture and convincing 
 quality hinting at ample stores of experi 
 ence. 
 
 And this brings me to the main point 
 of my argument. Nothing could testify 
 with more force to the fact that we have 
 outgrown romanticism than this almost 
 unanimous desire, on the part of our au 
 thors, to chronicle the widely divergent 
 phases of our American civilization. 
 There are scarcely a dozen conspicuous 
 
States now which have not their own local 
 novelist. Howells, T. B. Aldrich, Miss 
 Jewett, and Miss Wilkins have described 
 with the pictorial minuteness and delicacy 
 of a Meissonier the life of New England 
 in village, city, and country. New York 
 follows not far behind with Julien Gor 
 don, the vivid chronicler of our fashion 
 able life, Frederic, Fawcett, W. H. Bishop 
 (the author of The Home of a Merchant 
 Prince), H. C. Bunner, Miss Woolson, and 
 a dozen of minor lights. Creole Louisi 
 ana has found a most faithful and delight 
 fully artistic biographer in G. W. Cable. 
 Virginia boasts Thomas Nelson Page, 
 Constance Cary Harrison, and I might 
 add Amelie Rives Chanler, if it were not 
 for the fact that her stories might just as 
 well be located in the moon. 
 
 Georgia s biographer, than whom I know 
 few with a vivider touch and a more 
 masterly grasp of character, is Richard 
 Malcolm Johnston, the author of the de 
 lightful Dukesborough Tales. Tennessee 
 has suddenly raised her head among her 
 sister States as an aspirant for literary 
 glory since Miss Murfree (Charles Egbert 
 
75 
 
 Craddock) published her beautiful collec 
 tion of tales, In the Tennessee Mountains. 
 Through these and The Despot of Broom- 
 sedge Cove, In the Clouds, and Where the 
 Battle was Fought, we have acquired a 
 realizing sense of the distinctness of phys 
 iognomy which the neighbor of Kentucky 
 presents to the world. What was hitherto 
 a mere geographical conception, made up 
 of some rather arbitrary lines on the map, 
 has, through Miss Murfree s art, become 
 an individuality,with a living countenance. 
 For so great a service she surely deserves 
 a monument. Of the throng of brilliant 
 writers who have raised California to the 
 pinnacle of a world-wide (though not quite 
 enviable) renown, I have already mention 
 ed Bret Harte ; and Mark Twain, whose 
 Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, 
 in spite of their occasional grotesqueness, 
 are important documents of social his 
 tory, has furnished the comic counterpart 
 to Bret Harte s heroics. There are fully 
 a dozen more who have followed in their 
 wake ; and only their number prevents 
 me from mentioning them. 
 
 Pennsylvania and the Middle States 
 
have, so far, lagged behind in the literary 
 movement, and are still awaiting their au 
 thentic biographers. If Edward Eggle- 
 ston had not abandoned Indiana, after his 
 promising debut with his Hoosier School 
 master, Roxy, etc., he might have claimed 
 the same identification with her name as 
 Cable and R. H. Johnston with their re 
 spective States. But in his latest novel, 
 The Faith Doctor, he has moved to New 
 York, and left James Whitcomb Riley in 
 full possession. For Riley is a Hoosier to 
 the backbone ; and though he is primarily 
 a poet, he possesses, in prose as in verse, the 
 vitalizing touch of genius, which stamps 
 everything that he produces with a vivid 
 individuality. Illinois,* as far as I know, 
 has as yet no novelist who is peculiarly 
 her own ; and Ohio, Kansas, and all the 
 stripling States that stretch away to the 
 Pacific have perhaps failed to display as 
 yet a sufficiently distinct type to have 
 need of a biographer. For all that, a 
 
 * Since the above was written a promising Illinois 
 novelist, of realistic tendencies, has appeared in the per 
 son of Henry B. Fuller of Chicago, the author of The 
 Cliff-Dwellers. 
 
77 
 
 " prairie State " furnished the scene of 
 that remarkable novel, The Story of a 
 Country Town, by E. W. Howe ; and Ham- 
 lin Garland (the most vigorous realist in 
 America) has caught the very soul of that 
 youthful virgin, Dakota, and held up to 
 her a mirror of most uncompromising 
 veracity. 
 
 The " Philadelphia flavor," which I am 
 told is something very fine and very dis 
 tinct, has hitherto scorned to put itself 
 on record in literature; but recently Mr. 
 Thomas Janvier captured it, as it were, 
 on the wing, and wafted it into the nos 
 trils of an expectant and appreciative 
 world. Mr. Janvier possesses the distinc 
 tion of being, up to date, the only American 
 novelist who can boast such an achieve 
 ment ; though I seem to remember that a 
 thin ghost of Philadelphia pervaded a 
 short story which appeared in the Century, 
 many years ago, by Miss Sprague, the au 
 thor of An Earnest Trifler. I am also 
 aware that the late Bayard Taylor was a 
 Pennsylvanian, and that he wrote several 
 novels {Hannah Thurston, The Story of 
 Kennett, etc.), descriptive of the life of 
 
his native State ; but he forsook his ca 
 reer as a novelist at too early a date to 
 accomplish the task which once must have 
 attracted him, and for which he had a 
 most admirable equipment. His ballads 
 "Jane Reed " and " The Old Pennsyl 
 vania Farmer" show what an exquisitely 
 sympathetic biographer the Quaker lost 
 in him. 
 
 It is because the American novel has 
 chosen to abandon " the spirit of romance," 
 which never was indigenous on this conti 
 nent, and devoted itself to the serious 
 task of studying and chronicling our own 
 social conditions, that it is to-day com 
 manding the attention of the civilized 
 world. It is because Realism has ousted or 
 is ousting Romanticism from all its strong 
 holds that we have a literature worthy of 
 serious consideration, and growing every 
 year more virile, independent, and signifi 
 cant. 
 
 1892 
 
THE HERO IN FICTION 
 
 .OMETIMES a nightmarish 
 sensation comes over me 
 that I am living somebody 
 else s life that I am repeat 
 ing with a helpless, hideous 
 regularity the thoughts and deeds, the 
 blunders and successes, of some creature 
 that lived ages ago. If heroes of fiction 
 were endowed with the power of sensa 
 tion, they would, no doubt, be oppressed 
 with a similar consciousness of pre-exist- 
 ence. For most of them have not only 
 their prototypes, but their exact counter 
 parts, in the ages of the past. Environ 
 ments may change, and are continually 
 changing; and a certain modification in 
 the hero s external guise and speech and 
 sentiment may be the result of what we 
 call " modern improvement." But in 
 their innermost core the characters re- 
 
So 
 
 main essentially the same. The funda 
 mental traits of human nature, transmit 
 ted by inheritance from generation to 
 generation, seem capable of but a limited 
 degree of variation, and it would seem 
 as if the novelists had already reached 
 the limit. 
 
 The novel has existed, in one shape or 
 another, from the earliest period of which 
 history has preserved the record. By the 
 novel I mean fictitious narrative in prose 
 or verse; and when the art of writing 
 was still unknown, the spoken story took 
 the place of the written. Bards, rhap- 
 sodists, scalds, troubadours, ballad-sing 
 ers, improvisator! have at different times 
 ministered, and, in part, do yet minister, 
 to this innate craving for fiction among 
 the classes which are never reached by 
 literature in the stricter sense. Whether 
 there have been found cuneiform novels 
 on the sun-baked bricks of Babylon and 
 Nineveh I do not know ; but the frag 
 ments of mythological poems which have 
 been discovered suffice to show that the 
 cuneiform equivalent for a novelist was 
 not wanting. As for the Egyptians, their 
 
ingeniously elaborate style of writing 
 must have been a sad restraint upon the 
 hieroglyphic novelist when he was in 
 clined to be prolific ; and that may be one 
 of the reasons why no hieroglyphic novels 
 have been unearthed in tombs or temples 
 or pyramids. The king had apparently 
 (if we may judge by the extravagant fic 
 tions concerning himself and his deeds 
 which he inscribed upon the public mon 
 uments) a monopoly on novel-writing, as 
 on everything else that was pleasant and 
 profitable. The priests worked out his 
 plots in prose and verse, and supplied 
 heroic embellishments ad libitum. 
 
 Having established this broad defini 
 tion of fiction, let us take a look at the 
 gallery of popular heroes which the nov 
 els of all ages supply. The oldest hero, 
 as well as the newest (if we except the 
 very latest development), is the man who 
 looms a head above all the people. It is 
 the king, the chieftain, the demi-god 
 whose strength and prowess and beauty, 
 physical or moral, thrill the soul, and 
 kindle, by admiring sympathy, the heroic 
 possibilities in our own hearts. Each na- 
 
82 
 
 tion sees its own ideal in this type, and 
 modifies it in accordance with its char 
 acter. Achilles, though swift -footed, 
 brave, and beautiful, is petulant as a child, 
 hot-tempered, and by no means a model 
 of virtue; but, for all that, superb adjec 
 tives are heaped upon him, showing that 
 he was meant to be a national ideal. Still 
 nearer to this distinction comes the wily 
 Ulysses, whose readiness of- resource, 
 faithlessness, and cheerful mendacity are 
 so remote from Germanic notions of 
 heroism that a modern novelist, if he 
 used him at all, would be compelled to 
 assign to him the part of the villain. 
 
 Siegfried, in the "Nibelungen Lied," is, 
 perhaps, the completest general embodi 
 ment of the Germanic hero. Siegfried is, 
 like Achilles, brave, beautiful, and strong, 
 and he is also repeatedly described as 
 swift (der snelle recke) ; but here the re 
 semblance ceases. Even though the story, 
 in the mediaeval German version, may 
 contradict the poet, when he calls him 
 faithful, it is obvious that the potion of 
 oblivion (which the Icelandic version sup 
 plies) is responsible for his breach of faith 
 
to Brunhild. He is truthful, gentle, for 
 giving, an ardent, chivalrous lover, and 
 a chaste and affectionate husband. He 
 resembles in many respects the Celtic 
 King Arthur also a god-descended hero 
 but is more warmly human, and less of 
 a faultless prig. In the Icelandic version 
 in the Elder Edda, he is wilder, more 
 ferocious, more frankly barbarian. There 
 is a freshness of dawn and a new-born 
 world upon his love for Brunhild a feat 
 ure which is most exquisitely preserved 
 in Wagner s opera " Siegfried " but, be 
 yond a proud truthfulness and regard for 
 his promise, he is not troubled with many 
 modern virtues. As an heroic type, he 
 recurs with slight modifications in a num 
 ber of the Norse sagas ; and he has been 
 and is the hero of innumerable English, 
 German, and Scandinavian novels. In 
 fact, the romantic school of fiction knows 
 scarcely any other style of hero ; and is 
 forced, in order to excite admiration, to 
 repeat the Siegfried type, more or less 
 disguised, ad infinttum. Take the herpes 
 of Walter Scott s novels, one by one (con 
 spicuously Ivanhoe], and what are they 
 
but pale reflections of the general Ger 
 manic ideal? Tremendously brave, sur 
 passingly strong, extravagantly virtuous, 
 pursued by hostile powers which threaten 
 to overwhelm them, but over which they 
 ultimately triumph is not that a fair de 
 scription of the usual hero of romanti 
 cism? Whether he wears doublet and 
 hose, or frock-coat and trousers, he is al 
 ways the same fellow at heart, and he 
 rarely fails to win, as the prize of his 
 valor, his female counterpart, for whose 
 sake he breaks many a lance in life s per 
 ilous tourney. In Mr. Marion Crawford s 
 novels, Mr. Isaacs and Dr. Claudius, I re 
 cently renewed my acquaintance with the 
 Siegfried type in a modernized guise, and 
 in Cooper s " Leather-stocking Tales " he 
 is perpetually recurring. 
 
 Another type of the romantic hero is 
 represented by the fairy tale of the Poor 
 Boy who kills the Ogre and gets the 
 beautiful Princess and half the kingdom. 
 Boots he used to be called in the English 
 fairy-tale, and in the Norwegian he is 
 called Ashiepattle. In the so-called Ro 
 mantic sagas of the twelfth and thir- 
 
teenth centuries he is a favorite hero. 
 He is of lowly origin, has had no advan 
 tages of education, is often buffeted and 
 maltreated by his associates; but by dint 
 of indomitable energy and perseverance 
 conquers all obstacles, and finally marries 
 his employer s daughter, or whoever else 
 the Princess may be upon whom he has 
 set his heart. Of course, if the author 
 is a cruel wretch, with no regard for ten 
 der readers, he may vary the denouement 
 by landing the fair lady in the arms of 
 the rich and hateful rival, whom the 
 odious parent has selected for a son-in- 
 law ; but then the chances are that son-in- 
 law No. i will be short-lived, and the loving 
 hearts will be united in the last chapter. 
 Dickens is very fond of this Ashiepattle 
 style of hero, and has used him with suc 
 cess in Dombey and Son, David Copper- 
 field, and many other romances. In the 
 French novel he is the young man from 
 the provinces who comes to Paris in 
 sabots, and rises to fame and fortune. 
 Daudet has him in Le Nabab, but though 
 he gets his Princess, he has to content 
 himself without half the kingdom. In 
 
fact, the modern novelists, since the 
 death of Dumas pcrc, are no longer so 
 lavish of kingdoms, and sometimes, from 
 sheer malice, pursue Ashiepattle and 
 his Princess beyond the honeymoon, 
 and broadly hint that they did not " live 
 happily ever afterwards." But that is so 
 reprehensible that I wish it could be for 
 bidden by an act of Congress, or that a 
 tax might be levied (it is such an easy 
 thing to get a tax levied, and so hard to 
 get one removed) on every novel that 
 does not end happily. 
 
 In the American novel, the Ashiepattle 
 hero is very popular under the guise of 
 the self-made man. Our national his 
 tory is really a romance of the Ashiepat 
 tle among the nations, who beat the 
 British ogre, and wedded the beautiful 
 Princess Liberty, and conquered a king 
 dom compared with which those of the 
 ancient fairy tales were scarcely worth 
 considering. We have, therefore, a na 
 tional sympathy with Ashiepattle in his 
 struggles, and demand that his success 
 shall be brilliant and pronounced. It 
 will not do to cheat him out of the fruit 
 
8 7 
 
 of his labor, as Howells has done in 
 The Minister s Charge, and James in The 
 American ; or to develop weaknesses in 
 him which make him unworthy of suc 
 cess, as the former has done in A Mod 
 ern Instance, and the latter in Roderick 
 Hudson. Hardly more commendable is 
 the example of Mr. E. W. Howe, who, 
 in his powerful novel, The Story of a 
 Country Town, made the road to suc 
 cess so gloomy and the success itself so 
 modest as not to seem worth the trouble 
 of the pursuit. It is our national com 
 edy, as well as the national tragedy this 
 struggle of the Poor Boy for the Princess 
 and half the kingdom ; and we may be 
 pardoned if we take a more personal in 
 terest in the fortunes of the hero than is 
 compatible with artistic impartiality. 
 
 A type of hero which is happily rare in 
 American fiction is what Rousseau calls 
 " the grand and virtuous criminal," whom 
 Bulwer domesticated in English litera 
 ture in Eugene Aram. The type was 
 popular in Germany at a much earlier 
 period, as Schiller had invested it with 
 the charm of his genius in Karl Moor, in 
 
The Robbers, and in Fiasco. The man 
 who wages war single-handed against a 
 corrupt and pusillanimous society who 
 is forced into the career of a criminal be 
 cause all roads of honorable utility are 
 closed to him was a direct outgrowth of 
 the sentimental philosophy of Rousseau, 
 and at different times occupied the fancy 
 of every poet and novelist who came un 
 der his influence. The Problematic Char 
 acter, which Goethe sketched and Spiel- 
 hagen elaborately studied, is essentially 
 the same type, and has yet an enormous 
 vogue in the German novel. In Spiel- 
 hagen, the Problematic Character ends 
 his life on the barricades or by suicide, 
 but usually escapes the ignominy of a 
 jail. He is a radical of an extreme type, 
 and labors for the reconstruction of so 
 ciety according to the socialistic ideal. 
 
 It will be observed that all the heroes 
 I have so far described have one thing 
 in common. They are all heroic. They 
 loom a head above all the people. The 
 heroic criminal is no exception, for he is 
 meant to demonstrate, not his own de 
 pravity, but that of the mediocre herd 
 
8 9 
 
 who are incapable of appreciating his 
 grandeur. The latest development of the 
 novel breaks with this tradition. It really 
 abolishes the hero. It has, to be sure, a 
 central character about whom the events 
 group themselves ; but this central char 
 acter founds his claim upon the reader s 
 interest, not upon any exceptional brill 
 iancy or attraction, but upon his typical 
 capacity, as representing a large class of 
 his fellow-men. This is the great and 
 radical change which the so-called real 
 istic school of fiction has inaugurated, 
 and it is fraught with momentous conse 
 quences. The novel, as soon as it sets it 
 self so serious an aim, is no longer an 
 irresponsible play of fancy, however brill 
 iant, but acquires an historical importance 
 in relation to the age to which it belongs. 
 The Germans are never weary of empha 
 sizing what they call die kitlturgeschicht- 
 Itche Bedeutung des Romans ; and it rep 
 resents to me the final test by which a 
 novelist is to be judged. Thackeray, for 
 instance, is, to my mind, a far greater 
 novelist than Dickens, because he has, to 
 a large extent, chronicled the manners, 
 
go 
 
 speech, and sentiments of England dur 
 ing his own day. He dealt chiefly with 
 what is called good society, and the com 
 pleteness, the truthfulness, and the vivid 
 ness of his picture no one can question. 
 Dickens, though perhaps more brilliantly 
 equipped, had no ambition to be truth 
 ful. He had the romantic ideal in view, 
 and produced a series of extremely en 
 tertaining tales, which are incidentally 
 descriptive of manners, but caricatured, 
 extravagant, and fantastic. The future 
 historian, who should undertake to re 
 construct the Victorian England from the 
 romances of Dickens, would be justified 
 in the conclusion that the majority of 
 Englishmen during that period were af 
 flicted with some cerebral disorder. He 
 might with equal profit study Alice Be 
 hind the Looking-Glass. 
 
 Thackeray s heroes, then, derive their 
 chief value from the fact of their not 
 being heroic. Arthur Pendennis, Clive 
 Newcome, Harry Esmond, Captain Dob 
 bin, Rawdon Crawley, and all the rest of 
 them, how well we know them ! How 
 near they are to our hearts ! There is a 
 
chapter of social history bound up in 
 every one of them. They were in the 
 best sense representative and typical. 
 That was the way Englishmen acted, 
 spoke, and felt during the first half of the 
 nineteenth century. Thackeray s novels 
 are historical documents of unimpeach 
 able veracity. But take the Guppys, 
 Smallweeds, Tootses, Murdocks, Betsy 
 Trotwoods, and Micawbers how utterly 
 absurd and unreal they seem by compari 
 son ! A critic would have to be preter- 
 naturally acute to find in them any trace 
 of representative value. Even George 
 Eliot s heroes, though they are psycho 
 logically true, have less of the earthy 
 flavor of reality about them than those of 
 Thackeray. They were drawn, primarily, 
 to illustrate a moral law or problem, and 
 they are admirably adapted for this pur 
 pose. We know them ; but we know 
 them less intimately than we do Colonel 
 Newcome and Clive and Pen. Lydgate 
 is typical, both as to character and fate, 
 and so are Rosamond, Casaubon, Doro 
 thea, Gwendolen, Grandcourt, and Mag 
 gie Tulliver. But they lack the last touch 
 
of substantiality which distinguishes such 
 a character as, for instance, old Major 
 Pendennis or the sportive Harry Foker. 
 They would, for the purposes of my hy 
 pothetical historian, be less valuable than 
 the very sordid company who are im 
 mortalized between the covers of Vanity 
 Fair. 
 
 Any observant reader will have noticed, 
 as a further evidence of the evolution of 
 fiction, that the hero of the modern novel 
 is no longer a gentleman of leisure, 
 whose sole business in life is to make 
 love and run into debt. It was sup 
 posed formerly that a hero would have 
 to be high-born, handsome, and rich 
 in order to command the interest of 
 young ladies (who, at all times, have been 
 the novelist s chief patrons) ; and all gifts 
 of nature and fortune were, therefore, 
 lavished upon him. But either the senti 
 ments of the fair damsels must have been 
 misunderstood, or less regard is now paid 
 to them. For the heroes of the most 
 modern tales are apt to be men who are 
 neither high-born nor rich ; who have 
 much business of a practical sort to at- 
 
93 
 
 tend to, and write their billets doux on 
 half-sheets with the printed letter-heads 
 of their firm. Engineers have especially 
 developed an extraordinary popularity, 
 in witness of which I might cite Ohnet s 
 Maitre des Forges, Daudet s Jack, Mrs. 
 Hodgson Burnett s That Lass o Low- 
 rie s, and a multitude of others. The 
 merchant, the editor, the farmer, and even 
 the reporter and the clerk and the farm 
 hand are now attracting the attention of 
 the novelist, and they are being portrayed 
 not only in their leisure hours, but in 
 their offices among bills of exchange and 
 boxes, bales and barrels, ploughs and har 
 rows. " The novelist," says the German 
 critic, Julian Schmidt, " must seek the 
 German people where the German people 
 is to be found, /. e., at its labor." And 
 it is not only the German people which 
 is to be found at its labor. In France 
 Zola has, in the Rougon-Macquart series, 
 chronicled both the legitimate and the il 
 legitimate trades, and conscientiously out 
 raged all heroic traditions. The Ameri 
 can people has probably less leisure than 
 any nation under the sun, and its novel- 
 
ists, if they aim at realism, must acquire 
 the art of converting the national indus 
 tries into literary material. Mr. Howells 
 has made an admirable experiment in this 
 direction in The Rise of Silas Lapham, 
 which depicts a typical American mer 
 chant, a self-made man, in his strength 
 as in his limitations. We see the whole 
 life of the man in all its important phases ; 
 his pride in his mineral paint ; his social 
 insecurity and awkwardness ; his pleasure 
 in his horses ; his relations with his fam 
 ily. In short, Colonel Silas Lapham is as 
 vivid a reality to us as any of his coun 
 terparts around the corner, whom we 
 meet daily, but do not know half so well. 
 Silas Lapham, however, enables us to 
 know them better and to judge them 
 more justly. 
 
 I am aware that journalists are dis 
 posed to resent the picture which Mr. 
 Howells has drawn of them in Bartley 
 Hubbard, in A Modern Instance. It is, 
 perhaps, possible that Bartley is not strik 
 ingly typical as a journalist ; but that he 
 embodies a very prevalent type in our 
 national life is, I think, beyond dispute. 
 
95 
 
 The unscrupulous smart young man, with 
 a kind of superficial cleverness, but ut 
 terly destitute of moral sense who is 
 there among us who does not know him 
 to his cost ? There is not an American 
 village which cannot exhibit him in 
 numerously varied editions. I believe 
 that it is also a fact that he is apt to drift 
 into journalism, as offering the shortest 
 and easiest road to the eminence which 
 he feels sure is within his reach. 
 
 There is not another American novel 
 ist who has apprehended so deeply and 
 portrayed so faithfully two such types of 
 our national life as Silas Lapham and 
 Hartley Hubbard. Mr. James does not 
 know the country well enough to achieve 
 anything so vital in the way of American 
 portraiture, and each new book which he 
 puts forth shows a further alienation from 
 his nationality. His point of view is al 
 ready that of the American colonist in 
 Paris, London, or Rome, who has learned 
 to apologize for his origin. Even such 
 types as Mr. Newman in The American, 
 and Roderick and Rowland in Roderick 
 Hudson (admirable though they be), lack 
 
the strong flavor of the soil which de 
 lights us in Hartley and Silas. While Mr. 
 Howells appears to be getting a stronger 
 grip on reality, as it fashions itself on 
 this side of the Atlantic, Mr. James soars, 
 like a high-bred and cynical eagle, in the 
 upper air of the best British society, and 
 looks down upon his former country with 
 a sad, critical disapproval. Nevertheless, 
 these two novelists, each within his own 
 sphere and limitations, represent the lat 
 est evolution of realistic fiction. Their 
 unheroic heroes are, as a rule, social 
 types; and if (as I devoutly hope) long 
 lives and unimpaired vigor be granted 
 them, they may leave behind them a 
 national portrait-gallery which will repay 
 the study of the future historian. 
 
AMERICAN LITERARY 
 CRITICISM 
 
 JFTEEN years ago, during a 
 visit to Paris, I had the 
 pleasure of spending an 
 evening at the house of 
 Alphonse Daudet. There 
 were half a dozen gentlemen present, 
 nearly all of them bearers of distinguished 
 names. An editor of a literary periodical 
 who was among the guests was good- 
 humoredly taken to task by a young 
 author for the capriciousness, the absence 
 of principle, in the criticisms he admitted 
 to his journal. 
 
 " Well," he asked, " can you define to 
 me the right principle of criticism ?" 
 
 " I can," ejaculated a vivacious novel 
 ist (though not the one addressed). 
 " Let us have it." 
 
 " Une main lave 1 autre. 
 
 Lavez la mienne, et je laverai la votre. " 
 
98 
 
 A Homeric laugh greeted this sally; 
 but in the discussion that followed it was 
 conceded that it was not at all amiss. 
 It described the principle openly, though 
 not avowedly, practised. The editor, 
 though he made no specific admission, 
 treated the matter jocosely, and thereby 
 demonstrated that he did not regard the 
 charge as a very serious one. 
 
 I have frequently, in later years, been 
 reminded of the above couplet, when 
 reading the criticisms of books in the 
 daily press. The hand that has been 
 washed or is expecting to be washed is 
 often glaringly visible. If it is not the 
 writer s, it is apt to be the editor s or the 
 proprietor s ; or that of the latter s inter 
 est as embodied in the counting-room. 
 The attention which in nine journals out 
 of ten is paid to a publication does not 
 depend primarily upon its intellectual or 
 aesthetic value, but upon the publisher s 
 relations to the journal, and the amount 
 of advertising which he is able to dis 
 pense. I do not contend, of course, that 
 there is anything deeply reprehensible in 
 this. For under the purely commercial 
 
90 
 
 view of journalism which in the last dec 
 ade has become well-nigh universal, a 
 newspaper is scarcely to be blamed for 
 making the most advantageous use of its 
 space, compatible with the general prin 
 ciples of morality and decency. The 
 mere favor bestowed upon or withheld 
 from an author, for reasons which have 
 nothing to do with literature^ is a venial 
 offence, compared to the hideous and de 
 basing sensationalism which daily empties 
 a sewer of moral filth upon the subscrib 
 er s breakfast-table. As it is not often 
 that a newspaper makes a feature of liter 
 ary criticism, the influence which it exerts 
 upon an author s fate is difficult to com 
 pute, but in ninety cases out of every 
 hundred, may be put down as a vanish 
 ing quantity; while its influence upon the 
 public, whose vision of life is largely af 
 fected by its daily resume of the world s 
 doings, is a very appreciable quantity, 
 and a matter of common concern. 
 
 An author who has anything definite to 
 say does not sit and squint at his public, 
 while writing; nor does he trouble him 
 self much about the opinion of the press. 
 
The value of a criticism depends primar 
 ily upon the insight and the intellectual 
 equipment of its author ; and where these 
 are slight, or altogether lacking, the power 
 of the verdict for good or for ill is corres 
 pondingly small. What, for instance, can 
 it matter to me if an anonymous young 
 gentleman, who incidentally confesses to 
 a warm admiration for Rider Haggard, 
 and regards Walter Scott as the grand 
 master of fiction^ what can it matter to 
 me, I say, if such a man finds me dull and 
 commonplace ? I have never suspended 
 my heroines over the brinks of yawning 
 chasms; nor have I introduced monkeys 
 falling in love with men or men with 
 monkeys ; nor am I equal to the depict 
 ing of the perennial charms of women 
 two thousand years old. The laurels of 
 romancers who revel in this style of ju 
 venile entertainment never disturb my 
 slumbers ; and the opinions of critics who 
 take pleasure in such rubbish may amuse 
 me, but influence me no more than the 
 chorus of mosquitoes that hum about my 
 ears of a summer s night. If, on the other 
 hand, a reviewer, whether anonymous or 
 
not, shows himself to be in tolerable 
 sympathy with my aim and my concep 
 tion of what fiction should be, I read 
 what he has to say, with a critical reser 
 vation perhaps, but yet w r ith interest and 
 a desire to profit by his advice. It is al 
 ways a matter of some concern how your 
 work affects an unprejudiced mind, which 
 approaches it without friendly or hostile 
 bias. And I may as well confess that a 
 cordial and sympathetic review which in 
 telligently seizes your thought and from 
 a kindred point of view develops your 
 merits and shortcomings, is often a source 
 of deep gratification. Praise, unless it is 
 discriminating, and shows maturity of 
 judgment, has none other than a com 
 mercial value ; and I sometimes even 
 question if it has that. 
 
 A consensus of silence would, no doubt, 
 in the case of an unknown author, kill 
 his book ; and would, even in the case of 
 .a famous one, prove highly injurious ; but 
 (if the opinion of the trade is to be trust 
 ed) vociferous and elaborate abuse is, for 
 commercial purposes, scarcely less valu 
 able than praise. It is the amount of at- 
 
tention which a work arouses that, gen 
 erally speaking, determines its fate. And 
 yet while I am writing this, half a dozen 
 exceptions occur to me which seem to 
 disprove the rule. The late Rev. E. P. 
 Roe never attracted much attention from 
 the newspapers (and the more authorita 
 tive journals ignored him altogether) ; 
 and yet he rejoiced in a popularity which 
 threw all his competitors into the shade. 
 I remember he once showed me some 
 scant paragraphs ridiculing one of his 
 books ; and he asked me if I could sug 
 gest any explanation of the hostile atti 
 tude of the press toward him. I offered 
 a rather lame one, being unwilling to hurt 
 his feelings ; for he was a lovable man, of a 
 singularly sweet nature, and the very best 
 of friends. " The fact is," he said, " I 
 can t discover that the newspapers affect 
 the sale of a book one way or another. 
 The people whom I reach read very few 
 newspapers; and I think they are more 
 influenced by their neighbors opinions 
 than by anything they read." 
 
 "What then, in your judgment, deter 
 mines the success of a book ?" I asked. 
 
io 3 
 
 " Well, I should say its nearness to the 
 life and thought of average men and wom 
 en," Mr. Roe replied. 
 
 " How do you mean ?" 
 
 " I mean that what the critics call art 
 removes the book from the intelligence 
 of ordinary people. I have been blamed 
 because there is not art enough in my 
 novels. Well, to be frank, there is as 
 much art in them as there is in me. No 
 more and no less. I never try to write 
 down to any one s intelligence ; but I 
 write as well as I am able to write, and 
 then let the art take care of itself. No 
 one could have been more surprised than 
 I was at the great success of my first 
 books, unless it were the newspapers ; 
 but my explanation is that I happen to 
 feel and think very much as the average 
 plain American feels and thinks, and my 
 manner of expressing myself is such as 
 he, without effort, can understand. When 
 a man does his best, he can afford to ig 
 nore the critics." 
 
 The above conversation, which took 
 place during a drive in the neighborhood 
 of Cornwall -on -the- Hudson, lingered 
 
104 
 
 long in my memory, because it strongly 
 reinforced an opinion expressed a few 
 years earlier by Dr. J. G. Holland, who 
 enjoyed for a score of years a popularity 
 of the same order and magnitude as Mr. 
 Roe. Dr. Holland, however, took the 
 contemptuous treatment of the critics 
 much more to heart than Mr. Roe appar 
 ently did; and the epithet, "the Ameri 
 can Tupper" (invented, if I remembe*r 
 rightly, by the New York Sim}, rankled 
 in his gentle mind. Even though the 
 sale of his books ran up into hundreds of 
 thousands, the tolerant patronage or un 
 disguised sneer of the reviewer remained 
 the drop of gall in the cup of his happi 
 ness. 
 
 I remember once discussing Dr. Hol 
 land s popularity with Bayard Taylor, 
 who was at that time literary editor of 
 the Tribune and the most prominent 
 member of the guild of newspaper critics. 
 He professed to regard it as a most mys 
 terious phenomenon ; and maintained 
 that popularity and fame were entirely 
 distinct things, the former being by no 
 means a passport to the latter. Without 
 
disputing the distinction, I endeavored 
 to suggest a rational explanation of Dr. 
 Holland s hold upon the American public. 
 
 "What an author gives in his books," 
 I observed, "is primarily himself his 
 personality. Now Dr. Holland s person 
 ality is a noble and lovable one. I have 
 known no man who has impressed me 
 more strongly with his personal worth 
 the genuine goodness and sweetness of 
 his character than Dr. Holland. His 
 writing is a spontaneous pouring forth of 
 his own soul ; and the American public 
 the great mass whom Lincoln called the 
 plain people recognize the man behind 
 the book, and feel the elevating influence 
 which he exerts." 
 
 Taylor, with his German culture and 
 his detestation of the narrow New Eng 
 land Presbyterianism, whose incorpora 
 tion he saw in Dr. Holland, had no toler 
 ation for such a view, maintaining, justly 
 enough, that some of the greatest literary 
 artists had been pretty bad characters ; 
 and that it was intellect and the artistic 
 sense, not morality, which entitled a man 
 to a place in the world of letters. 
 
io6 
 
 I called attention, in my turn, to his 
 distinction between popularity and fame, 
 and reaffirmed my opinion that character 
 frequently counts for more in the former, 
 as intellect surely does in the latter. And 
 it was not to be deplored that men like 
 Dr. Holland who exerted so great a power 
 for good were the favorites of the Ameri 
 can public. 
 
 Bayard Taylor, though naturally san 
 guine, had, as the above conversation in 
 dicates, in his later years slight confidence 
 in the public at large, and still less in his 
 colleagues of the press. It always exas 
 perated him to be referred to (in reviews 
 of his poetical works) as "the great 
 American traveller;" and he felt perpetu 
 ally handicapped in his later and more 
 serious activity by his early popularity as 
 a writer of books of travel. " My case," 
 he said, " is like that of a sculptor who, 
 on account of poverty, was obliged to 
 make his start in life as a bricklayer. 
 When he had gained the means to sup 
 plement his deficient culture, he began to 
 model in clay and make statues in mar 
 ble. . . . Now, if this sculptor shows 
 
io 7 
 
 himself a worthy member of the artistic 
 guild and produces work of artistic merit, 
 is it fair to be forever saying to him : 
 You were such an excellent bricklayer. 
 Why didn t you continue to lay bricks? 
 That is exactly what the American public 
 is continually saying to me. I haven t a 
 particle of pride in my books of travel, . . . 
 and if I have no other title to remem 
 brance, I shall be content to be forgotten." 
 
 When, a few months before his death, 
 he had finished his lyrical drama, " Prince 
 Deukalion," he said to me: 
 
 " This poem of mine will, I fear, not 
 mean much to the average American, who 
 would like to run as he reads. I am 
 aware that it will appeal only to the few, 
 who have thought somewhat on the same 
 lines as myself. I shudder to think what 
 the newspaper critic will make of it. 
 Therefore I am going to ask you to do 
 me a favor. Will you write a review of 
 the poem from the advance sheets I sent 
 you for Scribners Monthly? Stedman 
 has offered to review the book in the At 
 lantic, and McDonough in the Tribune. 
 Now let it be fully understood that I don t 
 
io8 
 
 want you to feel under any obligation to 
 praise. I know that you understand the 
 poem ; and I only want you to strike the 
 key-note, as it were, for its interpretation. 
 It is nonsense to say (as many, no doubt, 
 will say) that, if it is worth anything, it 
 will be understood by the average reader 
 without any commentary. For this once, 
 I am anxious to be completely and sym 
 pathetically understood. I have never 
 made the least effort to secure a favora 
 ble hearing for anything I have written ; 
 and I want you to promise, as far as pos 
 sible, to eliminate your friendly feeling 
 for me. It is not your friendship I need, 
 but your intelligence." 
 
 I wrote the review, as desired, after 
 having acquainted Dr. Holland with the 
 author s wishes ; but before the Febru 
 ary number of Scribncrs Monthly (1879) 
 reached Berlin, Bayard Taylor was dead. 
 
 To me, his anxiety to be understood, 
 and the precaution he took to secure in 
 telligent comment upon his work, though, 
 perhaps, a reflection upon the newspaper 
 critic, were not only natural 1 , but com 
 mendable. It was because he knew the 
 
log 
 
 fraternity so well, and was so thoroughly 
 acquainted with its general intellectual 
 equipment, that he had such serious mis 
 givings. And yet the three men he se 
 lected to interpret his thought were all 
 more or less closely identified with the 
 critical guild ; and though not profes 
 sional journalists held semi-official rela 
 tions to journalism. I was myself, at that 
 time, semi - editorially connected with 
 three prominent publications which were 
 in the habit of sending me books for re 
 view; and the experiences I accumulated 
 in this capacity, though they were not all 
 agreeable, I would not have dispensed 
 with for a small fortune. 
 
 The dilemma upon whose horns I was 
 always in danger of being impaled was 
 the endeavor to reconcile kindness and 
 justice. I was not one of those who 
 cherish a grudge against a man for hav 
 ing achieved a book; and I dare assert 
 that I picked up every novel or poem 
 that was sent me with a kindly fellow- 
 feeling for the author and a desire to 
 view him in the most favorable light. 
 But frequently, when I had read a page 
 
or two, the reflection would obtrude itself 
 that this was after all a very ephemeral 
 performance ; and by the time I had fin 
 ished fifty pages, most of my benevolent 
 intentions would, perhaps, be chilled, and 
 my critical impulses would bristle like 
 the quills upon the fretful porcupine. 
 Had I the right to commend such feeble 
 ness such vague and muddled thought, 
 so clumsily expressed for fear of hurting 
 the author s feelings?- Was I not prac 
 tising an imposition on the public if I 
 misrepresented the character of a book, 
 and perhaps induced scores of people to 
 buy it who otherwise would have left it 
 alone ? I came to the conclusion, after a 
 brief wavering, that I should be doing 
 neither the author nor his reader a kind 
 ness in uttering vapid compliments or 
 talking learned, laborious stuff with a 
 view to concealing my real opinion. 
 
 I am bound to confess that none of 
 the three journals with which I was then 
 connected nor any of those which have 
 later engaged my services endeavored in 
 any way to influence my judgment. Never 
 did I receive an editorial hint as to the 
 
tone in which I ought to review this or 
 that book. But by a curiously indirect 
 process I was once made to feel that I was 
 too good-natured, and that I was in fut 
 ure expected to be more severe. For in 
 two successive reviews of mine, all the 
 complimentary portions were stricken out, 
 and only the censure was permitted to 
 remain. When I complained of this treat 
 ment to a friend, who had had a similar 
 experience, he told me that I must be 
 aware that the journal in question made 
 a specialty of damning. Its traditional 
 tone was one of superior condescension, 
 or cynical forbearance. The man who 
 praised, without some qualifying censure, 
 could not long remain persona grata in 
 its editorial sanctum. 
 
 He was entirely right; and I have 
 found since that, unless a critic has an 
 intimate and accurate knowledge of the 
 traditions of his paper, he will be sure 
 to run against invisible and unsuspect 
 ed snags. I know one great newspa 
 per which invariably damns or ignores 
 the publications of a certain publishing 
 house, and (if the report be true) as a 
 
rule is predisposed in favor of the books 
 of another. I give this, however, as 
 rumor, not as incontestable fact. 
 
 If I may trust my own experience, I 
 should say that a book stood a far better 
 chance of being judged on its merits ten 
 or fifteen years ago than it does now. 
 The monthly magazines gave then a large 
 amount of space to " Recent Literature," 
 and they often gave the cue to the more 
 ephemeral publications. I have never 
 ceased to regret the disappearance of the 
 excellent department devoted to "Cult 
 ure and Progress" in the old Scribners 
 Monthly and the Century Magazine ; and 
 the "Open Letters" seem to me a poor 
 and inadequate substitute. The idea that 
 the newspaper critic (because he comes 
 earlier) has the advantage of the maga 
 zine critic and makes him superfluous is, 
 to my mind, a lamentable error. Harper s 
 Magazine held, as long as Mr. W. D. 
 Howells occupied its " Editor s Study," a 
 unique position, and contained some of 
 the subtlest, justest, and most admirably 
 vigorous and discriminating critical writ 
 ing that it ever has been my good-fort- 
 
une to read. And, what was more, it 
 was discussed in hundreds of newspapers 
 all over the country, and produced a 
 great atrd lasting effect. I do not mean 
 to insinuate, of course, that Mr. Howells s 
 successor, Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, is 
 less able and brilliant ; but his critical 
 point of view is so alien to mine that, 
 with all my admiration for his wit and 
 his beautiful style, I am unable to do him 
 full justice. 
 
 Even the Atlantic Monthly, which once 
 exerted so great an influence as a literary 
 censor (not to speak of the North Amer 
 ican Review), has abolished its depart 
 ment of " Recent Literature," while yet 
 devoting from time to time some pages 
 in the body of the magazine to the dis 
 cussion of important publications. The 
 more credit does the Cosmopolitan de 
 serve for maintaining a literary depart 
 ment (under the title " In the Library ") 
 which unites finish of style and a certain 
 epigrammatical snap and sparkle with the 
 keenest acumen and the soundest judg 
 ment. I know indeed no wielder of the 
 critical lance in the United States, unless 
 
it be Mr. M. W. Hazeltine, of the Sun, 
 who in point of scholarship, perspicacity, 
 and hospitality of mind rivals Mr. Brander 
 Matthews. He does not beat about him 
 with cheap catch-words ; nor does he, like 
 so many of his colleagues, assume airs of 
 loftysuperiorityand pat the poorauthor on 
 the back, telling him not to be discouraged 
 even if he fails to pass muster before such 
 an august authority as the reviewer in 
 question. 
 
 There is, I suppose, an evolution in 
 literary criticism, as in all other human 
 concerns. The process of differentiation 
 which has eliminated the department of 
 " Recent Literature " from most of the 
 monthly magazines, has in this country 
 as in England been instrumental in rele 
 gating the book review to special journals. 
 The Nation, which commands a wide 
 range of expert opinion, has long held a 
 pre-eminent position and scalped many a 
 rising novelist with a neatness and de 
 spatch which could not but challenge the 
 victim s admiration. The Critic, which is 
 now twelve years old and has long since 
 vindicated its right to existence, is con- 
 
"5 
 
 ducted with conspicuous ability; and the 
 Literary World, of Boston, which counts 
 nearly a score of years, furnishes also an 
 admirably clear and comprehensive sur 
 vey of the intellectual movements of the 
 age. A younger rival, for which I con 
 fess to a considerable predilection, is the 
 semi-monthly Dial of Chicago distin 
 guished for its broad-minded impartial 
 ity and scholarship, and a typographical 
 beauty which gives an added zest to the 
 perusal of its bright and instructive pages. 
 It is probable, however, that with the 
 growing tendency to specialization which 
 is characteristic of modern life, some of 
 these weekly and bi-weekly journals, de 
 voted solely to literary criticism, will con 
 tinue to grow in authority and prosperity, 
 until they will monopolize the field. It 
 is obvious to every attentive reader that 
 each of the more prominent ones is al 
 ready acquiring a temperament as dis 
 tinct as that of the English Spectator or 
 the Saturday Review. They are accumu 
 lating a fine assortment of likes and dis 
 likes (intelligent or unintelligent accord 
 ing to your point of view) ; they are 
 
n6 
 
 attaching to themselves a large corps of 
 experts, in the most varied fields, and are 
 gradually attaining the importance, the 
 individuality, and the traditions befitting 
 permanent institutions. 
 
 1893 
 
AMERICA IN EUROPEAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 >HEN ^Eneas met Achilles in 
 Hades, the swift-footed son 
 of Thetis, according to Vir 
 gil, was suffering from the 
 blues. There was a certain 
 weary monotony about the life in the 
 nether world, he complained a shadowy 
 futility which made existence a burden. 
 I remember the time when, to the cul 
 tivated classes in Europe, America pre 
 sented a picture not unlike the Greek 
 conception of Hades. Life here was 
 supposed to be devoid of all higher 
 pleasures, dreary, and destitute of all 
 charm ; but beyond this, the land was a 
 shadow-land, and all ideas concerning 
 it were hazy and indefinite. The laws of 
 cause and effect which prevail in Europe 
 were supposed to have no validity on this 
 
u8 
 
 side of the ocean ; and all reasoning con 
 cerning the country and its people was 
 therefore conceded to be unsafe. If I 
 had told my grandmother in Norway that 
 two and two made five in America, I do 
 not believe it would have surprised her. 
 She had seen what was to her a much 
 more startling phenomenon. A slovenly, 
 barefooted milkmaid named Guro, who 
 had been in her employ, had returned 
 from the United States, after an absence 
 of five years, with all the airs of a lady, 
 and arrayed in silks and jewelry which in 
 Norway represented a small fortune. My 
 grandmother was convinced that Guro 
 (who had never been a favorite with her) 
 had crossed the ocean for the sole pur 
 pose of dazzling her, triumphing over 
 her, and enjoying her discomfiture. For 
 she had prophesied Guro a bad end, and 
 she bore a lasting grudge against the 
 country which had brought her prophecy 
 to naught. 
 
 These complete transformations, 
 wrought by a transatlantic sojourn, were 
 by no means rare occurrences in my child 
 hood. Gawky stable-boys who never 
 
iig 
 
 wore a coat except on Sundays returned 
 attired in broadcloth and stove-pipe hats, 
 which immensely impressed their coun 
 trymen. A certain vulgar impudence 
 and dash of manner which they likewise 
 had acquired in the far West were no less 
 envied and admired. The country in 
 which such things could happen could 
 scarcely be subject to ordinary mundane 
 laws. It presented itself to the imagina 
 tion as a shadowy fable-land, where fort 
 une might overtake a man as it did Boots 
 in the fairy-tale ; where all things were 
 possible, except that which might have 
 been expected. 
 
 It is but natural that these notions con 
 cerning the United States, as a sort of 
 dreary and vulgar fable-land, emancipat 
 ed from the laws of probability, should 
 find -their reflection in literature. The 
 Uncle from America was long a standing 
 character in the French and the German 
 drama, and occasionally also invaded the 
 novel. He was a benevolent Deus ex 
 machind, and so enormously rich that, 
 like Dumas s Monte Cristo, he never car 
 ried less than a million for small change 
 
in his vest pocket. By the gift of a few 
 hundred thousands, and the promise of 
 as many millions after his death (for the 
 Uncle from America was always a bache 
 lor), he put his nephew, the poor but 
 worthy lover, in a position to triumph 
 over all obstacles. The cruel parents re 
 lented; the dutiful daughter, whose heart 
 had all along been his, gave him joyfully 
 her hand ; and the delightful uncle, in dis 
 pensing his blessing, in the final tableau, 
 usually declared that he had lived but for 
 this moment, and that it rewarded him 
 for his life-long toil. 
 
 It was, of course, only as long as the 
 haziest notions concerning the United 
 States prevailed that this kind of uncle 
 could flourish, and as a matter of fact he 
 is not frequently met with in the con 
 temporary drama or novel. The last 
 time I encountered him was in a recent 
 novelette entitled Monika Waldvogel, 
 by the German author Wilhelm Jensen. 
 The uncle there, who is as eccentric and 
 shrewd as he is benevolent, returns (as 
 every good German should) to his Father 
 land to enjoy his American millions, 
 
hunts up the last two representatives of 
 his family, buys a large estate, and makes 
 a will, in which the niece, Monika, is made 
 sole heir, on condition that she shall offer 
 a permanent home in her house to her 
 remote male cousin, for whom she has 
 a particular aversion. If, however, she 
 marries him, the estate is to go to the 
 residuary legatee, whose name is to be 
 found in a sealed envelope. After a cer 
 tain time, spent in the fiercest hostilities, 
 the Amazon is conquered by Achilles, 
 and determines to surrender the estate to 
 the residuary legatee, who proves to be 
 herself with the matrimonial prefix to 
 her name. The American Uncle, who 
 here follows the legitimate avuncular vo 
 cation, is amusingly, though not very con 
 vincingly, portrayed ; but his American 
 flavor is of the very vaguest kind. Ger 
 man authors, when they need that style 
 of uncle nowadays, usually make him 
 hail from India or Borneo or Morocco, or 
 some such terra incognita ; for America 
 has, by perpetual intercourse, been made 
 to assume a more and more definite char 
 acter, and has thereby been largely spoiled 
 
for purposes of romance. In Lindau s 
 recent novel Mr. and Mrs. Bewer (and a 
 charming novel it is) the returning Crce- 
 sus comes from the far East ; while his 
 American brother (who hails from Cali 
 fornia) is only moderately rich, and the 
 latter s American wife and sister-in-law 
 are represented as being well-bred and 
 warm-hearted women, and not strikingly 
 unconventional. 
 
 It is interesting to note that since the 
 shadowy stage has been passed an au 
 thor s attitude towards the United States 
 is determined, not so much by his knowl 
 edge of the country as by his political 
 principles. An author with Tory procliv 
 ities (like Ouida or the late Lord Bea- 
 consneld) is sure to cherish a more or 
 less pronounced animosity towards the 
 great democratic republic; and to repre 
 sent it as the home of pretentious vulgar 
 ity, ridiculous snobbishness, and igno 
 rance of all that gives a higher value to 
 existence. Authors inclined towards radi 
 calism, on the other hand, although they 
 are not blind to the vulgarity of certain 
 classes of Americans, refuse to accept 
 
123 
 
 these as representative ; and dwell with 
 preference on the practical ingenuity and 
 skill of our people, their shrewd common- 
 sense, and freedom from feudal prejudice. 
 The young man who, because of his ex 
 ceptional daring and nobility of soul, re 
 fuses to fit in anywhere in the ancient 
 feudal machinery, and whose life would 
 have been crushed or broken by the stub 
 born and complicated tangle of ancient 
 abuses and wrongs, finds, in the radical 
 drama or novel, promptly his place in the 
 New World, and develops there to his full 
 spiritual stature. It is, according to this 
 class of writers, the humdrum, mediocre 
 soul, which drowsily accepts whatever is, 
 and lacks the courage to grapple with 
 troublesome problems it is this type of 
 soul which thrives in the ancient society 
 and gives it its color and character. The 
 Philistine is so strong, not because he is 
 brave, but because he is so numerous. 
 Samson, though shorn of his locks, has 
 yet strength enough left to shake the pil 
 lars of the temple ; but the temple buries 
 him in its fall. But if Samson had gone 
 to the United States, instead of succumb- 
 
ing to the charms of Delilah, he could 
 have disported himself with the jawbone 
 of the ass to his heart s content, and no 
 body would have molested him. That is 
 the impression we derive from the radi 
 cal optimists who wage war in their 
 novels and plays against the old social 
 order, and who in their innocence believe 
 that the ancient spirit of caste and re 
 ligious hatred and prejudice have no 
 vogue and no force in the happy Atlan 
 tic beyond the sea. In Spielhagen s nov 
 els the socialistic agitator, who wants to 
 turn everything upside down, is usually a 
 German who has spent a period of years 
 in the United States, and acquired here 
 a wholesome audacity of thought and the 
 ability to penetrate to the bottom of all 
 shams. In Auerbach s Black Forest Vil 
 lage Talcs, "The Gawk," who has been 
 the sport and the scapegoat of his native 
 town, becomes a useful and respected 
 citizen in Ohio, and writes a letter home 
 which furnishes the illustrator of the book 
 with the subject for a tail-piece, consist 
 ing of two luxuriant palm-trees. In fact, 
 transformations of this kind are frequent 
 
125 
 
 in Auerbach ; and the palm-trees from 
 Ohio are symbolic of his realism in trans 
 atlantic affairs. *. 
 
 It was to be expected that the Nor 
 wegian authors, who are all pronounced 
 liberals, would deal with the United States 
 as a land of refuge and redemption for 
 problematic characters. The old fossil 
 ized society has become rigid ; in its anx 
 ious instinct of self-preservation it re 
 spects no one s individuality, if it differs 
 from that of the majority, and forces 
 every one who does differ into hypocrisy 
 and lies. The great Norwegian drama 
 tist, Ibsen, has made this the theme of a 
 very effective drama called " The Pillars 
 of Society." Consul Bernick, the hero, 
 has during long years spun himself into a 
 net of dissimulation and falsehood, in his 
 endeavor to conform to the moral ideal 
 of the society, whose " pillar " he feels 
 himself to be. He forces his son into the 
 same strait-jacket, regardless of the fact 
 that the boy s wholesome individuality 
 and natural gifts rebel against it ; and the 
 result is alienation between father and 
 son, between husband and wife, between 
 
126 
 
 all who naturally belong together, sim 
 ply because no one dares be himself, but 
 must do homage to the norm of thought, 
 speech, and conduct which society has es 
 tablished, and upon which it has set the 
 seal of its approval. The denouement in 
 these painful complications is precipitated 
 by the arrival of a very curious person 
 a spinster named Lona, from the United 
 States. This Lona had loved Bernick in 
 his youth and been loved by him ; but for 
 social reasons they had parted. Life in 
 the United States has now freed her from 
 all foolish prejudice, and she is, in fact, 
 surprisingly " emancipated " from all anti 
 quated notions of propriety and morals. 
 I have met ladies resembling her at a 
 Woman s Rights Convention in Boston, 
 but I doubt if they would have been much 
 of an acquisition to any society except 
 the one in which I found them. Ibsen s 
 Lona, however, is meant to be a great 
 deal wiser and pleasanter than she is, 
 judged by the effect she produces upon 
 Bernick and his family. One of the char 
 acters, Martha, who has for half a life 
 time waited for a lover who cannot afford 
 
I2 7 
 
 to marry, exclaims, after having heard 
 Lena s description of American life : 
 " Yes, over there it must be beautiful ; a 
 wider sky and clouds that sail higher than 
 here ; and a freer air blows over the peo 
 ple." In Bjornson s novel, The Heritage 
 of the Kurts, the United States is similarly 
 represented, as a land that has much to 
 teach Europe, particularly in technical 
 education and pedagogics ; and an Amer 
 ican lady who is not in the least carica 
 tured comes over to Norway in order to 
 impart new ideas on the subject of educa 
 tion. The defmiteness, self-restraint, and 
 absence of all utopianism in this descrip 
 tion, testify sufficiently to the fact that 
 Bjornson has spent a year in this coun 
 try and knows whereof he speaks. If he 
 had drawn upon his imagination for his 
 facts, his Massachusetts school-mistress 
 would, no doubt, have approximated the 
 type of Ibsen s Lona. In the novels of 
 Jonas Lie, another well-known Norwe 
 gian author, the United States likewise 
 figures as a land in which many a lesson 
 of practical wisdom can be learned ; and 
 his returned Norse- Americans are usually 
 
better and abler men for their sojourn 
 beyond the sea. In his Family at Gilje 
 the captain s son, who for many a weary 
 year has struggled in vain with the un 
 congenial Latin and Greek, escapes from 
 his classical sufferings to the land of lib 
 erty, and there turns out to be a mechani 
 cal genius, and gains wealth and position. 
 It is not " genteel " in Norway to train 
 one s self in the mechanical arts. Society 
 prescribes but two ways to influence and 
 position in the state viz., the one through 
 the military academy and the other 
 through the university ; and the father 
 who does not wish his son to be cttclasst 
 compels him, regardless of his proclivi 
 ties, to choose the one path or the other. 
 It is a curious fact that in no European 
 literature is America more persistently 
 misrepresented than in that of France. 
 With the exception of Ludovic Halevy, 
 who seems to have studied Mrs. Mackay s 
 salon with a not unkindly interest, I can 
 recall no prominent French novelist who 
 does not burlesque American speech and 
 manners whenever the opportunity pre 
 sents itself. But then Halevy, with all 
 
his Gallic esprit, is a Jew, therefore scarce 
 ly representative. Edouard Laboulaye, to 
 be sure, was conspicuous as the partic 
 ular champion of our republic, and in his 
 ingenious fable, Paris in America, gave a 
 Utopian picture of American life, as it 
 was supposed to be forty years ago ; but 
 nobody took that seriously, except its 
 author, who with charming naivete prided 
 himself on his power of poetic divination. 
 I cannot recall any reference to the United 
 States in Daudet ; and of Zola I have not 
 read enough to have a right to speak. In 
 the dramas of Sardou and Dumas fi Is the 
 references are mostly contemptuous, and 
 the transatlantic characters who are in 
 troduced would, if they were real, amply 
 justify their author s scorn. When, as oc 
 casionally happens, a French author is too 
 kind-hearted or too regardful of prob 
 abilities to kill his villain at the oppor 
 tune moment, he is apt to ship him to 
 the United States. As a means of just 
 retribution it amounts to the same thing, 
 the one punishment being held to be no 
 less severe than the other. Of course, I 
 am here speaking of belles-lettres, for in de- 
 
scriptions of travel and politico-econom 
 ical works, like De Tocqueville s famous 
 Democracy in America, there are found 
 many just and shrewd observations, and 
 many betraying keenness of insight and 
 the broadest cosmopolitan spirit. 
 
 A survey of English fiction with refer 
 ence to its attitude towards " the States " 
 I do not attempt, partly because the sub 
 ject is too extensive for a short article, 
 and partly because every reader has suffi 
 cient material at hand for an indepen 
 dent judgment. 
 
THE ETHICS OF ROBERT 
 BROWNING 
 
 my essay entitled "The 
 Problem of Happiness " * 
 I made the assertion that 
 Robert Browning " preach 
 es frankly the rights of pas 
 sion, and derides in his heroes all pusil 
 lanimous regard for duty." Now a voice 
 comes from the East and several from 
 the West, challenging me to explain what 
 I mean by such an insinuation. Well, 
 then, I will be explicit. I will, for the 
 present, ignore Browning in the capacity 
 in which I sincerely admire him (i.e., as a 
 poet), and deal with him in the capacity 
 in which I do not wholly admire him 
 viz., as a moralist. I venture to believe 
 that I have a certain qualification for this 
 
 * Essays on German Literature, pp. 129-140. 
 
132 
 
 task, for Browning s books have been my 
 constant friends and companions for well- 
 nigh fifteen years. I have lived on a 
 close and familiar footing with Fra Lippo 
 Lippi, Rabbi ben Ezra, Andrea del Sarto, 
 and, above all, with that glorious compa 
 ny of robust saints and sinners in " The 
 Ring and the Book." I am quite ready 
 to subscribe to the opinion of Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, who (in "Virginibus 
 Puerisque ") calls this poem the noblest 
 book of the nineteenth century, in which 
 case, of course, I count Goethe s " Faust" 
 as belonging to the eighteenth. But so 
 great a work it is, that I am loath to stand 
 sponsor to an opinion which may seem 
 to detract from its merit. What I shall 
 say, then, is said in no censorious spirit, 
 but in the spirit of respectful interroga 
 tion, as a disciple may speak to his mas 
 ter. 
 
 As I have already said, I am inclined 
 to regard Browning as a eudemonist. 
 Those of his characters into which he 
 has poured his own soul have no sort 
 of consciousness of their obligations as 
 members of society. With a light-heart- 
 
133 
 
 ed, freebooting propensity they start out 
 in quest of happiness, and rarely trouble 
 themselves to consider whose rights are 
 violated as long as they achieve their pur 
 pose. Take, for instance, that charming 
 ly full-blooded piece of Italian Renais 
 sance, Fra Lippo Lippi. Where have the 
 rights of the flesh been preached more 
 eloquently ? Where do you find such 
 sunny paganism under the cowl of one 
 consecrated to the service of Christ ? 
 But that is in keeping with the charac 
 ter, you will say ; it was the very birth 
 mark of the Renaissance. Granted. Tak 
 en by itself, it does not prove much ; 
 taken in connection with a dozen or 
 twenty instances of the same kind, it 
 proves what I am aiming to prove, viz., 
 the tendency of Browning to glorify the 
 flesh. " A Light Woman " is a more strik 
 ing instance. The poet tells how he alien 
 ated the affections of his friend s mistress : 
 
 " For see my friend goes shaking and white; 
 
 He eyes me as a basilisk ; 
 I have turned, it appears, his day into night, 
 Eclipsing his sun s disk. 
 
134 
 
 "And I did it, he thinks, as a very thief; 
 
 Tho I love her that he comprehends 
 One should master one s passion (love in 
 
 chief), 
 And be loyal to one s friends. 
 
 And she she lies in my hand as tame 
 As a pear hung basking over a wall ; 
 Just a touch to try, and off it came. 
 Tis mine can I let it fall ? 
 
 With no mind to eat it at the worst, 
 
 Were it thrown in the road would the 
 case assist ? 
 
 Twas quenching a dozen blue-flies thirst 
 When I gave its stalk a twist. 
 
 "And I what T seem to my friend, you see 
 What I soon shall seem to his love, you 
 
 guess. 
 
 What I seem to myself, do you ask of me ? 
 No hero, I confess. 
 
 "Well, anyhow, here the story stays, 
 So far, at least, as I understand ; 
 And Robert Browning, you writer of plays, 
 Here s a subject made to your hand." 
 
 It is unfair, perhaps, to assume that 
 this poem is what it appears to be au- 
 
tobiographical ; although Browning has 
 taken particular pains to identify himself 
 with the story by affixing his sign-man 
 ual, as it were his full name in the last 
 verse. If the manner in which it is told 
 proves anything and I am inclined to 
 think that it does it proves that moral 
 obligations sit lightly upon this poet. I 
 draw this conclusion from the tone that 
 pervades the verses, rather than from any 
 particular verse ; and I doubt if any one 
 who reads the whole will contend that it 
 could have been written by a moralist. 
 
 Still more to the point is the beauti 
 ful poem entitled " The Statue and the 
 Bust," which seems to have served as a 
 model for Bret Harte s " For the King." 
 There the Duke and the Lady the Bride 
 of the Riccardi spend their lives in vain 
 ly sighing for each other. She is married, 
 and so is, probably, he. The passion that 
 cried out in the hearts of both for a union 
 was wasted, not by a severe regard for 
 duty, but by mere dalliance, lack of cour 
 age, cowardly temporizing. Their mis 
 take was, according to Browning, that 
 they allowed considerations of piety, pru- 
 
136 
 
 dence, and state to interfere with the im 
 mediate fulfilment of their purpose. It 
 were better to have sinned, he thinks, 
 than to spend one s life pining away with 
 unsatisfied desire. If the sin, which was 
 in their hearts, had been consummated in 
 act, it would have been better for both. 
 
 " Is one day more so long to wait? 
 
 Moreover the Duke rides past. I know 
 We shall see each other, sure as- fate. 
 
 " She turned on her side and slept. Just so! 
 So we resolve on a thing and sleep. 
 So did the lady, ages ago." 
 
 And after having expended his regret in 
 very trenchant and incisive verses, the 
 poet, as if to clinch his argument, adds 
 these unmistakable lines : 
 
 "I hear your reproach but delay was best, 
 For their end was a crime ! Oh, a crime 
 
 will do 
 As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 
 
 "As a virtue, golden through and through, 
 Sufficient to vindicate itself 
 And prove its worth at a moment s view. 
 
" If you choose to play is my principle 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life s set prize, be it what it will. 
 
 The counter our lovers staked was lost 
 As surely as if it were lawful coin. 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate 
 ghost 
 
 "Was the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
 Though the end in sight was a crime, I say." 
 
 Those lines : " Let a man contend to 
 the uttermost for his life s set prize, be it 
 what it will," might serve for a motto to 
 nearly all that Browning has written. 
 They have a harmless look, and might 
 readily be accepted as a maxim of practi 
 cal wisdom. But this contention to the 
 uttermost implies in Browning a disre 
 gard of all rights that clash with your 
 own. It is individualism carried to its 
 extreme limit. Where the sense of duty 
 crops out in Browning, it is frequently as 
 a thing to be brushed aside as unworthy 
 of serious consideration. He delights so 
 in exhibitions of the blood-red barbaric 
 streaks in the human soul, that, I almost 
 
fancy, virtue, duty, and all pale abstrac 
 tions that pull in the opposite direction 
 affect him (in this mood) with a certain 
 impatience. They are less interesting, 
 less picturesque. To be sure, he is capa 
 ble of painting goodness and virtue most 
 beautifully, as, for instance, in Pompilia, 
 in "The Ring and the Book," and the 
 delightful Pippa in " Pippa Passes." But 
 how much more gorgeous is the coloring, 
 how much more resplendent the charac 
 terization of the guilty lovers, Sebald 
 and Ottima, than of Pippa ! It is power 
 Browning admires ; power, in whatever 
 shape it may appear. Self -abnegation, 
 abstention, renunciation, are pale nega 
 tive terms which in nowise attract him, 
 except for the psychological curiosities 
 which they may reveal. Natural sweet 
 ness and nobility, which are but the act 
 ing out of healthy inborn instincts, com 
 mand his sympathy, but it is where long- 
 suppressed power flares out in baleful 
 passion that he is at his best. 
 
 By passion I do not mean only the 
 passion of love. All exhibitions of un 
 restrained energy, concentrated in a mo- 
 
139 
 
 ment of supreme action, are to him beau 
 tiful. Happiness individual well-being 
 appears the legitimate object of human 
 pursuit, and his heart warms towards the 
 man or woman who, instead of sipping it 
 in slow driblets, drains it in one swift, 
 glorious draught. Prudential restraints 
 seem always pitiful. The young art-stu 
 dent and the singing-girl in "Youth and 
 Art," both poor as church -mice, who 
 loved each other across the house-tops, 
 are blamed for choking up the sweet bud 
 ding passion in their hearts, and aiming 
 instead for worldly success. He is knight 
 ed and becomes an R. A. ; she marries 
 a lord and becomes a person of conse 
 quence ; but in the midst of this external 
 success both are oppressed with a deep 
 heart-hunger a sense of futility in what 
 ever they undertake : 
 
 " P^ach life is unfulfilled, you see ; 
 
 It hangs still, patchy and scrappy ; 
 We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 
 Starved, feasted, despaired been happy. 
 
 " And nobody calls you a dunce, 
 And people suppose me clever ; 
 
This could but have happened once, 
 And we missed it, lost it forever." 
 
 This same sense of futility is shared by 
 Paracelsus (in the drama of that name), 
 not because he has sinned, but because 
 he has failed to experience any deep joy 
 any real happiness. It is a common 
 punishment with Browning (as, indeed, 
 it is with certain stormy temperaments 
 in reality) for having failed to make the 
 best of life s rare golden moments. 
 
 I am tempted to quote, too, as an evi 
 dence of a tendency to moral laxity, the 
 ingenious plea for the flesh contained in 
 the poem, "Any Wife to Any Husband." 
 The dying wife is bitterly conscious that 
 her husband will not remain faithful to 
 her memory. She foresees that he will 
 (to use the language of Dr. Berdoe) " dis 
 sipate his soul in the love of other wom 
 en ; he will excuse himself by the assur 
 ance that the light loves will make no 
 impression on the deep-set memory of the 
 woman who is immortally his bride. He 
 will have a Titian s Venus to desecrate 
 his wall rather than leave it bare and 
 
cold ; but the flesh-loves will not impair 
 the soul-love." 
 
 " Ah, but the fresher faces ! Is it true, 
 Thou lt ask, some eyes are beautiful and 
 
 new? 
 Some hair how can one choose but grasp 
 
 such wealth? 
 
 And if a man would press his lips to lips 
 Fresh as the wilding hedge - rose cup there 
 
 slips 
 The dew-drop out of, must it be by stealth ? 
 
 It cannot change the love kept still for her, 
 Much more than such a picture to prefer 
 Passing a day with to a room s bare side. 
 The painted form takes nothing she pos 
 sessed. 
 
 Yet while the Titian s Venus lies at rest, 
 A man looks. Once more, what is there 
 to chide ? " 
 
 It will be said, no doubt, that Browning 
 does not identify himself with this argu 
 ment, but gives it merely as a bit of in 
 teresting and deeply human soul-history. 
 I cannot quite agree with this view. 
 Upon me it makes the impression of a 
 thing intensely felt and experienced. It 
 has unmistakably the autobiographical 
 
note, and as such coincides perfectly 
 with the sentiment of the poems already 
 quoted. 
 
 As it is by the cumulative effect of my 
 quotations that the correctness of my 
 views is to be proved, I am inclined to 
 impose upon the reader s patience by a 
 few more examples. I doubt if there is 
 one more striking to be found in all 
 Browning than the long argument of the 
 Pope Innocent III. in " The Ring and the 
 Book," reviewing the alleged crime of the 
 priest Caponsacchi in virtually eloping 
 with another man s wife. It will be re 
 membered that Pompilia is the wife of 
 the fiendish Count Guido Franceschini, 
 who murders her and her foster-parents. 
 In accordance with the laws of the 
 Church, the priest, even though their re 
 lation may be morally blameless, has been 
 guilty of a crime which calls for condign 
 punishment. But the aged Pope is filled 
 with sympathy and admiration for the 
 daringly generous act. This is noble lan 
 guage, indeed, which he employs in sum 
 ming up the pros and cons of Caponsac 
 chi s plea: 
 
" Do I smile ? 
 
 Nay, Caponsacchi ; much I find amiss, 
 Blameworthy, punishable in this freak 
 Of thine, this youth prolonged though age 
 
 was ripe, 
 This masquerade in sober day 
 
 let him judge, 
 
 Our adversary, who enjoys the task ! 
 I rather chronicle the healthy rage 
 When the first moan broke from the mar 
 tyr maid 
 
 At that uncaging of the beasts made bare 
 My athlete on the instant, gave such good, 
 Great, undisguised leap over post and pale 
 Right into the mid -cirque, free fighting 
 
 place. 
 There may have been rash stripping every 
 
 rag 
 
 Went to the winds infringement manifold 
 Of laws prescribed pudicity, I fear, 
 In this impulsive and prompt self-display ! 
 
 Men mulct the wiser manhood, and suspect 
 No veritable star swims out of cloud. 
 Bear thou such imputation ; undergo 
 The penalty I nowise dare relax 
 Conventional chastisement and rebuke. 
 But for the outcome the brave, starry 
 
 birth, 
 
 Conciliating earth with all that cloud- 
 Thank Heaven, as I do !" 
 
I 4 4 
 
 And the saintly Pompilia, who loves 
 the priest as he loves her, with a half- 
 spiritual, half-earthly passion does she 
 regret having disregarded conventional 
 morality and escaped from the cruel mar 
 riage-bond in his company? No; dying, 
 she glories in his love : 
 
 "I feel for what I verily find again 
 The face, again the eyes, again through all 
 The heart and its immeasurable love 
 Of my one friend, the only, all my own, 
 Who put his breast between the spears and 
 
 me. 
 
 Ever with Caponsacchi ! 
 O lover of my life ! O soldier-saint ! 
 No work begun shall ever pause for death. 
 Love will be helpful to me more and more 
 I the coming course, the new path I must 
 
 tread, 
 My weak hand in thy strong hand strong 
 
 for that." 
 
 The bias which I have here indicated 
 is one that is very natural to a poetical 
 temperament. But Browning is so mul 
 tiform, so many-sided, so richly equipped, 
 that it seems scarcely possible to empha 
 size one phase of his personality without, 
 
by implication, doing injustice to several 
 correlative ones. I am far from pretend 
 ing to have expounded Browning s phi 
 losophy in these detached comments. Be 
 ing healthily robust in dealing with the 
 passions, he leaves morality to take care 
 of itself. On the other hand, no living 
 poet has a deeper insight into the secret 
 recesses of the soul than he ; no one is 
 more capable of putting himself en rap 
 port with spiritual exaltation, ascetic 
 enthusiasm, religious fanaticism, or of 
 describing the mood and action of the 
 soul upon its loftiest heights. This is the 
 true dramatic faculty, which makes an 
 author transmute himself into a sinner 
 or saint, scholar or ploughman, brute or 
 angel, as the poetic exigency demands. 
 And this faculty no English poet since 
 Shakespeare has possessed in so high a 
 degree. The only thing, in my opinion, 
 which prevents him from overshadowing 
 all contemporaries is the needlessly ob 
 scure and crabbed language in which he 
 often chooses to clothe his transcendent 
 thoughts. But even admitting his un- 
 melodiousness, and deploring the prolix- 
 
1 46 
 
 ily and intricate snarls of his latest verse, 
 I yield to none in my admiration of Rob 
 ert Browning. He belongs in the com 
 pany of the very greatest. 
 
 1888 
 
MARS vs. APOLLO 
 
 |OME years ago I visited the 
 studio of a famous Berlin 
 sculptor. He was model 
 ling a small group repre 
 senting a lieutenant who 
 has just returned from a reconnoitring 
 expedition, bringing some important in 
 telligence to his superior officer. A case 
 mate torn by a bomb, and a dozen stacked 
 guns formed the background. It was in 
 tended to be cast in bronze as a mantel 
 ornament, or possibly a clock. Round 
 about the studio were similar subjects, 
 some in plaster, and others in clay. The 
 cannon, the rifle, the bugle, the sword 
 in fact, all the instruments of war were 
 seen wherever you turned. 
 
 " Do you, artistically speaking, regard 
 the gun as a beautiful object?" I asked 
 the sculptor. 
 
148 
 
 " No, I regard it, artistically speaking, 
 as a hideous object," he answered. 
 
 " But it represents to you something 
 which you think is beautiful ?" I per 
 sisted. 
 
 " Yes," he said with a chuckle ; " it rep 
 resents to me, in the present case, fifteen 
 hundred marks easily earned. What can 
 be more beautiful, unless it were fifteen 
 thousand marks ?" 
 
 " But, joking aside, would you regard 
 me as impertinent if I ask you why you 
 keep on modelling guns, when you think 
 them hideous?" 
 
 " My dear sir," he replied, with a sig 
 nificant shrug of the shoulders, "one 
 must live." 
 
 A few days later, when visiting an ex 
 hibition of modern paintings, I was again 
 struck by the great prevalence of martial 
 subjects. Mars was the deity whom these 
 artists worshipped ; it was he who led the 
 dance of the muses on Mount Helicon, and 
 no longer Apollo. Bloodshed and slaugh 
 ter were glorified ; here the chieftains of 
 war, in shining harness, mounted upon su 
 perb steeds, were receiving the homage 
 
149 
 
 of the conquered neighbors beyond the 
 Rhine; there the wounded and the dying 
 were half raising themselves on their 
 elbows, swinging their blood-bespattered 
 caps, and with breaking voices cheering 
 the Emperor and Bismarck, or the Crown 
 Prince and Von Moltke as they rode by. 
 It was a pitiful spectacle to see the arts 
 thus degraded, enslaved, pressed into the 
 service of barbarism instead of advancing 
 and glorifying civilization. 
 
 I cannot cite all the evidence of Apol 
 lo s subjection to Mars, which accumu 
 lated on my hands during the sojourn 
 in Germany to which I refer. Only 
 one more observation will suffice. It 
 was my particular business at that time 
 to study German educational methods, 
 and I frequently obtained permission to 
 attend recitations in public and private 
 schools of various grades. On one occa 
 sion I was present during the hour for 
 declamation of poetry in one of the low 
 est classes of a gymnasium. A small boy 
 of eight, with painfully thin arms and 
 legs, and spectacles on his nose, stood up 
 and recited in a child s shrill voice a 
 
tremendously patriotic rhyme, bristling 
 with national braggadocio, hatred of the 
 French, and the most blood-thirsty sen 
 timents. That little, spectacled fellow 
 with his deplorable spindle-shanks was 
 snorting and panting for the blood of the 
 Gaul, and the teacher sat at his desk and 
 smiled approvingly at the deluded child s 
 ferocity, which he mistook for patriotism. 
 Presently another valiant warrior of about 
 the same age got up and spouted with 
 ludicrous vigor Arndt s 
 
 " Der Gott der Eisen wachsen liesz 
 Er wollte keine Knechte. " 
 
 He was followed by three or four others, 
 one of whom recited Korner s beautiful 
 " Battle Prayer," and another a hyper- 
 loyal greeting to the Emperor by an ob 
 scure author. 
 
 In France the martial spirit in the arts 
 is no Jess conspicuous and aggressive. 
 There, too, the picture galleries are crowd 
 ed with battle scenes ; though it is the 
 victories of the remoter past they cele 
 brate, not the defeats and humiliations 
 of 1870. There, too, the majority of pub- 
 
lie monuments represent great chieftains 
 of war, and commemorate battles and 
 martial achievements. Whether the little 
 boys in the public schools are taught in 
 their recitations of poetry and text-books 
 of history to hate the Germans, and to 
 yearn for the day of vengeance, I do not 
 know positively, but I think it highly 
 probable. The barbaric martial spirit, 
 upon which princes and nobles rely for 
 their continuance in power, is naturally 
 encouraged by them ; and the fine arts, 
 which have the same need of bread as 
 less exalted industries, court their favor 
 by appearing to be imbued with their 
 spirit. The muses and graces dance their 
 alluring dance about the rough and brutal 
 Mars, " striking the earth with rhythmic 
 feet," and joining their sweet voices in a 
 martial chorus. 
 
 It is a matter of congratulation that in 
 this country the arts have largely eman 
 cipated themselves from the sway of 
 Mars. Battle-pieces are comparatively 
 rare in our Academy exhibitions, and 
 cannon, guns, and bayonets are never in 
 troduced in ornamental bric-a-brac. To 
 
52 
 
 be sure, our great generals and admirals 
 have their niches secure in the temple of 
 fame, and their ugly statues on our pub 
 lic squares ; and every little town East or 
 West which sent soldiers to the War 
 has its soldiers monument, consisting of 
 an obelisk inscribed with the names of 
 the fallen, or a boy in blue leaning upon 
 his gun. But these monuments are more 
 in the nature of a commemoration of the 
 individual men than a glorification of 
 their martial calling. Our poets do not 
 often sing of battles and carnage, though 
 occasionally they single out heroic feats, 
 performed in war, as subjects worthy of 
 their muse. Thus Read has celebrated 
 " Sheridan s Ride," in strong and spir 
 ited verse, Lathrop, " Kearney at Five 
 Forks," and Whittier, " Barbara Friet- 
 chie." But considering the duration of 
 the Civil War, and the many brilliant 
 feats of arms which made it memorable, 
 the amount of poetry which it produced 
 was remarkably small. Among all our 
 great poets I cannot recall a single mar 
 tial spirit. Walt Whitman s " My Cap 
 tain, oh my Captain," is perhaps the no- 
 
blest poem of the war period, always, of 
 course, excepting Lowell s " Commemora 
 tion Ode." But neither is written in a 
 warlike spirit. Both are elegiac, breath 
 ing sorrow and regret, and lamenting the 
 sacrifice of noble lives. But they are 
 notably wanting in that fierce, revengeful 
 tone and exultation in destruction which 
 characterize French and German war 
 poems. There is in the " Commemora 
 tion Ode " a solemn organ tone of exalted 
 meditation and fervid outbursts of pa 
 triotism, but no martial strain arousing 
 enthusiasm and glorifying the warriors 
 deeds by appeals to the savage passions. 
 Longfellow, though he was a contempo 
 rary of all the heroes of the War, found 
 no inspiration for his song in their deeds ; 
 while those who fought the battle of 
 human rights in the pulpit and in Con 
 gress were cheered on by his voice. His 
 Poems on Slavery which, however, lack 
 the rousing note and indignant ring 
 of those of Whittier may have done 
 something towards awakening public sen 
 timent in the North ; but I doubt if they 
 could ever have been very effective. 
 
Whittier, man of peace though he is, 
 sings much better of the wrath of God. 
 With the exception of Mrs. Howe s " Bat 
 tle Hymn of the Republic," I do not know 
 a single poem in American literature that 
 has the martial tread, the enthusiasm, the 
 fury and fervor of war in anything like the 
 same degree as the German war songs of 
 Arndt and Korner. There are the bugle 
 call, the blare of the trumpet, the abrupt, 
 blood - stirring drum -tap, or the long, 
 thunderous roll of the reveille in these 
 poems, and you become temporarily a 
 barbarian when you read them, thirsting 
 for somebody s blood. They were valu 
 able in their day, when the Germans were 
 straining every nerve to throw off the 
 French yoke ; but to-day civilization has 
 outgrown them, or ought to have out 
 grown them. They are as pernicious as 
 an element of education as they are po 
 etically beautiful. 
 
 We may concede that Dr. Johnson ut 
 tered a paradox when he said that pa 
 triotism was the last resort of scoun 
 drels ; though I am of opinion that this 
 paradox has a wide application in the 
 
55 
 
 United States to-day. The pseudo-pa 
 triotism which finds vent in savage de 
 nunciation and appeals to passions, hap 
 pily extinct or in the process of extinction, 
 and in absurd manufactured indignation 
 regarding fancied slights or insults, are a 
 mere flickering blaze among the expiring 
 embers of sectional hate and martial sen 
 timent. Ours is an industrial civilization, 
 and emotions which are the products and 
 supports of feudalism cannot long sur 
 vive where all the normal agencies of life 
 tend towards their suppression. Senti 
 ments which at an earlier stage of social 
 evolution were useful and necessary, are 
 frequently at a later stage disorganizing 
 and injurious. Among these are blind 
 loyalty, implicit obedience, and subordi 
 nation all concomitants of the martial 
 spirit. A people which possessed all 
 these feudal virtues in an eminent de 
 gree would be poorly equipped for self- 
 government. A strong sense of inde 
 pendence, a jealous insistence upon one s 
 rights, a cool, vigilant, critical spirit 
 these are the qualities which make liberty 
 possible and secure. It is the sense of 
 
i 5 6 
 
 loyalty and the ready submission required 
 of the soldier in the field which, when 
 transferred to civic life, produces bossism 
 and the spoils system with all its attend 
 ant abuses. The civil service.with its one 
 hundred thousand or one hundred and 
 twenty thousand political workers, be 
 comes an organized army, in which each 
 one does the bidding of his chief ; and the 
 result is frequently the frustration of the 
 will of the people, and in the course of 
 time, perhaps, the loss of liberty. 
 
 But, it will be asked, what is the appli 
 cation of this to poetry and the fine arts ? 
 Well, the application is, perhaps, not ob 
 vious, but it is nevertheless near at band. 
 The sentiments which we regard as pre 
 eminently poetic are those which are 
 most closely associated with the martial 
 spirit. The verses which we learn to re 
 cite as boys and which most stir our 
 hearts are those which deal with heroic 
 feats of valor and self-sacrifice. The boy 
 who "stood on the burning deck " was, 
 when judged from a practical and un- 
 poetic point of view, more of a fool than 
 a hero ; and yet we are taught to admire 
 
him. I admit that to me, too, he appears 
 worthy of admiration ; but that is because 
 I, in common with the rest of my coun 
 trymen, am yet largely imbued with the 
 martial spirit. I have a strong suspi 
 cion that to the citizen of the industrial 
 democracy of the future Casabianca 
 will seem unfit for survival, by reason of 
 his defective sense of self-preservation. 
 Browning s beautiful poem, "An Incident 
 of the French Camp at Ratisbon," would 
 not move us as it does if we did not 
 share his instinctive estimate of Napoleon 
 as a grand and exalted personage, be 
 cause he had waded through carnage to 
 a throne. The wounded youth who rides 
 up before him, delivers his message, and 
 falls dead, is an instance of extreme de 
 votion to the martial chief and unques 
 tioning acceptance of any fate which may 
 befall one in carrying out his behests. 
 But this virtue is possessed in a still 
 higher degree by the most barbarous na 
 tions. Stanley relates that an African 
 king, as a delicate compliment, presented 
 him with the heads of a dozen of his own 
 subjects whom he had just killed in his 
 
58 
 
 guest s honor; and these twelve unfortu 
 nates accepted death stolidly as a matter 
 of course, and the incident made no sen 
 sation whatever. Thus the instincts of 
 barbarism survive in civilization and are 
 christened with new names, though they 
 remain yet, at bottom, the same ; and the 
 sentiments engendered by social condi 
 tions which are anything but admirable 
 may be put to nobler uses under new and 
 improved conditions. Thus the heroism 
 which was at first mere martial fury, be 
 came willingness to sacrifice self for the 
 common good. And in this aspect it has 
 a universal application in all stages of 
 civilization. The man who labors unre 
 mittingly under obloquy and discourage 
 ment, for a reform which he thinks of 
 vital importance to his fellow-men, dis 
 plays a heroism which is far more diffi 
 cult and therefore more laudable than 
 that of the soldier who, amid the beat 
 ing of drums and patriotic excitement, 
 marches to his doom. The bravery which 
 was first displayed upon the field of battle 
 may, a couple of generations later, mani 
 fest itself as contempt for danger and un- 
 
159 
 
 flinching perseverance in the defence of a 
 righteous cause. And in this shape the 
 martial virtues still remain fit subjects 
 for the treatment of the poet, the painter, 
 and the sculptor. It is in this transferred 
 application that the American poets, as a 
 rule, find inspiration in them ; and they 
 differ in this respect advantageously from 
 the contemporary poets of Germany. 
 
 A question which 1 never weary of ask 
 ing myself is this : How will industrial 
 ism, when consistently developed in all 
 relations of life, affect the fine arts? 
 Much of the lameness and tameness of 
 contemporary poetry is, I think, due to 
 the fact that the ideals of feudalism are 
 losing their hold upon the public, and 
 those of industrialism are yet but im 
 perfectly understood. A very intelligent 
 friend of mine insists that poetry is an 
 obsolescent art, and that the democracy 
 of the future will entirely dispense with 
 it. Likewise he sees in the decorative 
 purposes to which the arts are now being 
 applied, an evidence that they will merely 
 retain their places as trades of a higher 
 degree, ministering to the material com- 
 
i6o 
 
 forts of those who can afford to invest in 
 superior skill. And even in this limited 
 field, he thinks, they are destined to play 
 a smaller and smaller part ; for the ten 
 dency of the future will be towards equali 
 zation of material conditions, and legisla 
 tive discrimination against those who now 
 enjoy undue advantages in the struggle 
 for existence. Let Mars and Apollo fight 
 as much as they choose ; the future, he 
 says, is to belong to neither of them. It 
 is to be the age of Vulcan. Let me add 
 that this friend of mine is a philosophical 
 student of history, and has no affiliation 
 or sympathy with Henry George s Labor 
 Party. 
 
 The argument with which I have en 
 deavored to bring this prophecy to naught 
 is this: there is nowhere any evidence of 
 retrogression on a grand scale in human 
 history. The evolution of the future, 
 whatever temporary eclipses the arts may 
 suffer in intends towards the development 
 of a nobler type of man, and towards a 
 higher average of well-being. But a man 
 who should feel no responsive thrill at the 
 contemplation of what is beautiful would 
 
be no improvement upon the very imper 
 fect types which now inhabit the earth. 
 Even if the time shall come when men 
 will look back upon the nineteenth cen 
 tury as an era devoted to the cultus of a 
 vanished beauty, a still remoter future 
 will witness the resurrection of the arts 
 in greater perfection. What kind of verse 
 will then move the hearts of men, and 
 what kind of painting and sculpture they 
 will rejoice in, it is of course impossible 
 to tell. It is a safe prediction, however, 
 that as their intellects grow subtler, they 
 will find pleasure in verse which makes a 
 more direct and a severer appeal to the 
 intellect than is the case with contem 
 porary poetry. For I believe that the 
 man of the coming centuries will be a 
 more intellectual- and a less emotional 
 creature than his ancestor of to-day. 
 Browning, in spite of the ruggedness and 
 unmelodiousness of his verse, has, in my 
 opinion, a long lease upon the future. The 
 subtle psychological problems with which 
 he deals the marvellous soul-histories 
 he unravels will delight men more and 
 more, and open paths in which others will 
 
162 
 
 follow. Goethe s grand and free spirit, 
 with its many-sided development, points 
 in other directions to new problems, new 
 struggles, and peaceful victories. These 
 two names are to me the guide-posts into 
 the dim land of the poetry of the future. 
 
 1888 
 
PHILISTINISM 
 
 O Matthew Arnold belongs 
 the credit of having angli 
 cized and popularized the 
 German word Philister* 
 England, the home par ex 
 cellence of Philistinism, did not need the 
 term before the apostle of sweetness and 
 light had preached his gospel, because 
 the vanishing fraction of the British na 
 tion which was not Philistine did not feel 
 themselves, as yet, as a superior intellect 
 ual caste, and, therefore, lacked the te 
 merity to differentiate themselves from 
 the worshippers of Mammon. Perhaps 
 they even aspired to be classed among 
 those whom they despised, or, if they 
 
 * My friend Col. T. W. Higginson informs me that 
 the word " Philistine " was employed in the German 
 sense by Margaret Fuller d Ossoli and other writers for 
 the Dial, the organ of American transcendentalism. 
 
1 6 4 
 
 did not, their wives did ; for the children 
 of light have from days of old had a 
 fatal propensity for marrying the daugh 
 ters of the Philistines, who are no less 
 captivating now than they were in the 
 times of Joshua and Gideon. And they 
 have the same trick yet of underestimat 
 ing the blessings of their new condition, 
 and longing back on the sly for the tribe 
 of their fathers, in the land of Philistia. 
 
 A Philistine, in the German sense it 
 may not be superfluous to state is a 
 dweller in Grub Street, a person who has 
 no interests beyond his material welfare, 
 whose mental horizon is circumscribed, 
 the wings of whose fancy rarely rise above 
 bread and butter. No divine discontent, 
 no aspiration, no torturing doubts trouble 
 the Philistine bosom. As long as his 
 ledgers balance and his digestion is un 
 impaired he is satisfied with the universe, 
 satisfied with himself, and pities the fool 
 who worries about problems in a world 
 that is provided with so many good things 
 to eat and drink. A university education, 
 by furnishing a man with intellectual in 
 terests, is supposed to lift him out of his 
 
native Philistinism ; and German student 
 songs are full of exultation in this fact, 
 and of contempt for the sordid material 
 ism of the Philistines. That there are ac 
 ademical Philistines quite as sordid, un 
 aspiring, and stolidly contented as their 
 confreres in trade and commerce, is, per 
 haps, beginning to be recognized ; but as 
 it is not an inspiring theme for poetry, 
 the song-book may be pardoned for class 
 ing all academical citizens among the 
 children of light. The aristocracy of cult 
 ure is, in the land of the Teutons, a very 
 much greater power than we, on this side 
 of the Atlantic, imagine ; and the Philis 
 tine, accordingly, is a trifle more modest 
 and makes less noise. 
 
 If we would see the Philistine full 
 blown in the flower of his perfection, we 
 must cross to the British Isles. There he 
 rules not only the wave but the dry land 
 as well ; and makes life as uncomfortable 
 as possible for every one who is disposed 
 to find fault with him. With all due regard 
 for the many grand spirits which Great 
 Britain has produced, I doubt if any truer 
 verdict could be passed upon the nation, 
 
1 66 
 
 as a whole, than that of Matthew Arnold: 
 " An upper class materialized, a middle 
 class vulgarized, a lower class brutalized. . 
 That means, in other words, that (with 
 some illustrious exceptions, who serve 
 but to prove the rule) the whole nation is 
 Philistine, though in varying degrees. 
 
 Let any one who wishes to convince 
 himself of this fact read the lives of the 
 English poets. How terribly, how cruelly 
 non-conformism, in every instance, has 
 been punished, and how promptly con- 
 formism (even if coupled with mediocre 
 attainments) has been rewarded. John 
 Bull holds himself the tuning-fork, and 
 forces his poets to sing in the key which 
 he chooses to demand. They may enjoy 
 considerable latitude in that key ; but let 
 them beware, if they stray into one of 
 their own choosing. The fates of Shelley 
 and Byron (the former, with all his aber 
 rations, a most noble spirit) are a perpetu 
 al warning to British bards who might be 
 inclined to " follow too much the devices 
 and desires of their own hearts ;" and 
 those of Wordsworth and Southey adver 
 tise a premium to him who abandons the 
 
i6 7 
 
 hope of the promised land and returns to 
 the flesh-pots of Egypt. It is to be con 
 ceded, perhaps, that the British Philistine 
 is, in this respect, a trifle less exacting 
 than formerly ; granting men like Swin 
 burne, for instance, without any extreme 
 penalty, the liberty to rave melodiously 
 about a revolutionary sunrise which he 
 professes to espy upon the misty hori 
 zon. But then Swinburne is a poet for 
 the few, and can never be sufficiently pop 
 ular to be dangerous. Even his compli 
 cated canzonettes and ballades and villa- 
 nelles about babies shoes and stockings 
 appeal chiefly to those who are unac 
 quainted with these articles in the orig 
 inal. Let him only venture, if he could, 
 to sing revolution to tunes as popular as 
 those of Tom Moore s "Irish Melodies," 
 and we should see what would happen. 
 
 I believe Great Britain is the only land 
 of an advanced civilization where the Phil 
 istine spirit is so dominant, even in the 
 universities, as to be able to exclude the 
 greatest scholars from the academic chairs 
 on account of their religious non-con- 
 formism. In Germany the universities 
 
i68 
 
 are engaged in a sharp competition for the 
 possession of scientists like Helmholtz, 
 Virchow, and Dubois-Reymond ; and it 
 occurs to no one to inquire what may be 
 their opinions on theology. In France, 
 likewise, it has been the custom to attach 
 scientific pioneers like Claude Bernard, 
 Pasteur, and Charcot to the Sorbonne or 
 the College de France, the latter insti 
 tution being founded expressly for the 
 encouragement of independent research 
 without reference to accepted tradition. 
 It would be difficult, I fancy, in France as 
 in Germany to find any really great name 
 in science which was not connected with 
 some seat of learning. But in England 
 the two great universities, Oxford and 
 Cambridge, have cheerfully dispensed 
 with the services of men like Darwin, 
 Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Fara 
 day, Sir Humphry Davy, nay, of wellnigh 
 all the illustrious banner-bearers of mod 
 ern progress; and gloried, in the mean 
 while, in their Puseys and Newmans and 
 Mannings all most excellent men, but, 
 at heart, medievalists and utterly out of 
 sympathy with the nineteenth century, 
 
1 6g 
 
 for which (whatever be its failings) it is 
 the business of universities to educate its 
 students. I am not by any means sure 
 that Darwin or any of his confreres would 
 have accepted a call from Oxford or Cam 
 bridge ; but if they had all refused, it 
 would have been because of this theologi 
 cal mediae valism to which I have referred. 
 Scientific research never flourishes in 
 such an atmosphere. I am not sure that 
 the late Mark Pattison, M. P., in his re 
 port to the British Parliament, ascribed 
 the comparative failure of Oxford and 
 Cambridge to educate live modern men 
 in a modern spirit to the clerical Toryism 
 which then pervaded the air of those 
 venerable institutions ;* but I remember 
 vividly his declaration that the small 
 est German university, with its under 
 paid professors and half-starved privat 
 docenten, accomplishes more for learning 
 
 * I am aware that Oxford and Cambridge have greatly 
 changed since the above was written. Vide Goldwin 
 Smith s article "Oxford Revisited," in the Fortnightly 
 for February, 1894. "Oxford," says this author, "is 
 now exceedingly sensitive to the charge of not being 
 abreast of the age." 
 
. 7 o 
 
 than Oxford and Cambridge with their 
 magnificent endowments.* 
 
 Some years ago I had the pleasure of 
 making the acquaintance of the French 
 Philistine ; and since I am dealing with 
 his tribe, I cannot, for reasons of polite 
 ness, omit mentioning what an interest 
 ing acquaintance I found him to be. The 
 French Philistine is named collectively 
 Joseph Prudhomme, and is, on the whole, 
 not a bad fellow. He has none of the 
 brutality towards his inferiors of his 
 neighbor beyond the Channel ; nor his 
 snobbish servility towards his superiors. 
 He is a small bourgeois, absorbed in petty 
 economies, and the chief aim of his life 
 is to make both ends meet. He is a ter 
 rific Chauvinist, and believes that noth 
 ing admirable can originate outside of 
 France. But the Southern sun has bright 
 ened his temper and made it kindly and 
 genial. He takes his pleasure like a civil 
 ized being, and not like a morose and be 
 sotted brute. If his intellect is not very 
 alert, a certain emotional vivacity serves 
 
 * Quoted from memory. 
 
him as a fair substitute for intellect. He 
 feels himself intensely as a member of la 
 gratide nation ; and the heritage of the 
 Revolution (even though he ma}/ not at 
 all comprehend it) has stimulated his self- 
 esteem and given him a certain human 
 dignity which his confreres in other lands 
 usually lack. I am speaking of the class 
 of French Philistines, as a whole, includ 
 ing the small traders and shopkeepers in 
 Paris and the provincial cities, who live 
 decent lives, make their families fairly 
 happy, and hold the government respon 
 sible for the crops and the state of trade. 
 A thousand years ago it was the fashion 
 to cut the king s head off when the crops 
 were poor ; and in France, as we all know, 
 the fashion has been illustrated in recent 
 times. The Philistine, in all lands, judges 
 his government to this day by the crops 
 it makes and the state of trade; and 
 that is one of the advantages which a 
 republic has over a monarchy, that you 
 cannot, except metaphorically, cut its 
 head off when it fails to regulate the 
 weather satisfactorily. Like the hydra, it 
 grows new heads as fast as you cut the 
 
old ones off ; and each new growth is apt 
 to be uglier than the preceding one. 
 
 Now, as regards the American Philis 
 tine, I have been told by professed con 
 noisseurs that he does not exist. Ah, 
 would that it were so ! But I run my 
 head against him most unexpectedly ev 
 ery day ; and as his head is harder than 
 mine, I am the sufferer by the collision. 
 At the time when he flew into a rage over 
 Mrs. Trollope s libel, and grew hysterical 
 over the caricatures by Charles Dickens 
 (my friends say), then the American Phil 
 istine was a dominant type ; but now he is 
 as extinct as the megatherium, except in 
 Chicago, where he yet survives and grows 
 rich on pork. But, friends, let us bear in 
 mind our definition. A Philistine is a 
 worshipper of Mammon a person desti 
 tute of higher interests. Look about 
 among your acquaintances, and you will 
 be astonished at the number you will find 
 whom the cap fits. I have the misfort 
 une to meet quite frequently an opulent 
 member of the tribe who pats me patroniz 
 ingly on the shoulder, asks me how much 
 I make by my writings, tells me, by way 
 
of contrast, how much he made last week 
 by a single transaction in wheat; and 
 while I laugh at him in my sleeve, he 
 basks, as he imagines, in my envious ad 
 miration. His chief pride is that he has 
 made his own living since he was twelve 
 years old ; when he commenced his illus 
 trious career by sweeping out his father s 
 store. If he takes me to drive, he tells 
 me how much his horses cost. He is so 
 sublimely unconscious of his bad taste 
 that it would be sheer waste of energy to 
 grow angry with him, and I conclude by 
 despising myself for suffering such pat 
 ronage without resentment. As for in 
 tellectual interests, he does not know 
 what the term means, and he does not 
 care to know. All that which lies beyond 
 his mental horizon is embraced in his 
 stolid and capacious contempt. 
 
 I am sure you know this type as well 
 as I do. Perhaps you have also made a 
 discovery upon which I have prided my 
 self, viz., that the American Philistine 
 does not invariably propagate his kind. 
 His son, it is an even chance, will desert 
 the tribe, and attach himself to the tribe 
 
which his father despises. This is a 
 case of rapid intellectual evolution which 
 seems to be confined to our continent. 
 The English and the German Philistine 
 remain Philistine generation after gen 
 eration, differing only in the degree and 
 odiousness of their Philistinism. Joseph 
 Prudhomme, too, is blessed with a multi 
 tude of small Prudhommes, who, in their 
 turn, are apt to be similarly blessed. But 
 the American worshipper of Baal has ap 
 parently at the bottom of his inner con 
 sciousness a sneaking suspicion that he 
 is, perhaps, after all, not so admirable as 
 he has fondly imagined ; that there may, 
 after all, be something worth considering 
 in the things which he affects to despise; 
 and, accordingly, he will give his son the 
 chance to determine for himself what 
 the value of these things may be. A col 
 lege career of four years may or may not 
 enlighten the young man on this subject ; 
 he may relapse into his native Philis 
 tinism like the German Brodstudenten,\& 
 whom science is nothing but a means of 
 earning his livelihood. But the chances 
 are against such a relapse; in an experi- 
 
75 
 
 ence of fourteen years I have known but 
 few instances. The tribe of the Philis 
 tines in the United States are not defi 
 cient in cerebral development, and if a 
 higher outlook is once opened in their 
 minds, it is not probable that it will ever 
 be closed. 
 
 What is true of the sons of the Philis 
 tines is no less true of their daughters; 
 although the educational opportunities 
 that are provided for the latter are usu 
 ally so poor that no stimulus to higher 
 interests is derived from school or col 
 lege. But the daughters of the Philis 
 tines are blessed with an abundance of 
 leisure ; they are, in fact, the only lei 
 sured class of the United States ; and for 
 want of better things to do, they fill the 
 yawning vacuums of their days with novel- 
 reading. The greater part of what they 
 read is shockingly bad ; but occasionally 
 they stumble upon a good book, which 
 makes a miniature revolution in their 
 miniature brains. How often I have wit 
 nessed this sudden awakening of a young 
 woman s mind, which had slumbered con 
 tentedly or discontentedly for a period of 
 
i 7 6 
 
 years. Then comes a hunger for culture 
 which is truly pathetic an omnivorous 
 consumption of novels, histories, critical 
 essays, and scientific speculation. The 
 eagerness with which these damsels seek 
 intellectual guidance, and follow every 
 erratic will-o -the-wisp that dances away 
 over swamps and quagmires, is another 
 pathetic phenomenon, which is constant 
 ly repeating itself within the sphere of my 
 observation. The Philistine home which 
 concerns itself only with food, drink, 
 clothes, and social prestige, fails to supply 
 to the children that mental balance which 
 is only to be found in true culture gradu 
 ally imparted from early years, and re 
 ligious principles vitally pervading the 
 domestic life. 
 
 No portrait of the American Philistine 
 would be complete without some refer 
 ence to his behavior abroad. It is a piece 
 of national good-fortune, or misfortune, 
 according as you choose to view it, that 
 our Philistine is rich. He can afford to 
 travel, and when travelling he likes to 
 make himself as conspicuous as possible. 
 He brags of his opulence, patronizes the 
 
effete monarchies, whose manners (which 
 he designates as " frills "), customs, and 
 institutions fill him with a grand patri 
 otic contempt. He discourses loudly in 
 the reading-rooms of the banks and ex 
 changes on the superiority of the United 
 States and all that appertains to them to 
 Europe and all that appertains to it, and 
 makes himself generally obnoxious. To 
 Europe he represents America ; is the typ 
 ical American, and cheerfully accepts his 
 representative character. It is futile for 
 us who refuse to recognize him in this ca 
 pacity to protest that he libels his native 
 land. The only way to make him harm 
 less would be to keep him at home; and 
 as this is impossible, we have no choice 
 but to submit with good grace to his mis 
 representation. 
 
SOME STRAY NOTES ON 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 HERE is no novelist living 
 who possesses the quality of 
 charm in a higher degree 
 than Alphonse Daudet. His 
 phrases have a degree of fe 
 licity which make him the despair of 
 translators. Compared to him even such 
 accomplished writers as Claretie and Guy 
 de Maupassant seem a trifle heavy-hand 
 ed. It is difficult to see how the mere art 
 of expression can be carried to a great 
 er height than he has carried it. His 
 pages abound in winged words, which 
 the reader (if he be sufficiently skilled 
 in the vernacular to perceive their exqui 
 site flavor) sits and gloats over and re 
 turns to with fresh delight. But these 
 winged words butterfly-winged words, 
 one might almost call them are so light 
 
and delicate that they are apt to lose their 
 color and perfume in the hands of the 
 translator. Who, for instance, could ever 
 hope (though, we believe, more than one 
 has had the boldness to try) to transfer 
 into another tongue that maze of sun- 
 steeped Southern phrases, redolent of 
 "dance and Provengal song and sun 
 burnt mirth " which are collected under 
 the title Lettres de man Moulin ? L. Arle- 
 stenne, for instance, or La Belle Niver- 
 naise who would have the hardihood to 
 say that he could put that into adequate 
 English ? 
 
 The question as to whether Daudet is 
 a realist or a romanticist has been de 
 bated in France without any decisive re 
 sult as far as the public is concerned. A 
 realist in the sense that Zola is, or claims 
 to be, a realist he surely is not, though 
 there is evidence in his latest novels 
 notably Sapho and L Evangelist e >that 
 Zola s laurels disturb his sleep. What 
 ever value his books have, apart from 
 their mere charm of style, surely rests 
 upon their fidelity to actual conditions. 
 Daudet set out deliberately to be the lit- 
 
i So 
 
 erary historiographer of the Second Em 
 pire, just as Balzac had been that of the 
 kingdom of Louis Philippe, le rot citoyen. 
 His position as private secretary to the 
 Due de Morny afforded him an excellent 
 opportunity for studying that age of glit 
 tering corruption in its most intimate as 
 pects. Never was an embryonic novelist 
 more happily placed than Alphonse Dau- 
 det in the bed-chamber (for the duke 
 conducted most of his affairs from his 
 bed-chamber) of that dazzling, fascinat 
 ing, unscrupulous, amiable, and altogeth 
 er complex libertine who ruled France in 
 the name of his half-brother, Napoleon 
 III. But, on the other hand, it is doubt 
 ful if France at that time possessed an 
 other man so happily equipped for mak 
 ing the most of this rare opportunity. 
 Read The Nabob and you will be able to 
 judge. There is the social record of 
 the Second Empire, written in letters of 
 flame. Though concessions are made to 
 the exigencies of art, the book is almost 
 a chronicle, and a cJirotnque scandaleuse 
 at that, as every novel of the period was 
 bound to be. It gathers the striking 
 
iSi 
 
 characteristics of that interesting deca 
 dence into a large, impressive, and com 
 prehensive picture. Natural causes pro 
 duce natural nay, inevitable effects. 
 We get a view of the hidden levers and 
 springs which set all this complex ma 
 chinery in motion ; and, though it may 
 not increase our respect for the Empire 
 to know what these springs were, it cer 
 tainly will increase our knowledge and 
 understanding of many bewildering facts 
 of modern history. All the mushroom 
 growths which flourished and luxuriated 
 in those days on the dunghill of official 
 corruption, and whose soil was blown 
 from under them by the explosion of the 
 Franco- Prussian war, fill, perhaps, a dis 
 proportionate space in the story; and, in 
 order to spare the sensibilities of the sen 
 timental reader at the final catastrophe, 
 the author has introduced one pure and 
 innocent pair of lovers M. de Gerry and 
 Mademoiselle Joyeuse who, like a mod 
 ern Deucalion and Pyrrha, are saved in a 
 water-tight little compartment amid the 
 universal deluge. 
 
 Of Daudet s other novels, Le Petit 
 
Chose, which was the first in order, is 
 particularly attractive by reason of the 
 biographical material which it contains. 
 Up to the eleventh chapter it is a truth 
 ful account of the author s boyhood and 
 early youth. Its tone is sentimental and 
 a trifle lachrymose. Daudet is the son 
 of a once -prosperous silk manufacturer 
 in Nismes, who failed, moved to Lyons, 
 where the son s troubles began, and never 
 recovered his peace of mind or his fort 
 une. His father s poverty and ill-humor 
 were sore trials to Alphonse ; and his 
 sensitive temperament and lack of pluck 
 (in the Anglo-Saxon sense) caused him 
 to feel the misfortunes of his family with 
 an acuteness which made his boyhood, 
 after the removal from the sunny South, 
 a perpetual misery. Read the vivid chap 
 ter in Le Petit Chose on the hunt for the 
 cockroaches in the dreary lodgings in 
 Lyons. It bears the indelible stamp of 
 autobiography, and is altogether mas 
 terly in its grim veracity. If it had 
 been venomous serpents the Eysette 
 family had been hunting for in cor 
 ners and crevices, the author could not 
 
have expended more horror on the situ 
 ation. 
 
 The temperamental note which is here 
 so distinctly struck vibrates audibly 
 through all the early books of the au 
 thor. \njack, which is a prolonged mis 
 ery in some thirty-odd chapters, the hero 
 becomes positively tiresome by reason of 
 his misfortunes. If his various miseries 
 were not described with such marvellous 
 vividness that it becomes an artistic pleas 
 ure to follow them, we should cheerfully 
 renounce the acquaintance of Master Jack 
 and his reprehensible mother at an early 
 stage of their career. But Jack s mother 
 is the kind of character which it is not 
 easy to dismiss. Flippant, vicious, good- 
 natured, sentimental, and by turns affec 
 tionate and cruel, she is so altogether 
 modern and contemporaneous in all her 
 contradictory characteristics that her fol 
 lies become interesting by reason of being 
 typical. There is a strong flavor of Dick 
 ens in this novel, as also in the descrip 
 tion of the Joyeuse family in The Nabob ; 
 and it would seem probable that the au 
 thor of David Copperfield and Dombey 
 
.8 4 
 
 and Son had inspired a good many chap 
 ters in Daudet, if the latter did not ex 
 pressly declare that he has never read 
 Dickens, or at least had not read him at 
 the time when these novels were written. 
 If Daudet had remained faithful to a 
 resolution which at a certain time of his 
 life he no doubt cherished, we should 
 have missed the works by which he will 
 be longest remembered ; viz., Fromont 
 jeune et Risler ainc (English, Sidonic} and 
 Numa Roumestan. For if he had con 
 fined himself to depicting the Second 
 Empire in all its phases its comcdie hu- 
 viaine, in the Balzac sense he would 
 have been compelled to leave the Repub 
 lic to the tender mercies of some more or 
 less competent successor. It is generally 
 assumed (though Daudet has taken pains 
 to deny it) that Numa Roumestan is none 
 other than Gambetta, and that in the face 
 of a hundred denials fre will continue to 
 remain Gambetta. It is easy to under 
 stand how a novelist can with safe con 
 science depict a man, and yet say that the 
 result is not a portrait. An artist like 
 Daudet refrains from servile copying, but 
 
i8 5 
 
 he takes the kernel of a man s charac 
 ter, his essential nature, as it were, and 
 clothes it in living flesh and blood ; ad 
 hering, no doubt, to the actual type which 
 he has in mind, but adding touches here 
 and there and inventing traits and inci 
 dents which are in essential harmony with 
 the character. The result, then, both is 
 and is not the same as the living model. 
 Daudet has in this sense denied that the 
 Due de Mora in The Nabob is intended 
 to represent the Due de Morny, and he 
 might with equal propriety deny that he 
 is himself The Little Thing in Le Petit 
 Chose. As a matter of fact, there is prob 
 ably not a single prominent character 
 (nay, perhaps not even a subordinate one) 
 in all Daudet s books which is not drawn 
 from a living model. He has very little 
 invention of the romantic sort (in which, 
 for instance, Dumas pere excelled). He 
 is, in my opinion, a better novelist for not 
 having it. His books are historic docu 
 ments of unimpeachable value. To the 
 future historian of the Second Empire 
 and the Third Republic they will be of 
 greater importance than any number of 
 
i86 
 
 diplomatic blue-books and protocols of 
 legislative proceedings. Thus people 
 thought and acted in France in the lat 
 ter half of the nineteenth century ; every 
 page bears evidence of the author s ve 
 racity. These are the typical characters 
 in politics, religion, society, finance, and 
 trade. The lower strata of society he 
 has neglected, obviously because he does 
 not know them. It is only Parisian life 
 which he knows and by preference de 
 scribes. If he is ever to rival Balzac in 
 comprehensiveness and completeness (as 
 he surpasses him in delicacy and felicity 
 of phrase), he will have to write nov 
 els dealing with the Vie de Province be 
 fore he is many years older, though he 
 may without offence omit the Etudes 
 Philosophiques. But it is an open ques 
 tion whether Balzac added to his laurels 
 by his novels of provincial life, and we 
 fear Daudet would, outside of his native 
 South, suffer a worse fate. His Tartarin 
 de Tarascon is a revelation of the very 
 heart of the florid, magniloquent South of 
 France ; the sunny, luxuriant South, with 
 its love of glory, its half-burlesque yearn- 
 
i8 7 
 
 ing for heroism, its sweet naivete, and its 
 indestructible joy in existence. To have 
 depicted this ought to suffice for any 
 man s ambition. 
 
 Of Daudet s other works The Kings in 
 Exile is the most notable. The King of 
 Illyria, who, having lost his crown by a 
 revolution, wastes his health and sub 
 stance in riotous living, while his heroic 
 wife plots and schemes for the recovery 
 of his throne, is but a thin disguise for 
 the King of Naples, whose fate and per 
 sonality in nowise differed from those of 
 the unworthy scion of royalty who is here 
 described. The Evangelist is a somewhat 
 repulsive study of religious fanaticism, 
 and gives one the impression that the 
 author is here in an unknown territory, 
 where he has not. as yet, taken his bear 
 ings. In Sapho we find Daudet enter 
 ing into rivalry with Zola in his own field. 
 How a man of fifty who is a father can 
 dedicate such a book to his sons "when 
 they will be twenty years old " is a mys 
 tery which it takes a Frenchman to un 
 derstand. 
 
 Henry James, if I remember rightly, 
 
iSS 
 
 once sighed for more latitude in English 
 fiction, but I fancy that if he had been a 
 Frenchman (and still been Henry James) 
 he would have sighed for less. It would 
 seem impossible to go farther than Dau- 
 det has done in Sapho and still remain 
 within the domain of literature. Zola s 
 Nana is, morally speaking, a saner and 
 healthier book. No one will ever rise 
 from its perusal without the same sort of 
 shudder which he might feel at witness 
 ing a clinic or an autopsy. And Zola, by 
 the way, in describing his heroine as a 
 pest-boil on the body social, frankly as 
 sumes the role of a demonstrator. He is, 
 indeed, no mean pathologist, whatever 
 one may think of his psychology. Dau- 
 det, on the other hand, is primarily an 
 artist, and as such necessarily a psycholo 
 gist. From his dedication it is to be sur 
 mised that he meant incidentally, or at 
 least inferentially, to preach. But his ser 
 mon resembles those of Abraham a Santa 
 Clara. It is so clever, so witty, so amus 
 ing, that one is apt to overlook its moral 
 import. While Nana warns and fright 
 ens, Sapho piques one s curiosity. The 
 
charm of the very improper heroine is so 
 delicately insinuated that the reader has 
 to be on his guard against a sneaking 
 desire for her acquaintance. He does 
 not loathe her as he does Nana. He is 
 not shaken in his innermost being at the 
 contemplation of her destructiveness to 
 body and soul. The beautiful Gorgon 
 whom Zola has depicted is therefore far 
 less dangerous than the beautiful Siren of 
 his subtile and exquisite confrere. 
 
 Of The Immortal I shall not say much, 
 because I have not read it. Although a 
 professional reviewer, I have not yet ac 
 quired that oracular infallibility which 
 enables so many members of my guild to 
 say striking things about books which 
 they have not read. A friend of mine 
 who habitually bristles with epigram, in 
 forms me that it is a most profound ex 
 position of the shallowness of modern 
 life, a most noble disquisition upon its 
 meanness, and a most civilized demon 
 stration of our imminent return to sav 
 agery. In other words, it is a discourse 
 upon the fierceness of the modern strug 
 gle for existence ; and its hero is aptly 
 
designated by that awful specimen of 
 a Gallicised anglicism, le struggle for 
 lifeur. The plot hinges upon a hotly- 
 contested election to the " Society of the 
 Forty Immortals," the French Acad 
 emy. 
 
 77/6 1 History of My Books, which is 
 delightfully confidential, is full of the 
 " sweetness and light " of the author s 
 early period. It discreetly lifts the veil 
 of privacy, and gives us pleasant glimpses 
 of his personality and family relations. 
 It is of light weight compared to The 
 Nabob and Numa Roumestan ; but, apart 
 from the excellence of its literary work 
 manship, it is interesting as showing that, 
 like those of Goethe, Daudet s works are 
 but " one continued confession." " Blood 
 is a quite peculiar juice," says Mephis- 
 topheles ; and every book of lasting value 
 is written with its author s blood. Such 
 books can never grow old, and, even when 
 the age has outgrown them, they will 
 preserve a vitality which will save them 
 from oblivion. 
 
 Artists Wives is a collection of short 
 stories which no artist candidate for mat- 
 
rimony can afford to leave unread. It 
 is an elaboration in twelve chapters of 
 Punch s laconic advice : " Don t." The 
 preface, which is an ingenious bit of dia 
 logue between a poet and a painter, the 
 former a bachelor and the latter happily 
 married, would, in spite of its cautious 
 reservations and concessions, deprive 
 even a Brigham Young of his taste for 
 marrying. To steer safely in such dan 
 gerous waters, where hidden rocks and 
 quicksands lie in wait to wreck your frail 
 bark at every turn of your rudder, would 
 require a firmer hand, a cooler head, and 
 a deeper knowledge of navigation than 
 even the most conceited male would pre 
 tend to possess. When the vulgarly clev 
 er and pretty shop-girl ruins the life of 
 the promising poet, Heurtesbise, it might 
 seem to the uninitiated that Heurtes 
 bise got no more than his deserts, if 
 he was fool enough to take a pretty face 
 on trust and out of a bric-a-brac shop 
 at that. But, unhappily, that is the kind 
 of folly for which not only young poets but 
 young men in all professions have a fatal 
 proclivity. It is indeed well that men 
 
I 9 2 
 
 should marry in their foolish age, or they 
 would not marry at all in the upper 
 strata of society, I mean, where women 
 have, as a rule, ceased to be helpmeets to 
 their husbands, as they yet generally are 
 in the lower ranks. 
 
 But Daudet (leaving the question in 
 its wider bearings out of consideration) 
 desires merely to enforce the proposition 
 that an artist runs a far greater risk than 
 do other men in marrying. He absolutely 
 requires for his happiness that his wife 
 shall love his art, and be interested in 
 the aesthetic, and not merely the com 
 mercial aspects of his occupation. But 
 women who are by training and temper 
 ament capable of this aesthetic apprecia 
 tion would seem to be very rare in France, 
 if we are to judge by Daudet s book. 
 The pctites miser es of daily companion 
 ship with an unbeloved or uncongenial 
 partner he depicts with a convincing 
 mastery and vividness which lifts them, 
 as it were, into the region of actual ex 
 perience, and he accomplishes this result 
 by those felicitous feather-touches of de 
 scription and portraiture which are so 
 
peculiarly his own that they would seem 
 to require a new adjective for their char 
 acterization, coined from his name. 
 
 Altogether, the score of novels which 
 bear the name of Alphonse Daudet will 
 prove most precious documents to the 
 future historian who shall undertake to 
 do for the nineteenth century what Taine, 
 Thiers, and De Tocqueville have done for 
 the eighteenth. 
 
MY LOST SELF 
 
 F Mr. Thomas Hardy had not 
 appropriated the title The 
 Retiirn of the Native, I 
 should have employed it as 
 a superscription for the fol 
 lowing reflections. There is a suggestion 
 in the word " native " which I particular 
 ly like a flavor of the woods of some 
 thing indigenous, aboriginal, deeply root 
 ed in the soil. It was the feeling that I 
 had in a measure forfeited the right to 
 apply it to myself which caused me a 
 vague heartache during my recent visit 
 to Norway. A residence of twenty-three 
 years in the United States had so com 
 pletely transformed me changed my 
 very substance that I lacked the bra- 
 zenness even to personate my lost Norse 
 self. I knew beforehand that it would 
 have been a dismal failure. It is not your 
 
195 
 
 physical fibres only that are perpetually 
 displaced and renewed ; your spiritual 
 being is subject to the same cruel and 
 beneficent law of renovation and decay ; 
 and it is a very singular sensation to be 
 suddenly made aware (as I was in Nor 
 way) of what you had changed from to 
 be confronted, as it were, with your lost, 
 primitive self. I met him (should I say 
 itf) on the pier the moment I set foot on 
 Norwegian soil. He shook me by the 
 hand, stared at me with a sharp re 
 proach, and remarked that I "affected a 
 foreign accent." He spoke Norwegian 
 to my wife and sons, and was filled with 
 amazement, not unmixed with repro 
 bation, because they did not understand 
 him. 
 
 " What !" he asked, in a tone of rebuke ; 
 "do you mean to say that you have 
 not taught your children your mother 
 tongue ?" 
 
 I explained apologetically that it was 
 not their mother tongue, and that they 
 had had no opportunity of learning it; 
 whereupon I sank so low in the estima 
 tion of my lost self that we barely man- 
 
aged with great stress to be polite to 
 each other. 
 
 The doubt tormented me, during the 
 first week of my sojourn in Norway, 
 whether my lost self might not, after all, 
 be right. I went into book-stores, dry- 
 goods stores, and telegraph-offices, deliv 
 ering myself, as I fancied, of the most 
 elegant Norwegian, and everywhere the 
 man in charge either answered me in 
 English, or called a clerk who possessed 
 the accomplishment of English speech. 
 I cudgelled my brain to find out what 
 was the matter with my Norwegian, and 
 received at last a succinct explanation 
 from a friend, who asserted that there 
 was nothing at all the matter with it ex 
 cept that it was English. It was, he said, 
 the kind of Norwegian that is spoken by 
 Englishmen and Americans only, per 
 haps, a trifle more fluent. How curious 
 ly this intimation affected me no one will 
 comprehend. A sort of somnambulistic 
 confusion of identity haunted me. I saw 
 things from two distinct points of view. 
 I saw myself dimly, as I appeared to my 
 lost self, and viewed myself with senti- 
 
ments of mingled contempt and pity, and 
 at the same time I reciprocated his feel 
 ings cordially; and from the mental eleva 
 tion of a man of the world, who had tak 
 en a cosmopolitan survey of humanity, I 
 looked down upon him as a simple-mind 
 ed, patriotic little cockney. Now I was 
 my lost self, and shared his sentiments ; 
 and now, again, I was my new American 
 self, who regarded things Norwegian with 
 something of the interested supercilious 
 ness with which a big and rich nation 
 patronizes a small and poor one. If this 
 perpetual flitting between my two selves, 
 with its attendant conflicts of sentiment, 
 had continued long enough, I should, no 
 doubt, by a psychological necessity have 
 been torn into two distinct beings a 
 Norwegian Jekyl and an American Hyde, 
 or an American Jekyl and a Norwegian 
 Hyde; and we should have ended by part 
 ing as amicably as circumstances would 
 permit, though I fancy a mysterious in 
 terdependence of each upon the other 
 a haunting sense of incompleteness, and 
 perhaps a mutual homesick yearning 
 would scarcely be avoided. 
 
A reminiscence from my childhood, 
 which had been banished from my mind 
 for a quarter of a century, returned to 
 me with extreme vividness and caused 
 me the liveliest regret. When I was nine 
 or ten years old I had a tutor, of the ul 
 tra - patriotic species known as Norse- 
 Norseman. Once when we were stand 
 ing together on the beach, looking at the 
 huge mountain peaks reflected in the 
 fiord, he broke forth with startling sud 
 denness. 
 
 " Boy," he said, with a noble glow of 
 enthusiasm, "the first thing you should 
 thank God for in the morning and the 
 last thing at night is this, that you are 
 born a Norwegian. God made no end of 
 Frenchmen and Germans and English 
 men, but he made only a very few Nor 
 wegians, because the stuff was too pre 
 cious." 
 
 Never shall I forget the thrill of patri 
 otic pride which rippled through me at 
 the consciousness that I belonged to this 
 select and favored race. How with a 
 boy s delight in the heroic I gloried in 
 the feats of the Vikings on sea and land, 
 
190 
 
 the bloodier the better; and with a sav 
 age joy in adventure depicted to myself 
 their brave galleys sailing the main, and 
 spreading terror of the Norseman s name 
 throughout the effete kingdoms of the 
 world. How heartlessly I joined in derid 
 ing and tormenting those boys at school 
 whose appellations indicated an admixt 
 ure of Dutch, Danish, or German blood ! 
 How deeply I despised them ; how mer 
 cilessly I made them feel their inferiority 
 to the proud Norseman ! I remember 
 with what righteous indignation I once 
 thrashed a boy as a mere wholesome dis 
 cipline because his father was a Dane ; 
 for the Danes, as I had recently learned 
 from history, were the enemies of Nor 
 way, and had maltreated her for four 
 hundred years, once even reducing her 
 to a provincial relation. I had an old 
 score to settle on my country s behalf, 
 and I settled it then and there. Never 
 have I felt so virtuous, so gloriously con 
 tented as I did when, with my hands in 
 my pocket, I swaggered away from that 
 weeping Danish boy. I felt I was play 
 ing an historic role and was justifying my 
 
noble ancestry. It is nearly thirty years 
 since I performed this heroic feat, and I 
 blush to think how miserably I have since 
 degenerated ! Now, like the cosmopoli 
 tan poltroon I am, I bow politely to mine 
 enemies and make flattering speeches to 
 those who despitefully use me. It never 
 occurs to me to avenge my country s 
 wrongs by boxing the ears of any chance 
 gentleman whose ancestors may have 
 been mixed up with the ancient feuds of 
 Norway. But for all that, I feel a sort 
 of amused tenderness for this lost juve 
 nile self of mine, and I would give a year 
 of my life to be able to transpose myself 
 back into that noble piratical state of 
 mind, when to swing a cutlass seemed so 
 infinitely more glorious than to be driv 
 ing a quill. 
 
 I shall, in all likelihood, be suspected 
 of levity if I say that I would contented 
 ly return to that primitive condition, and 
 count myself thrice blessed if, by some 
 magic process, I could slip back perma 
 nently into my lost self; if I could drink 
 deeply of that potion of oblivion which 
 Grimhild in the Volsunga Saga gave to 
 
Sigurd, and have all the experience that 
 has transformed me drift away and van 
 ish like a dream that dissolves at waking. 
 The world was not draped in gray then, 
 but lay dewy and fragrant, flushed with 
 the lovely colors of the dawn. What a 
 passion of life and joy thrilled in my 
 veins ! How melodiously my heart beat ! 
 And how brave, how strenuous, how rav 
 ishing its rhythm ! How remote from me 
 was the dreary resignation, the melan 
 choly philosophy of patience which now 
 weighs like a gray deposit of the current 
 of time upon my spirit ! Nay, there was 
 a zest in each breath a wholesome sav 
 age relish in the taste and feel and smell 
 of things, for the loss of which no book 
 ish delights can compensate. And what 
 an exquisite set of senses I had, forsooth ! 
 How keen-edged, quiveringly alert, and 
 vigilant they were ! I could almost weep 
 (if that too were not one of my lost ac 
 complishments) at the thought of all the 
 happiness that I have forfeited by the 
 gradual blunting of those delicate instru 
 ments for apprehending reality. How 
 sweet the world smelled every morning, 
 
when it woke with a bright, dewy gaze 
 from the slumber of the night ! How I 
 plunged into it, revelled, rioted in it with 
 wanton zest ! Each season had its own 
 peculiar joys. There was an inexhausti 
 ble delight in watching the changing 
 tone of earth and sky at the approach of 
 spring; and scarcely less was the rapture 
 with which I hailed the autumnal splen 
 dors the first frost on the river and the 
 birds of passage and the first premoni 
 tions of snow. 
 
 I maintain that no pleasure that life 
 has offered me in later years is compara 
 ble to these ; and it was because my lost 
 self was temporarily revived and persist 
 ed in nudging me in the side wherever I 
 went; it was therefore, I say, that my 
 anticipated enjoyments assumed such an 
 elegiac tone nay, were largely turned 
 into regrets. I was like an organist who 
 sits down at his instrument to play Men 
 delssohn s Wedding March, and whose 
 fingers wander away, willy-nilly, into the 
 solemn intricacies of the Dead March in 
 " Saul." I sat down, in my American 
 self, at an American desk, filled with 
 
203 
 
 patronizing superciliousness towards my 
 Norse self; and lo and behold! my Norse 
 self slipped into the seat of consciousness, 
 and, like Balaam, I find that my curses 
 have turned into blessings. I fancied, un 
 til this fatal visit to Norway, that I was 
 greatly to be congratulated on having 
 risen in the scale of civilization ; but now I 
 would willingly descend the scale again, 
 step by step,or at one grand stride, if I could 
 be sure of recovering what I have lost. 
 
 My American self, who has been si 
 lenced in this debate, here mildly insinu 
 ates that I have been guilty of a confu 
 sion of terms. It is not, in the opinion 
 of this authority, my primitive self, but 
 my youth I am regretting. All these 
 delightful things which unquestionably 
 have gone from me I should have lost 
 as surely, with the lapse of years, if I had 
 remained primitive. I am in the position 
 of the poet in the prologue to " Faust," 
 and my yearnings, as well as their cause, 
 are identical with his : 
 
 " Then give me back that time of pleasures, 
 When yet in joyous growth I sang ; 
 
When, like a fount, the thronging measures 
 
 Uninterrupted gushed and sprang ! 
 Then bright mist veiled the world before 
 me ; 
 
 In opening buds a marvel woke. 
 
 As I the thousand blossoms broke, 
 Which every valley richly bore me ! 
 
 I nothing had, and yet enough for 
 youth 
 
 Joy in illusion, ardent thirst for truth. 
 Give, unrestrained, the old emotion, 
 
 The bliss that touched the verge of pain, 
 The strength of Hate, Love s deep devo 
 tion 
 
 give me back my youth again /" 
 
 If I were capable of detaching myself 
 from my American self as completely as 
 I did a year ago, I should make a crush 
 ing rejoinder to this insinuation ; but suf 
 fering, as I do, from the old confusion 
 of identity, I shall have to leave it unan 
 swered. 
 1892 
 
THE MERIDIAN OF LIFE 
 
 |O pass the meridian of life 
 the half-way house, the 
 temporary resting-place be 
 tween youth and age is an 
 unpleasant thing. I never 
 yet knew a man who did it joyously. An 
 elegiac mood seems the proper one for 
 the occasion. A melancholy resignation 
 invades one s spirit on that fatal day, in 
 spite of one s resolve to take a cheerful 
 view of the situation. Though you may 
 laugh ever so heartily, and be as youth 
 fully frisky as you like, there is apt to be 
 a slightly forced note in your mirth, and 
 your jaunty demeanor is a trifle conscious 
 and lacks the charm of heedless spon 
 taneity which made you so irresistible to 
 the ladies in your younger days. You 
 may put a bold face upon it, and brazenly 
 assert that you feel as young as ever. 
 
206 
 
 Nobody will believe you, dear friend. I 
 do not believe you, and, what is worse, 
 you do not believe yourself. If youth 
 only meant a cheerful acceptance of life 
 as it is, a readiness to join in gayety and 
 innocent pleasures, a capacity for falling 
 in love, etc., then I don t in the least 
 doubt that you are young, though you 
 may be past the meridian. But these are 
 merely the superficial characteristics of 
 youth. The deeper ones are as subtle as 
 perfumes and as hard to catch. When 
 they depart, they depart finally and for 
 ever. They are beyond simulation and 
 imitation. And the fact is that no mid 
 dle-aged man, wishing to appear young, 
 would ever dream of simulating them. 
 
 The first (though the order is arbitrary) 
 is a certain emotional exuberance, a cer 
 tain rank ferment of the blood, which 
 prompts vehement sentiment and head 
 long, inconsiderate action. It is what 
 Swinburne celebrates under the terms 
 "foam "and "froth" and "mist, "and it 
 is what imparted an indefinable charm to 
 his early verses. It was the warm and 
 riotous pulse of youth ; and since, with- 
 
out any complicity on his part, this has 
 departed from him, he is not half the 
 poet he was before. Middle age has shorn 
 him of the locks of his strength. It is the 
 rhythmic vehemence or the vehement 
 rhythm of our blood which, at that happy 
 period, makes poets of most of us. It is 
 at that time that prose is too slow and 
 pale and commonplace to express our 
 emotions, and with the sweet uncon 
 sciousness of young birds we set about 
 imitating the older singers. Oh, the di 
 vine folly of those years ! How I luxuri 
 ated in fictitious love and remorse and 
 despair! How absorbingly interesting I 
 found myself, while I was harboring all 
 these emotions and relieving my over 
 burdened heart in poems which, when I 
 read them now, seem positively humor 
 ous. How unblushingly I borrowed from 
 Goethe, from Tennyson, but above all 
 from Heine, who is the poet par excel 
 lence of unhappy love. The young lady 
 with whom, for want of a better subject, 
 I enacted this serio-comic tragedy, was a 
 prosaic soul, and I strongly suspect that 
 I really cared very little about her ; but I 
 
2o3 
 
 needed some one to be unhappily in love 
 with, and she seemed to be the only avail 
 able candidate for the position. There 
 was in my breast a large store of accumu 
 lated sentiment which I had to expend 
 upon somebody. 
 
 Turgueneff once said to me, in response 
 to an inquiry about his health : " Oh, I 
 am getting old, and I know it by one in 
 fallible test. I try to be cheerful. I cher 
 ish my pleasant emotions. When I was 
 young it was my gloomy sentiments I 
 revelled in. It was my despair which 
 nourished my self-respect. It was melan 
 choly, remorse for imagined sins, hopeless 
 love, which I cherished with particular 
 satisfaction." 
 
 This remark did not at all strike me as 
 profound at the time I heard it. I was 
 then on the sunny side of the meridian, 
 and incapable of philosophizing concern 
 ing my own condition. "What a pity," 
 I thought, "that so great a man should 
 be so cynical." 
 
 And forthwith I spun a lurid romance 
 about him out of such material as I had 
 at my command, and concluded that his 
 
209 
 
 cynicism was the result of a disappoint 
 ed or unrequited love. (I have learned 
 since that it was the result of a lavishly 
 requited love.) But now that I have 
 passed the meridian, I find myself veri 
 fying his experience. I surprise myself 
 pushing (with a prosaic impatience) un 
 pleasant subjects out of sight; subjects 
 which ten or twenty years ago would have 
 given me material for the most delight 
 fully gloomy meditations and sage entries 
 in my diary concerning the bitterness of 
 love, the insignificance of life, the futility 
 of all human endeavor. Such scant emo 
 tions as I now have I allow to pass with 
 out apostrophizing them or photograph 
 ing them in a diary, or in any wise 
 detailing them ; and if, by chance, I 
 stumble upon one which it seems worth 
 while to prolong, it is sure to be a cheer 
 ful one. My stories, which, in a sense, I 
 wrote with my heart-blood (and no story 
 is worth anything which is written with 
 a cheaper liquid), had, by some strange, 
 occult necessity, to end unhappily. Most 
 of my heroes, in those days, had tragic 
 experiences. I marvel, in retrospect, that 
 
a humane, kind-hearted man (as I believe 
 I am) could have heaped up so much 
 gratuitous misery. One handsome and 
 deserving young man, who never had 
 harmed a fly, I induced to sit down and 
 freeze to death on the front stoop under 
 the window of his beloved. Another I 
 condemned to a kind of roving vagabond 
 age, like the Wandering Jew, all owing to 
 a sentimental affliction ; and a third wore 
 out his life miserably in an effort to re 
 store sight to the girl whom he loved. A 
 fiendish ingenuity assisted me in invent 
 ing distressing situations, from which 
 there seemed no issue possible except 
 death by frost or fire or a long self-im 
 posed martyrdom of sorrow and suffer 
 ing. Problems which to heroic and 
 uncompromising youth seem insoluble, 
 differences which seem irreconcilable, 
 may to middle age, with its easy, laissez- 
 faire philosophy, seem not at all hope 
 less. The stoic of twenty frequently be 
 comes an epicurean at forty. Young 
 Goethe could see no possible fate but 
 death for Werther, enamoured of his 
 friend sfiancte ; but the middle-aged pub- 
 
lisher, Nicolai, subjected the sentimental 
 hero to medical treatment, and by liberal 
 cupping dispelled his romantic fanta 
 sies, until his reason reasserted itself. 
 And in the end he made a rich and sensi 
 ble match, and became the father of a 
 large and blooming family. 
 
 In no book with which I am acquainted 
 is the subtle process, incident upon the 
 passing of the meridian of life, more truth 
 fully and delightfully depicted than in An 
 Indian Summer, by W. D. Howells. It 
 is not the occasional twinge of rheuma 
 tism, or the weariness after the ball, or 
 an inclination to drowsiness after dinner 
 which primarily gives the impression of 
 middle age in the hero ; but it is his whole 
 attitude towards life, his humorous ac 
 ceptance of reality as it is, and his utter 
 incapacity for sentimental self-delusion. 
 That is a fatal in fact, the most fatal 
 defect in a lover. Love, without it, is 
 robbed of its poetry. It becomes a sor 
 did thing ; a physical attraction, or men 
 tal compatibility; a mere prose prologue 
 to matrimony. It is because youth con 
 stitutes nine-tenths of the public of the 
 
American author, that the American nov 
 el (if it aims at popularity) is obliged to 
 pander to this self-delusion, and represent 
 life as, according to youth s sanguine 
 scheme, it ought to be. It must blink 
 facts, or view them in a vague and gen 
 eral way through romantic spectacles. 
 The author must play Providence, and 
 with a Rhadamantine justice reward low 
 ly virtue and visit retribution upon pros 
 perous wickedness. He must reconstruct 
 the scheme of things in accordance with 
 the ideal demands of his reader, or forfeit 
 his popularity. Not that I blame youth 
 for demanding a so-called poetic justice ! 
 No, I envy it. I wish I were myself capa 
 ble of that charming delusion ; or capa 
 ble of pretending that I believed in it, 
 even though my faith had departed. 
 
 Now I do not mean to imply that mid 
 dle age, though it may have lost the high 
 est zest in existence, is without its com 
 pensations. I admit there is a touch of 
 exquisitely cruel regret in the thought 
 that I am henceforth no more to be num 
 bered among that happy throng to whom 
 folly is becoming and permissible ; that I 
 
213 
 
 am henceforth incapable, by my approach 
 or departure, of accelerating the pulse of 
 the sweet girls who are yet capable of 
 accelerating mine ; that, matrimonially 
 speaking, I am no longer of any account 
 (having made, once for all, a felicitous 
 choice). No one who has passed the fatal 
 meridian of forty will deny that there is 
 something humiliating in the fact that 
 (even though you were unattached) you 
 would now cut a comic figure as a lover, 
 and no maiden s heart would incline nat 
 urally to you, except with a filial devo 
 tion, or from sordid and worldly motives. 
 The sweet unrest, the mysterious fascina 
 tion, the fine, healthy, primeval passion, 
 which inspire the noblest poetry of life, 
 you are no longer capable of awakening, 
 though you may still flatter yourself that 
 you are capable of feeling it. You are 
 growing stout; you are compelled to be 
 a little prudent about your health (though 
 you take care to disguise your caution or 
 exercise it on the sly), and finally the first 
 gray hair (which you scrupulously elimi 
 nate) strikes the fatal conviction to your 
 heart that you are no longer young that 
 
your youthful pretences are hollow and 
 transparent shams which deceive no one 
 but yourself. In fact, I know nothing 
 more tragic than a man s discovery of that 
 first gray hair ; unless it be a woman s 
 discovery of it. 
 
 But, pardon me, I forgot that it was 
 the compensations of middle life I was to 
 speak about, not its privations. There 
 is a poem by Robert Browning (and a no 
 ble poem it is), which puts the case at 
 issue between youth and age with marvel 
 lous force and insight. I shall not now 
 quarrel with the sentiment of the open 
 ing verse, though some years ago I should 
 have found it more than problematic : 
 
 " Grow old along with me! 
 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life for which the first was made. 
 Our times are in His hand 
 Who saith: A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all, nor 
 be afraid." 
 
 There is something wondrously con 
 soling in this reflection that youth is but 
 .the preparation for something better to 
 
215 
 
 come, a somewhat fantastically decorated 
 vestibule through which we enter into the 
 more soberly upholstered house where we 
 are to dwell, and where our best and most 
 effective work is to be done. The youth 
 really builds the house in which he is to 
 dwell as a man (except in the few cases in 
 which his fathers have built it for him), 
 and its commodiousness and beauty of 
 style depend upon the strength and the 
 genius that are in him. Many of us 
 erected during our turbulent years, while 
 we were repeating the perennial folly of 
 the race, a very much better and hand 
 somer and more commodious edifice than 
 we were aware of ; and we live secure in 
 our moderate prosperity, happy in con 
 genial labor and in the affection of our 
 children. Though we may have to ac 
 commodate ourselves to a more prosaic 
 jog-trot than we once thought compatible 
 with our fiery genius, we find a deep satis 
 faction in the very toil and obligations 
 which impede our speed. There are yet a 
 hundred things which we would like to do, 
 but which, out of regard for those who are 
 dear to us, we have to refrain from doing. 
 
2l6 
 
 I know a middle-aged engineer, now 
 far past the meridian, who has been 
 walking about for twenty years with an 
 immortal epic in his brain, and will be 
 walking about with it till the day when 
 he will be confined within a narrow rose 
 wood box from which no epic, even if 
 ever so immortal, can escape. But I ver 
 ily believe that that epic (which, on ac 
 count of family necessities he never will 
 get a chance to write) has benefited its 
 author more than it ever would have 
 done, if it had appeared in cold print. It 
 has redeemed his life from the common 
 place. It has given him the precious feeling 
 of being exceptional of being something 
 more than the world gave him credit for 
 being; and, finally, it has lifted his exist 
 ence to a higher plane by giving him sym 
 pathy with lofty though futile endeavor. 
 
 " Far thence a paradox 
 
 Which comforts while it mocks 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail ? 
 What I aspired to be, 
 But was not, comforts me: 
 A brute I might have been, but would not 
 sink i the scale. 
 
" But all the world s coarse thumb 
 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account; 
 All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure, 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled 
 the man s amount ; 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act; 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and es 
 caped; 
 
 All I could never be, 
 All men ignored in me 
 This I was worth to God, whose wheel the 
 pitcher shaped." 
 
 It may be a somewhat ethereal compen 
 sation which the poet here hints at, but on 
 that account none the less real. You will 
 contend that it lies beyond the experi 
 ence of most men, and is, therefore, not 
 typical. But I doubt if to the grossly 
 material man, incapable of harboring 
 such aspirations, middle age has any com 
 pensation beyond the mere- satisfaction in 
 outward prosperity and in agreeable fam 
 ily relations. It is the highly developed 
 individual who points the way for the 
 
2l8 
 
 race ; who by anticipating the normal 
 development reveals what is possible to 
 all. The highest pleasures of life are 
 those which cannot be measured by rule 
 of thumb ; and the keenest delights are 
 not those of achievement, but those of 
 anticipation. Only the aspiring man is 
 truly a man. Some mocking hope, some 
 secret fantastic yearning corresponding 
 to the epic in the engineer s brain is to 
 be found in many more lives than we are 
 apt to suspect. It is the spark of youth s 
 Promethean fire astray amid the gray re 
 alities of middle age ; and if you can con 
 trive to carry this spark along with you 
 and to keep it alive, you need have no 
 fear of crossing the fatal meridian. 
 
 September 23, 1888 
 
 THE END 
 
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